Sandisk Sansa E200 series Factory Format

This will delete all media and mods from the device and return it to factory defaults.

1. Turn off Device
   
2. Slide the HOLD switch to the hold position (Red visible)
3. Hold down the Record button on the side of the device then press the power button
4. It will say "Recovery Mode, Attache USB cable"
5. Attach the USB cable
6. When Windows creates a drive letter, open it
7. Right click in the window, select NEW >> Text File
8. Rename the Text file "sansa.fmt", do not put any data in the file
9. Unplug the Sansa Player from the USB cable
10. It will format
11. Resync your music.
    

Windows 7 & TrueCrypt Full disk Encryption

Currently installing FDE using TrueCrypt is not possible on Windows 7 without doing some trickery before you install the OS on your drive.

1. Start the installation like normal
2. Make sure you customize your install, don't just let it do everything for you.
3. When it gets to the part where you choose your disk, click the "advanced" disk setup.
4. Delete all your partitions.
5. Click "New...", choose the maximum size possible for your drive. Click OK
6. It will tell you that "Windows may create a partition..." blah blah. Click OK. You'll see a 200 MB partition in addition to another partition with the rest of your space.
7. Now delete the larger partition leaving the 200MB partition intact.
8. Now select the 200MB partition and expand it to fill the space. Click OK to the warning.
9. Now you should have a single partition, go ahead and install windows the rest of the way.
10. Encrypt your drive as normal.
    

Windows File Shares over SSH

Create a Microsoft Loopback adapter:

1. Add New Hardware
2. Yes, I have already connected the hardware
3. Add New Hardware
4. Install the hardware that I manually Select from a list (Advanced)
5. Network Adapters
6. Microsoft | Microsoft Loopback Adapter

Configure your new Loopback adapter:

1. Right Click => Properties
2. Make sure "Client for Microsoft Windows" is checked
   
3. Uncheck "File and printer sharing"
4. Click TCP/IP => Properties
5. Manually Set an IP, doesn't matter what I used 10.1.1.1
6. Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
7. Gateway is your "REAL" gateway
8. DNS Servers are your "REAL" dns servers
9. Click "Advanced"
10. Click "WINS" Tab
11. "Netbios Setting" should have "Disable NetBIOS over TCP/IP"
12. OK your way back out.

Set up Putty:

1. Open Putty
2. Enter your hostname or IP Address
3. Enter the correct SSH Port (default: 22)
4. Open Connection >> SSH >> Tunnels
5. In Source port type: "10.1.1.1:139"
6. In destination type "127.0.0.1:139"
7. Leave "Local" and "Auto" radio buttons alone, click "ADD"
   
8. In Source port type: "10.1.1.1:445"
9. In Destination type: "127.0.0.1:139"
10. Leave "Local" and "Auto" radio buttons alone, click "ADD"
11. Click On "Session"
12. In "Saved Sessions", type in a name and hit "Save"

Testing it:

1. Double-click your session
2. Accept the SSH Fingerprint, if requested
3. Type in yoru username and password
4. Open My computer, type "\\10.1.1.1" in the address box
5. You should have your shares.
   

Windows 7 & Adobe Premier Elements 4

Yes I installed Windows 7 and for the most part I really like it. The only problems I've been having are the occasional issue with installing some applications that do a OS version check before allowing the install to go through.

One such application is "Adobe Premiere Elements 4.0" which I bought for my Windows XP system that I just blew away in favor of Windows 7. Installing it proved to be a bit of a challenge, only because I'm used to things just working with XP.

The solution is not to use Adobe's autorun installer, rather to explore the disk and run the .msi installer version instead. That seems to bypass the stupid version checker that Adobe built in.

So there you go, hopefully someone out there will find this useful.

Space Siege and GameStop and Rear Enders, OH MY!

I've never ranted on a blog before but today I've just had enough. First off let's start with GameStop.

I went to the Gamestop here in Newington, CT and asked for Space Siege. The sales guy behind the counter told me that they were sold out. I said, Wow, must be a great game. He said they only got one copy, *ONE COPY*. Now Newington is not a small city and it's right outside Hartford, CT and with all the hype, the advertising and big studios behind the game Gamestop decided to get, one freakin' copy of the game.

He did call ahead two two other stores and only one of the stores had their *ONE* copy in stock. The employee told him to hold it while I drove there. Fine, I want to get ti bad enough that I will drive to another store.

So, I'm in my car driving to the Westfarms mall and I come to a stop light on the main road to get onto highway 9 and...*WHAM!* I get rear ended. I'm thinking, you've got to be fucking kidding me... We called out insurance companies to get that straightened out and 45 minutes later, I'm back on the road to the store; now it's becoming a god damn mission at this point.

I'm not seriously hurt, by the way, thanks for asking.

Anyway, I get to the store and buy the game, no story there...thank god.

Now I get home, install my latest graphics drivers and then go to install the game. You know what I get? A FUCKING CRC ERROR ON THE DISC! Yep, the disc is damaged and will not install.

Now since Gamestop, in it's infinate wisdom, decided to only stock ONE FUCKING COPY OF A NEWLY RELEASED GAME there is no way I can exchange it for another copy.

So now, I'm now downloading it off bittorrent, at least I have something to do while my bruises heal from my car accident.

...

Damn it.

Bringing Up a Network Interface Without DHCP or an IP Address

This is a useful thing to know if you want to bring up a network interface without using DHCP or assigning it an IP address. This would mostly be used for things like a SNORT server where one interface is just listening in promisc mode and doing nothing else.

I'm using Ubuntu Server 7.10 for this, it may be different for other distributions:

Add this to your /etc/network/interfaces file:

iface eth1 inet manual
pre-up ifconfig $IFACE up
post-down ifconfig $IFACE down

Then test your changes by typing:

ifup eth1

Your interface should come up without the overhead of DHCP or putting a fake IP.

# ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:00:00:00:00
inet addr:XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX Bcast:XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX Mask:255.255.255.192
inet6 addr: fe80::XXX:a0ff:XXX:bf85/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:16061154 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:18718055 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:1044924142 (996.5 MB) TX bytes:361626953 (344.8 MB)
Interrupt:16

eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:00:00:00:00
inet6 addr: fe80::21b:21ff:fe08:xxxx/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING PROMISC MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:641984551 errors:358 dropped:30480447 overruns:0 frame:181
TX packets:86416 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:2577620812 (2.4 GB) TX bytes:21151016 (20.1 MB)
Base address:0xdcc0 Memory:df8c0000-df8e0000

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:7923 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:7923 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:730857 (713.7 KB) TX bytes:730857 (713.7 KB)

Copy One Hard Disk to Another with Ubuntu 6.06 LTS

1. With the machine off plug your target hard drive into a second channel on your computer.
2. Boot the machine, when you see the grub start menu hit ESC
3. Choose "Recovery Mode"
4. When it prompts, enter your root password
5. If you have IDE hard drives your drives will be /dev/hda for the source drive and /dev/hdb for the target. If they are SATA then they will be /dev/sda and /dev/sdb
6. Type fdisk /dev/sda
7. Type "p" to print a list of the partitions. Write these down, trust me it will make things easier in the future.
8. quit out of fdisk with a CTRL+C
9. Start FDISK again with /dev/sdb
10. Press "n" to start a new patition segment
11. Fill in the parameters you wrote down
    
12. Try to duplicate the partition tables the best you can, here's the time to make the partition layout larger if you wish.
13. Once you are done, type "w" to write the partition info to the disk
14. Now you can copy the data over to the target disk
15. mkdir /new in the root of the source disk
16. mount /dev/sdb1 /new
17. I have var on a separate partition on my system so I'm going to exclude it for this step and handle it later. However we still need to create a var mount point in what will be /
18. mkdir /new/var
19. mkdir /new/var/run
20. mkdir /new/var/lock
21. Now we do the copy:
22. cd into /
    

tar --exclude var --exclude new -cvf - . | (cd /new; tar xf -)

1. You will get error messages saying that the size has changed during copying, this is normal.
2. Once it's done copying, we will do the same for the var partition.
3. umount /new
4. mount /dev/sdb3 /new
5. cd into /var
   

tar -cvf - . | (cd /new; tar xf -)

1. That copy should be pretty quick, we are done with the copy process.
2. umount /new
3. poweroff the system
4. Next we need to reinstall grub on the new hard drive
5. Remove the source disk from the system
6. Power on the system, insert the ubuntu 6.06 installation CD and boot from it
7. Select the "Rescue a broken system" option.
8. This will look like it's installing the system again, just select all the appropriate options, enough to get you to the recovery screen.
9. At one point it will ask which partition you want to be your root file system, 99% of the time this is part1, select it.
10. It will then ask you what you want to do, select "re-install grub boot loader"
11. It will give big long thing to read asking you where do you want to install the boot loader; we want it on /dev/sda, so we type that in and hit enter.
12. It should install the boot loader, reboot the system and take the installer disc out of the drive.
13. Done, you should have a fully working system on a new drive.
    
14.