M635 J520

We have a couple of laptops that are still technically working, but we have moved on to greener pastures so we no longer need them. Around the corner there's a charity that reworks old tech, so the laptops are heading there. Prior to that I figured it would be a good idea to securely wipe their hard-drives -- by basically writing random garbage to them several times over. Luckily there are quite some tools made for that. After some trial and error here's what I ended up doing: 1) Found an old USB disk, fittingly sporting a Batman logo. 2) Formatted it as a FAT (MS-DOS) drive. 3) Downloaded the free ISO of Darik's "boot and nuke" data wiping tool (DBAN) from  http://www.dban.org/ 4) Dowloaded Unetbootin from  https://unetbootin.github.io/ and launched it. 5) Used this to turn the Batman disk into a bootable disk based on the DBAN ISO. 6) Due to a bug somewhere in this pipeline (Possibly Unetbootin? Or DBAN itself?), I needed to edit the " syslinux.cf...

Inspired by the success of the new SSD in my Mac Pro (and puzzled by a weird HD error) I went ahead and invested in a SSD for my 2010 Asus laptop as well. To get everything up and running the way I wanted took a bit more hacking than with the Mac, but now everything seems great - dual-booting Ubuntu 12.04 (main OS) and Windows 7 (mainly for gaming - till Steam is launched for Linux). This is what I did. I went for a 128 Gb CRUCIAL SSD m4 2,5" with a noname external 2,5" drive case. I tore out the old 600Gb-ish drive from the laptop, put it in the external case, and fit the new drive in its place. "Klok av skade", I went for installing windows first. (The Windows 98 installer overwrote my SuSE back in the day...) Windows 7 Since this Asus doesn't have an optical drive, I couldn't generate the "Recovery disc(s)" needed to reinstall the operating system. (Clever Asus.) The way I got around that was to boot Ubuntu 12.04 from a USB-stick, us...

Vroom! Recently I have added SSDs to things around me. That is, at least to two things. My laptop and my trusty old Mac Pro. Both experiences were fairly hitchfree, but I would like to point out one or two things. First one out was my Mac Pro. I decided to add a 256 GB SSD drive and went for a OCZ SSD Vertex 4 Series 256 Gb 2.5" SATA III drive with a Pro Sled 2.5" SSD/HDD. This fit snuggly in the 4th HD bay of my machine. I also wanted to take advantage of this commotion for doing a clean install of the newfangled Mountain Lion. (After making sure using good old googling that Cubase and Lightroom would still work.) I bought the upgrade in the AppStore, downloaded the installer, and followed this guide to get it onto a USB-stick:  http://www.macworld.com/article/1161069/make_a_bootable_lion_installer.html  . Reboot holding down the alt-key, chose to boot from USB and got a clean OSX in zero point swish. Since I still have my old HDs in there somewhere, and some bigger, ...