The usual linux tool (fdisk) used for creating partitions don’t let you create one greater than 2Tb. This is a problem with today’s large drives. To create a partition larger than 2Tb we need to use gparted. Make sure youknow the device you want to be messing about with before you run these commands. fdisk -l …
Continue reading →I wanted to give a quick shout out to Spinrite. Great product created by Steve Gibson. I’ve used it to analyse drives when they start showing signs of wear. It’ll detect when your drive doesn’t have much life left in it. You can also usually use it to recover data from your drive if it…
Continue reading →My wife phoned me at work today to tell me that the computer was on fire! Luckily she was working at home for the day or goodness knows what could have happened. She smartly just disconnected the power supply at the wall and left it alone. It turns out that it was the connector between…
Continue reading →This (along with all my guides) is for Ubuntu but it could probably be done on any Debian based linux variant. It is worth setting your drives to spin down when the system is inactive. This will save some power and reduce the wear on the drive.First install your dependencies: apt-get install hdparm smartmontools You…
Continue reading →This one is fairly straight forward. This is what you need to do if your boot partition should fail and you need to remount the LVM logical partition in a new machine or once you’ve re-installed Ubuntu on a new boot partition.Make sure the HDDs are recognised. fdisk –lu Scan all disks for physical volumes:…
Continue reading →While we are on the subject of setting up LVMs and hard drives (see previous post), I thought I’d continue with how to upgrade your NAS by replacing one hard drive with another of a bigger size.Note that you will need to do this while your logical partition has free space equal (or greater) than…
Continue reading →In my previous NAS I ran a RAID 5 array for redundancy (see post here for more details on my previous build). However the whole point of setting up this NAS was to make use of a load of different size spare/old drives I had lying about. Given that my disks are of varying sizes a…
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