What Jessie Did Next… – Page 10 – …being the inane ramblings of a mundane Yorkshire bird.

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Disk Rescue: LaCie “Big Disk” 500GB

In my arsenal of USB2-attached hard drives, there’s a 500GB LaCie “Big Disk” USB2. This has been running for a while and seemed OK, although the USB2 chipset does get a little confused when there’s a sudden power loss. Sadly it died a fortnight ago – dmesg pointed out to me that the USB had disappeared, and upon investigation it looked like complete power loss or at least drive failure. The data wasn’t critical (I used it as a scratchpad) but curiosity got the better of me and I decided to attempt retrieval of the data.

Inside these “Big Disk” units are invariably two smaller drives – LaCie’s attempt to sell off bigger-than-consumer space using commodity disks. In this case, there were two Samsung drives of 250GB apiece (SP2514N). I have a handy USB-IDE interface which I used to plug in each drive in turn:

Disk 1 (Master) obviously had a partition table on it with a single 500GB ext3 partition defined (yes, it’s a 250GB disk!). Familiar, maybe this isn’t a dead loss!
Disk 2 spun up, detected, but no partition table.

My USB-IDE thingy doesn’t allow me to connect two disks at once so I figured I’d put it down for a week while I purchased a big enough disk to recover any data to.

The big question at this stage was whether the data was striped (RAID0) or whether disk2 was “welded onto the end” of disk1’s partition.

Once I’d got a big enough disk to recover data to, the first thing I did was get all the data off the disks using:

dd if=/dev/sdc of=disk1.bin bs=1M

and the same for the second disk (although sending it to disk2.bin in this case). That left me with two 250GB files, and I used losetup on disk1.bin (the one with the partition table):

losetup /dev/loop1 disk1.bin

That in turn gave me:

        Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
  /dev/loop1p1               1       60802   488392033+   c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)

So far so good, but it’s still just half the disk I’m mounting (and I’m pretty convinced the partition was ext3, not fat32!). By this time I wasn’t in the mood to try and work out striping (and if it’s needed in the future use mdadm or lvm), so just went for the theory that disk2 was lumped onto the end of disk1, making an uberimage through use of something as simple as ‘cat’:

cat disk2.bin >>disk1.bin

I mounted the loopback again, and tried to get to the partition:

# mount /dev/loop1p1 /mnt
mount: special device /dev/loop1p1 does not exist

Bollocks.

Enter your local friendly Interweb maillist, and Peter informed me that the fdisk partition was most likely a red herring and pointed me at the losetup ‘-o’ option which would skip the partition table straight to partition 1. Couple that hint with this info via Google and we’re in business using parted and offsets:

# parted disk1.bin
GNU Parted 1.7.1
Using /media/disk-1/disk1.bin
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) unit
Unit?  [compact]? B
(parted) print

Disk /media/disk-1/disk1.bin: 500118700031B
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Number  Start   End            Size           Type     File system  Flags
 1      32256B  500113474559B  500113442304B  primary  ext3         lba
(parted) quit
# mount -o loop,ro,offset=32256 disk-1.bin /mnt/disk1
# cd /mnt/disk1
# ls
lost+found  junkheap   Graphics
# rsync...

You get the idea – it’ll take a while. Mine’s still not finished and of course some data may be mangled so probably worth using –ignore-errors in your rsync as well.

So to summarise:

If your LaCie “Big Disk” fails and it’s not the PSU or one of the disks, it’s worth popping the disks out and attempting to weld the two disk images together.
The exact model this worked on was the USB2 500GB “Big Disk” configured in JBOD mode – I can’t tell you the model number because helpfully it’s not printed anywhere on the chassis or label.
You need at lot of disk space – a pile for the image (which will be the size of the “Big Disk” even if it’s not full), and a pile of space to recover the data to. I got a 1TB disk from our local computer shop.
All this was done using my little eeePC which is running Ubuntu Hardy Heron.

Nokia E71: Much Better

October 28, 2008 / Jess / 1 Comment

I went into the Vodafone Shop in Wakefield this morning and returned the N96. I also talked Nicky out of getting an N95.

I walked out with a Nokia E71 which seems to do everything I want it to and with reasonable competence, and Nicky ended up with an E66. Time will tell how we get on with those…

Nokia N96 On Vodafone: Big Fail

October 27, 2008 / Jess / 1 Comment

So the time’s come to upgrade my phone – my Nokia E65 is getting a bit long in the tooth and we’ve been on a rubbish tariff anyway, off to the Vodafone shop I go. I’d sorta contemplated an iPhone but the whole kill switch thing put me off.

Our local Vodafone shop in Wakefield has a useful chap working there who’s given me good advice in the past: a very pleasant gentleman called Gareth. I went in, explained the monthly £200-plus phone bills, and tried some handsets. I must admit, I was a bit single-minded about this: a friend also has an N96 and likes it, and I’ve known quite a few friends with N95s who said they’re OK. To be fair Gareth told me it wasn’t a decent handset for my needs and it seemed a little sluggish in the shop but I put that down to “new setup” and things. Bad bad move, should’ve listened to the Bloke Who Knows.

Some of the more interesting problems:

It’s slow. I’m not talking about odd bouts of sluggishness, it sometimes pauses for 5-10s and buffers the keypresses so you’ll get a rapid burst of functionality followed by nothing.
Random reboots. It’s done it twice in the middle of calls, once while using the video player on the stock videos it comes with, and once while using the MP3 player.
The MP3 player itself seems to be purely a reference implementation of the Fraunhofer decoder – it occasionally skips and garbles on known-good MP3s, and once it’s garbled the only way of fixing it is a reboot.
Awful camera. Admittedly I didn’t get it for the camera, but to say “ooooh 5MP” then chuck out awful poorly-focused shots isn’t good.
One fun point on Saturday it decided to not switch on: I was pretty sure the battery had died but once I’d removed and re-inserted the battery itself it came back with a decent charge.
One word: “power saver”. Utterly useless, looks like the phone has run out of charge which I’m pretty paranoid about since the earlier “don’t switch on” problems.
No thankyou, I don’t want to share that video on t’Internet. No, I don’t. Really I don’t. Please stop asking me. Please stop trying to upload it. Really. JUST STOP, YOU…
Downloading S60 apps via the browser causes a system reset sometimes – happened with PuTTY.
Cheap. Plastic. Feels cheap and plastic, almost like I’d break it if it was at the bottom of my bag.
And after all that, the keypad is awful to type on – buttons arranged in a format which makes it easy to not send texts, or accidentally cancel things out.

Just to give you an idea of how bad it’s got, I’ve put my SIM back in the old E65. The new handset’s off back this morning, and I’ll probably go for an E71 instead on the advice of People Who Use Phones In The Same Manner As Me.

(So, why do I need to give the E71 a miss? Comments please…!)

Crystal Reports vs PHP

October 21, 2008 / Jess / 0 Comments

“Crystal Reports – oh dear God I’d forgotten about that – the last time I used it was in 1998 when I worked with Deverill in Poole. Horrible piece of software.”

And now I’m getting it to talk to PHP via the Crystal Reports web service. *shudder*

Sam & Max On Wii

October 11, 2008 / Jess / 0 Comments

Tons to blog about today, but I’ve just seen the trailer for Sam & Max on the Wii and that seems more urgent. LINCOLN SMASH!

Loose End, SW6

October 9, 2008 / Jess / 0 Comments

I’m at Putney Bridge. The meeting I was going to have this afternoon has been cancelled, and I’m at a loose end. I want to go take photos without straying too far away from this side of London and I probably have about 3 hours.

Richmond, Barnes and the Thames have all been the subjects of photography for me previously, so I’m not so keen on doing those. The lenses I have with me are the f1.2 85mm and the f1.4 50mm. I have more than enough CF and batteries to do some photos this afternoon and still get the shoot this evening done, so that’s good.

Any ideas?

Update: I ended up wandering around the Thames Towpath and then pottered into the West End anyway. I took sod all good photos, never mind.

From The Shores Of Manchester Piccadilly

September 26, 2008 / Jess / 0 Comments

I’m in Manchester this morning, getting the cameras cleaned at Calumet, and with it comes another recommendation for a nice café: Zest Café on the access road to Manchester Piccadilly station.

No power sockets, no wireless, but a bloody good latté and a very welcome toasted currant teacake. The breakfasts look huge as well.

Getting Rid Of Saturation In Stage Lighting

September 23, 2008 / Jess / 0 Comments

I’ve been tearing my hair out trying to get rid of the red-light saturation you can see in past gig photos (examples here and here). Red lamps confuse the light meters and often result in me shifting half the shoot into monochrome and I was pretty sure that the lens I hired for the Paleday gig hadn’t resulted in such bad photos, so I was a bit confused.

Googling for a solution I found a couple of articles suggesting that UV filters could interfere with the colouring – bingo, that was the difference between the hired lens and this one, I’d added a UV filter. So off that came. Another suggestion involved forcing the camera to use tungsten settings: an excellent idea, the AWB on the 30D was probably getting confused.

I also discovered Steve Mirarchi’s tutorial on concert photography – it’s written from a film standpoint but I was sure many of the principles would apply. It’s a fab tutorial and I observed some of the practices, previously I’d been using 1/60 as a slowest shutter speed but cranked that up slightly and the difference was noticeable. I also decided to ignore the viewscreen when checking photos – because of the lighting, stuff looks out of focus on the LCD but is actually pretty accurate.

The fruits of the camera/lens tweaking are here (with a good single-photo example here) courtesy of Harry’s Bar yesterday with the f1.2 85mm. Later photos have more tweaks and changes applied, which have made a lot of difference to the shoot. Nothing there is fiddled with on Photoshop, it’s all JPEG as the camera chucked it out. Woohoo!

RSS2.0 Mended On photos.jml.net

September 20, 2008 / Jess / 0 Comments

A quick note to say I’ve mended the RSS2.0 feeds on photos.jml.net – Col noticed they were bust a week or two ago and I’ve finally got round to applying the relevant php-fu.

On a related note, I’ve also added in RSS2.0 feeds for each tag, so if you’re just interested in photos of a particular band, venue or event (or even just Wakefield Market Hall being levelled) then that’s nice and easy now.

Canon EOS 5D Mk II

September 17, 2008 / Jess / 0 Comments

Neal pointed me at this article on dpreview.com which details the specifications for the Canon EOS 5D mark II in time for Photokina this year.

Some stuff you get for your £2299:

21.1MP sensor with new low-pass filter and DIGIC-IV processor
1080p 16:9 movie recording (limited to 4GB constant file size)
ISO100-6400 native, with extension to ISO50-ISO25600
New battery type (oh bugger!) – LP-E6
9-point AF, 6 “invisible” AF points
Dust-reduction and sexy new cleaning mechanism

I’m quite glad I’ve held out for this now. Maybe I’ll budget for one on the other side of Christmas, or for my birthday in May. Actually, the latter sounds like a good idea…

Winning Prizes At Wrenthorpe Show

September 14, 2008 / Jess / 1 Comment

Every year Wrenthorpe village has a show where there are lots of prizes for things like biggest onion, tastiest chocolate cake, etc. There’s an entire section on photography including classes such as “Humour”, “The Human Face”, “A Water Scene”, etc. The prizes themselves aren’t anything to write home about – odds and ends of donated vouchers, things vaguely relating to the class (a photo frame for instance) and a bit of cash to buy a pint with.

Anyway, last year I was double-booked to do something else and never got chance to enter (or rather I just didn’t get my bum into gear to sort it). This year I sorted out a few photos, got them printed on 12×8 matt finish, guillotined them so that they fit in the maximum A4 size and popped down on Saturday at 9am to enter. I didn’t really expect to win anything after I entered in 2006 and got nowhere.

Yowsa! I was pleasantly surprised to find I’d won:

First prize in “A Water Scene” for the lily photo taken at Netherton when I’d been playing with one of the hire lenses;
First prize in “A Season Of The Year” for Ellie among the buttercups in Wrenthorpe Park;
First and second prizes in the “Humour” class for Fluff abusing flowers and Ben’s encounter with the cheese stall!

So frankly, colour me absolutely amazed.

I didn’t win the “Best In Show” for the photography, but the winner was very very good – a student chap called Joshua who had a wonderful black and white photo of a young girl. Very nice indeed, but I’m still dead chuffed I actually got something and even got to give out some of my Moo Cards!

3 Down At Wakefield Food Market

September 13, 2008 / Jess / 0 Comments

In the past few weeks the new Wakefield Food Hall has lost the game butcher (although I didn’t think they’d last long), the Polish deli, and most disastrously the fishmonger. We now don’t have a fishmonger in Wakefield again, a sorry state of affairs.

Spot The Difference

September 11, 2008 / Jess / 0 Comments

…between the photo on the KWVR events page (specifically this one), and this photo on my gallery.

Would have been nice to be asked this year.

Edit: Fixed URL typo. Thanks bgeek.

Cafe-Working: Sheffield

September 11, 2008 / Jess / 0 Comments

Before I forget, good place for breakfast and laptop-working instead of sitting on my own in a deserted boardroom: Alfie & Bella’s on Howard Street, opposite SHU. Good cup of tea.

Home-Made Pesto

September 2, 2008 / Jess / 6 Comments

I’ve been growing a supermarket-purchased basil plant for a few months, nurturing it carefully on the kitchen window-sill. More recently I was aiming to make some pesto using it.

Tonight came the time to slay it in cold blood, or at least cut about half of it out! I filled the food processor bowl with leaves (not the stalks, just the leaves) and added a little bit of olive oil, some sea-salt, a crunch of pepper, and a handful of pine nuts. Wazzed it all up, chucked it in among the pasta and browned chicken, and it was lovely. Nicky was quite worried it’d be too strong but it was much better than the jar stuff you get in supermarkets.

The food processor thing wasn’t the entire story – the main bowl in the Kenwood didn’t get it down to the fine consistency I coveted, nor did the liquidiser. Finally I resorted to the hand-blender which didn’t quite do the job but at least made it a lot finer.

Traditionalists please note: it probably wasn’t proper pesto either since apparently you need garlic. I had no garlic bulbs in (fx: sound of jaw hitting floor) but it was lovely nontheless.

Half the basil bush made a few tablespoons of pesto, enough for two plates of pasta/pesto/chicken. That’s better than I was hoping – many recipes or guides suggest you need a whole basil bush for one plateful of pasta.