BackTrack was the winner of our recent Hive Five for best Live CD, so we decided to take it for a test drive and show off a few of the features for everybody else. BackTrack can be installed to a regular boot cd, a USB drive, installed to the hard drive, or even downloaded as a VMware virtual machin...

Lighter posting this weekend.  I’m cleaning up the back yard for Spring and other assorted house-cleaning chores I’ve been putting off for a while. Michael Pietroforte at his awesome 4sysops blog has one of the best sysadmin sites I just can’t wait to see a new post from. Michael’s skil...

Last major collection of links. Alvis has a TAKS test tomorrow so we are going retro and watching some Azumanga Daioh anime DVD’s to melt our brain cells before heading off to an early bedtime. I’ll try to section it up a bit. Lots of neat finds and worthy candidates for your attention.  Do...

Previously posted in this series: Partition and Disk Management: Part I – Dancing with Diskpart Partition and Disk Management: Part II – Free and Useful Tools  Partition and Disk Management: Part III – Pesky Dell Partitions It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was making this post: Secu...

Previously posted here at Grand Stream Dreams: Partition and Disk Management: Part I – Dancing with Diskpart Partition and Disk Management: Part II – Free and Useful Tools In “Part I – Dancing with Diskpart� I was working with some Dell systems and in using GParted noted some strange thing...

In my previous post Partition and Disk Management: Part I – Dancing with Diskpart, I mentioned that I prefer to use Microsoft’s DiskPart Command-Line Options as my primary tool. I do this for a number of reasons, As I use WinPE 2.0 boot disks for primary system maintenance it is always at hand, ...

Sometimes I find myself on a technical issue and end up puzzling it out. The aftermath finds me overwhelmed with linkage.  Sometimes due to the interrelatedness of the issues, I struggle a bit to get it all organized in a logical manner. I’m having to “puntâ€� this time and do another multi...

If you dig the free EASEUS Partition Master but need a 64-bit version, or want its nifty bootable CD to manage and rescue your hard drives, today's your lucky day—it's free until midnight. The MakeTechEasier blog posts a link, username, and password that lets you get the Professional Edition o...

Nothing like a real-world challenge to lead me to burn through a few hours of research and followup. It all started with this post by Dwight Silverman over at the Tech Blog: Anarchy, indeed: Help recover files from a crashed drive Long story short, a business system crashed, some system recovery was...

Live CDs—that is, hard-disk independent tools and operating systems that boot from simple optical discs—are handy for everything from data recovery to test driving new systems. We want to know which one is best. Photo by bulinna. What Live CD has been the most valuable to you? This week ...