Linux a better Windows partition manager

My inlaws were in town to help Liz through her surgery. They brought their machines to me for repair One of the machines had a full disk so I upgraded the 20GB to a 250GB drive.

1. made the 20GB drive a slave
2. installed the 250GB drive as the master
3. booted Fedora Live CD
4. create a partition of the same size on the new disk
5. copy the master boot record (MBR) using dd
6. copy the partition using dd
7. shutdown
8. remove power from the slave (old 20GB) drive
9. reboot to Windows, verify things look ok.

For detailed instructions visit:
http://www.nilbus.com/linux/disk-copy.php

I stopped at the “Resizing the Partition”.

The best part of all this was I never knew the power of dd, ntfsresize, and fdisk. I was originally looking for a copy of PartitionMagic or Norton Ghost. Linux is far better than any of that.

Once I finished the dd, I shutdown, and removed power from the slave drive. I rebooted and Windows came up on the new 250GB but still appeared as a 20GB drive. Now I had to resize it.

The oddest part was resizing the partition, because I couldn’t wrap my head around the “delete the partition” then recreate. The delete part threw me off as I was afraid to lose the data. But it was an in memory operation so it didn’t affect it. WHEW! Then I ran ntfsresize -n -s 250G /dev/sda1, then rebooted back to Windows. After a chkdsk, I was all done!

So Linux is a better Windows partition tool than Windows
http://darkstar.ucd.ie/timosh/links/ntfsresize.html#cli

Fun moments

Yesterday, I took Adan to t-ball practice. He’s doing much better with paying attention. He did a great job playing third base and running the bases. It was particularly fun yesterday because I helped out by being third base coach, it was surprisingly fun.

At the beginning of practice, I help Adan warm up, then Marco & I played catch for a bit. Marco has quite an arm for a 4 year old, and pretty good with the grounders. Though while I was third base coach, Marco decided to roll down the hill

Another cool thing, Adan tells me last night “Daddy, we’re doing times [multiplication] in math class. 10 times 10 is 100!” Apparently, they’re starting third grade math now. Adan is only in first grade though

Iron Man weekend

This morning, Grandpop, Grandma, the kids & I went strawberry picking at Vollmer Farm in Bunn, NC. We came home with 3 buckets full. The berries are plump, red and sweet!

This afternoon, Grandpop Frank & I took the boys to see Iron Man. Usually I don’t see movies the weekend they have been released, but I promised the boys I’d take them today.  The movie was AWESOME! Adan & Marco loved it, as did I.

Then finally this evening, I drove the Trans Am to it’s new owner at RDU.

At home

The surgery went well, they straightened her septum and cleared up her sinuses. We got home around 2:45pm today, but the ride home was less than fun for her. We drover my car to the hospital, and the suspension being to taut made every bump, ditch, or even minor road imperfections noticable. She was NOT a happy camper. We could’ve taken our Grand Caravan but my father-in-law needed it to pick up Adan from school.

It was a rough right, but we finally made it home. We had some Chinese food tonight for dinner, Liz had some soup and crackers. She’s relaxing on the loveseat, actually looks like she SLEEPING! YAY! It’s been a long day.

Epiphany

Tonight while putting Adan to bed, he was stating some math fact: “0+0=0, 1+1=2, 2+2=4, 3+3=6, …Daddy, guess what? I just noticed something, they’re all even numbers!” I replied, “that’s very good. You’re right, any time you take to numbers and add them together you get an even number.” I could see the light bulb over his head. I was proud.

the fish

Marco has been begging for a fish. His class has a fish that they take care of and he wanted one for the house. So today I took Marco go Aquarium Outfitters here in Wake Forest. We bought a 2.5 gallon fish tank kit, some blue gravel, fish food, and 3 guppies (2 males & 1 female).

I filmed the fish swimming around.

Adan goes to work

Last week, Adán mentioned that some of his classmates go to work with their parents while they are tracked out from school. I ask him “so would you like to do that?” He replied excitedly “YEAH!”

Today, Adán, my 6 year old son, went to work with me for the entire day. First thing he realized was “it takes a long time to get to your work”, as my commute is about 35-45 minutes each way depending on time and traffic. When we got to work, we promptly got him a visitor’s badge, made a breakfast pitstop to pick up a bagel and a rice krispies treat (his choice). He ate about 3/4 of it, and half a bagel. Oh and he got orange juice, his favorite juice. He spent the morning playing on nickjr.com, drawing & coloring.

For lunch, we walked over to Rockola but it was closed when we got there. Closed as in no one works there anymore, not as in come back later. So we settled for Burger King which was a hit with Adán because he got crown shaped chicken nuggets and a toy. The best part was when we crossed the road which is a 4 lane with a turn lane. We crossed the first 2 lanes and stopped in the middle turn lane to allow the other 4 cars to pass us, before continuing crossing. When we got across Adán said “you almost killed me. I’m going to tell mommy you almost killed me.” I burst out laughing because he was serious.

After lunch, Adán continued to draw, color, and play on the computer. We took a walk at 3:00 pm down to Lake Raleigh where we saw some folks fishing. We then returned back to the office to finish up our day. Needless to say, he was wore out.

It was one of the best days at work I’ve ever had EVER!

It’s a trap

Adan, my six year old son, is making a trap…

for a Leprechaun!

He said “it is going to be St. Patrick’s Day and he has never caught one before, so he wants to try”

Rough week

It has been a really rough week. Last weekend, Adan got sick with flu-like symptoms: fever and coughing. Liz took him to the doctor’s on Monday where they did every kind of test and determined it was viral. So Adan was out of school Monday & Tuesday. Then Tuesday night I had a fever and felt under the weather too. Wednesday night, Liz had a fever and was knocked off her feet all day Thursday. Then last night, Marco woke up twice and was burning up with fever. :(  Iliana has had a runny nose the entire time as well.

I feel better today, but still rather, shall I say, phlegmy :)  But should be back in the office on Monday. Thankfully I was able to work from home to avoid contaminating my co-workers, and being able to take care of the family.

On a happier note, Liz & I celebrated our 8th wedding anniversary on Tuesday.  Happy Anniversary!

Happy Birthday

Happy 1st Birthday, Iliana!