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Gparted, 137 gb, 48 bit LBA and You

It was an interesting situation. Someone called with a hard drive that was always reading 137gb in windows even though it was 250gb. My first thought was that perhaps it wasn’t partitioned completely, I recommended maybe using fdisk on windows or downloading the latest GParted live CD to look at the partition scheme.

After I hung up the phone I did a little surfing and found out this 137gb limit all had to do with Logical Block Addressing or LBA for short. Older computers were not equipped to handle drives with 48 bit LBA and Windows did not support it by default until SP1.

If your still hung up with this problem a BIOS update for your motherboard or upgrades for windows may solve it. However you still might end up with a drive that needs partitioning. The Gparted liveCD is perfect for this. With it you can create, destroy, shrink or grow partitions of all types and sizes. Best of all you can do it all without damaging the data on your hard drive. Though it is highly recommended that you backup your existing data in case anything goes wrong.

This particular problem doesn’t affect Linux by the way. Linux completely ignores the BIOS when it comes to hard drives and uses its own addressing scheme.

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Interesting Spam

For the longest time I’ve been running a few blogs without making use of the Akismet WordPress plugin. For those who don’t know any time you run a blog or website as you start getting more and more popular the spam bots start hitting you more and more. They search for websites that have forms and auto fill these forms with links and keywords in hopes that a few of them might go through and bump up their ranking albeit temporarily.

Does this work? This link of a misspelled spam message proves it does somewhat. But realize in order to get those three thousand links on Google they probably had to send out three million.

So today I install Akismet on my last blog but before I close the doors on spam I’d like to share with you a few spam messages that caught my eye so to speak. These were a little harder to decipher as spam. Some sound more like fortune cookies.

  • Last week at Fry’s, littlestar and I played a bit of Guitar Hero 2 that they had out for demo purposes. While it did take some time to get used to the controls, we eventually got it, and it was alot of fun. Garage Geeks has built the a rel “nofollow… (the a rel “nofollow part is a link which was stripped out at some point.)
  • I can not agree with you in 100% regarding some thoughts, but you got good point of view…
  • Extremely interesting post. A little bit different from my point of view but neverless an interesting opinion….
  • Very interesting post. A little bit confusing, but it still ok Hm….
  • Every time I visit this website I loose my assurance that everything written here is real. But even if it’s not true, I keep on visiting it because it’s interesting. There are many posts which you can’t find anywhere else.
  • Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens….
  • Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world….

It was fun moderating you spam. I’ll miss you.