Coming back from the dead. A FAT32’s story.

I’ve forgotten why but it appears that I still had an old FAT32 partition on my (windows) computer (primary is NTFS). Last week, it crashed taking down all my photos, DL, and so on at the same time :) (Since Murphy’s law is the great rule that unified them all, let’s say I’d never heard of such things as backup !) The only things left was this dull message : The disk in drive D is not formatted. Do you want to format it now ? - NO !

Sadly when it comes to windows, software often rimes with money (or with astalathings – you’re evil !). Fortunately, I found TestDisk(1) which, one more time, prove that there IS a true god out there on the internet. Bless the GNU God.

This nice tool try to reconstruct the boot sector (look in the advanced menu) and find the root directory. I suggest that you let it find the root directory by itself if the first candidate seems not valid (use Abort, it’ll look for the best match).

If it succeeded, you can check the validity of its solution with List and write a brand new boot sector. Life can be beautiful, isn’t it !

Tools:

(1) http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Virtualisation 2. The free world’s revenge.

Some time has passed since the last time I build a virtual box from scratch with vmware… Now, time has come to use some pretty GNU stuff: VirtualBox(1) is all you need.

Before anything else, I have to warn you that despite being outrageously easy to install, I only used it has a client with NAT configuration. Has I’ve seen on the web, you can configure it with host interface. It seems only a little bit more tiresome than vmware configuration.

Like I’d said, it’s really easy : download VirtualBox (1.5), Download the ISO image of your preferred OS (I’d choose the Debian Etch.)

Step 1: Basic installation (with X)

Step 2: Installation of the guest additions.
Download the kernel header files, the default gcc version (which appears to be the one needed to recompile the kernel). Mount guest additions ISO image and run the installation script.

Step 3: Pb…
- I had to change the X configuration file manually to enable the new video driver in the Device section : Driver “vboxvideo”. (In fact, I do not remember if I’ve done this by editing this file or by running a dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg command)

- Once done, I loose the mouse cursor (but the mouse was still active). This time, you really had to edit xorg.conf and change the InputDevice’s driver to “vboxmouse”. It seems to be a known bug.

Step 4: Enjoy.

Tools:
(1) http://www.virtualbox.org/