New Mulit-Boot Loader for USB Drives 1
The folks over at PenDriveLinux have been busy. They have a new version of their multi-boot creation tool for flash drives, YUMI (Your Universal Multiboot Installer). YUMI-0.0.1.7.exe is the current released version, replacing MultibootISO.
The MultibootISO tool never worked for me. I was using unetbootin to load a single ISO onto a single flash drive, but often I’ve needed gparted, then DBAN, then PARTIMG, then an full Linux like Ubuntu 10.04 or Puppy or TinyCore. With YUMI, you can have all of those on a single flash drive and select which to use at boot time. It seems to work fine.
They finally added an Unknown ISO option so ANY ISO you have with a distro can be added to the boot menus. The boot-up screens are automatically organized nicely by type of tool.
I just placed about 5 ISO files onto a single 2GB flash drive. As I write this, Android-x86 is booting on a netbook. SWEET! I can’t wait to try it out for an hour or so before trying out the new MeeGo x86 release. As long-time readers know, I run Maemo today, so MeeGo would be the next update for that device.
Well, I’ve attempted to boot 3 different OSes.
- MeeGo failed almost immediately.
- Lubuntu displayed the boot screen, asked for a language and eventually failed.
- Android x86 was left to boot for over 30 minutes – the ……………. just kept coming.
The gparted ISO that I specified didn’t show up in the boot menu – I used a different ISO at the 3rd decimal point – mine was newer. I probably should have put it into the Unknown ISO group.
Some Good News
SpinRite did work perfectly. It is running now across all the partitions to refresh any lazy bits.
I moved the gparted ISO into the Unknown ISO group. Hopefully, it will work better there.
Optical Data Recovery Technique with ddrescue and par2
Many of us backup important data to optical disks like CDROM or DVD media. Over time, that media is known to fail. This means that every 5-10 years, a plan to migrate all the critical data to newer media needs to be included. It also means that when data is stored to this type of media, steps should be taken to protect the data. Recently, I had a need to pull some data, old family movies, from a DVD. The movies were stored as xvid/mp3 data inside an AVI container. Anyway, after loading the disk onto a network drive, the movie began playing, then abruptly stopped about 2 minutes into the hour long movie. I have other copies on other media … somewhere, but this would be a good opportunity to try a contingency plan that I’ve been using for at least 10 years.
Read more below.
Kid Safety Checklist 6
What should kids know to be reasonably safe? That’s a tough question.
Below is a draft Kid-Safety Checklist for parents to work through with their kids.
All kids do need to know these things.
Gparted Empty Partition Table 1
Today I wanted to add another OS to a netbook, an Asus Eee. My common practice is to boot a gparted ISO from a USB flash drive, move some data and partitions around and add a new logical partition to the end of the extended partition space. Write everything back out to disk. Then I’d boot the install disk/ISO and install to that newly created partition. Life was good, usually.
Today, I was greeted with gparted showing unallocated for the entire drive, all 160GB – unallocated. Ouch. This is the first time I’ve had partition table issues, ever, in over 20 yrs.
101 Uses For a Password Manager
Ok, not really 101 uses for a Password Manager, but many more than you thought, about 30.
Use A Password Manager
For the last few years, I’ve been trying to get anyone with more than 5 passwords to remember to start using a password manager, PM, as part of increasing your desktop security. Below I’ll go into a few alternate uses for that password database beyond just storing computer and website passwords.
Off-Site Backup for Home or Small Biz
Scott the Storage Guy wrote a little blog post about the offsite storage options now that Mozy has removed their unlimited plan. Crashplan was his winner. It supports Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris, nice. Seems there’s a 15% off deal for former Mozy clients.
Rdiff-backup vs Duplicati on Windows 2
I like backups. I like them more since losing many, many GBs of data over a decade ago – before I got backup religion.
Many of the long term readers know that I’m always looking for a better backup method.
I’ve been using rdiff-backup for about 3 years on Linux systems and mostly like it, but it isn’t perfect. Yesterday, I decided to check out a new way to backup my Windows7 laptop, Duplicati. I’d seen a few GUI tools for Windows that use the back end Duplicity tool. I’d always been interested in Duplicity because it does things that many other free tools do not. Things like encryption and networked backups to lots of services (Amazon S3) or just over ssh/sftp.
Keep reading for more on the different experience with Duplicati vs rdiff-backup.
Tips for Digital Photo Organization, Storage and Archival
By some standards, my 10,000+ digital photo collection is either very large or trivial. I suspect that professional photographers probably have hundreds of thousands of photos. Many of those will have different post-processing.
Organizing, backing up and archiving digital photos and images doesn’t have to be complicated to do well.
Organization
As you take the photos, place them into your organization. If you delay more than a week after returning from that once-in-a-lifetime vacation to Africa, then you probably will never perform any useful organization. Below are 8 steps to help you organize your photos efficiently.
2010 Article Summary
I was going to create a Top 10 List of 2010 here. Then started looking through the articles and some constant themes can out.
- Virtualization For Desktops and Servers
- Disk Encryption
- Backups Rock!
- Risks and Concerns for Cloud Computing
- Quicken Runs on Linux – ’nuf said.
- Security Isn’t Easy
- Passwords – Never the Same and Use a Password Manager
- Desktop Security Tips
- Browser Security Settings
- WiFi Router Security Checklist
- Privacy Is Gone Online
- Don’t Use Adobe Software
- Windows Software to Avoid
- Free Security Tips Ebook
- Dealing with Computer Viruses
- Been Hacked?
- How To Build A Home Server – Cheap
Previous Best Articles Here
Happy New Year!
How to Deal With Computer Viruses
We all get computer viruses, eventually. There is nothing anyone can do, but whether it is a small inconvenience or a major computer-doesn’t-work-for-weeks issue is up to you.
It doesn’t matter which operating system you have. Viruses have been written for it. It is true that since 92% of all computers in the world run MS-Windows, that platform is the main target, but Apple’s OSX, Linux, Solaris, AIX, iPhones, iPads, Blackberries, Android, Windows7 Phones are all targets too. If it runs with a computer, then it can have a virus. Those electronic picture frames have carried viruses.
Below, I outline the steps to recover from a virus infection or worse.
