Posted inExperience / Information Technology / Thank You Sir May I Have Another

Beware the Cradle

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek0
drive cradle

You know, a cradle can be the greatest thing on earth. It can also cost you days. A few days ago, when I was trying to determine just how weak the power supply in my HP Franken-Z, it cost me days.

The machine is running Linux Mint Mate edition. When I tried to stick in the NVS video card it couldn’t get powered on far enough to show me the logo screen. Just kept re-booting, well, trying to.

First thought is “Oh! I’ll shrink this 6TB partition, back it up, then restore it onto a 2TB SSD.” Yeah, I’ve been warned about thinking before. True to form the Gnome Disks utility gagged trying to resize the partition. It also spit up the warning that it needed to be hooked up to a Windows machine, running chkdsk on it twice.

“Oh! I’ll just pull the drive, install the SSD, then copy the stuff from the 6TB stuck into my cradle.” Yeah, some day I’ll be smart enough to listen to the warnings about thinking.

Drive shows up as 2.2 TB

You know, I lived through the 2TB drive limit era. I should have known better. Problem was the partition resizing had gagged so I believed there was just a software tweak needed. I even ran testdisk on the drive overnight. Found almost nothing.

Bought that cradle years ago. Need to swap a hard drive in my uncle’s notebook. I was happy to have the excuse to buy one. This was when GPT partitioning was just finding its way into the wild. Never had reason to put more than a 2TB drive in it until now.

The 512-byte Sector Limit

If you are shopping for a new cradle today make certain you check the maximum drive size supported by the cradle. Some being sold still have 2TB limits. Others max out at 6TB. A few of the nicer ones max out at 16TB. These, of course, aren’t the cheap ones.

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.

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