I’m in the process of switching all my hosted sites over to a new provider: Media Temple. I wasn’t pleased with the speed of my previous providers, and a billing issue kinda pushed me over the edge. I did some rough speed tests (sign up, move files over, then try to download them, see what’s faster). Media Temple seemed much faster. As in, load three pages before the first one loaded from busted provider. So we’ll see what happens.

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Warning! Heavy geek speak coming. Do not attempt anything below unless you know how to do a complete restore from backup, including rebuilding your Master Boot Record. If you don’t know what a LUN is (no, not Mr. Lunt) then you need to just move along. This is not the blog post you’re looking for.

The computers at work currently have roughly 20 GB used up for a disk image that we don’t use here at my location. I decided to reclaim this space. For those of you interested, here are my steps to reproduce the System partition extension (assumes Basic Disk on LUN 0 for System Partition, Win XP Pro):

• Delete any partition where current disc image stored (beyond D: drive)
• Delete 2.0 GB D: drive, ended up being ~21 GB unallocated space
• Clean up C: drive; remove cruft, defrag, etc
• Backup C: drive; including system settings, registry, etc
  • I used Windows Backup, selected entire C: drive including system state. Ghost would probably be better.
• Download Gparted LiveCD (Gnome Partition Editor, nice graphical interface to edit all manner of partitions and volumes), boot up with LiveCD.
  • I used version 0.3.4-7. Had some problems using autoconfig boot. Selected second option, and unplugged USB mouse/keyboard. Got to end, video driver did not start. Followed on-screen recommendation to force video start. Gparted then started fine.
  • LiveCD is a bootable CD that loads a small operating system (subset of Gentoo Linux in this case) into memory and gives you various tools without touching your hard drive.
• Extend system partition (LUN 0) into unallocated space.
• Apply changes
• Eject LiveCD and Reboot
• Windows Disk Checker Runs
• Reboot into Windows, check disk manager
• Plug in USB mouse/keyboard, reboot again

End result: 74.53GB NTFS System Partition (40% increase)

FYI - There is another method that involves using the MS utility diskpart, but it involves an NTFS boot disk. We don’t have floppy disks on these PC’s, and I didn’t want to format my USB drive to use as a boot device, though these machines are indeed capable of booting off USB. Using diskpart to extend a system partition is unsupported by Microsoft, however I’m sure using Gparted to extend a system partition is similarly unsupported by Microsoft.

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I got a new shirt as part of a promotion. Philip, where’s your picture?

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This just came across my desk… a contact at The MathWorks is looking for a Sr. Software Engineer in Multicore/Parallel Applications.? These are the guys that build MATLAB and Simulink, so I would think this would a good team to get involved in.? I think the position is in MA.

Let me know if you’re interested.

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I love this picture:

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