Louwrentius

So I was just messing around on my work station, when suddenly I smelled the smell any person familiar with electronics fears. The smell of some electrical component burning.

The whole upper floor smelled like something was smoldering. So I shut down both my storage servers. After half an hour I still hadn't found the source of the smell, but it definitely was my 18 TB NAS.

So I switched it back on to see if I could determine the cause. The smell became stronger and within the strike light of my flash light, I saw small strands of grey smoke slowly twirling out of the Coolermaster Silent Pro M 600W power supply.

That was the moment I decided to turn the system off immediately. I know this kind of thing can happen. But it is still very bad for such a component to crap out on me like that.

Needless to say that I don't want a replacement of this model in my server. I will now try my luck with the Corsair CMPSU-750HX 750Watt PSU.

Based on a single experience it cannot be concluded that this Coolermaster PSU is a bad one that should be avoided. But the only moving part of a PSU is the (big) fan. What must be wrong with it that it decided to start smoking?

For reasons of availability, a redundant power supply should be used, but that is just too expensive for my taste ($500+).

The fact is that computers aren't made for humans. Computers are just made, and humans have to adjust to them.

The problem is that most people that are not into technology just don't understand how computers work. Should I single click of double click? Click left or right?

The only people that can work with some ease on computers are people with a more than average interest in technology. Ordinary people often have to fight great battles to get the job done. The therm 'ordinary' does not justice to these people, because technologists seem to forget that they are the people that actually do something useful.

The iPad is the first personal computer that is actually made for humans that do not have a primary interest in computers. The entire computer is abstracted away to focus on the things you really want to do. People do not need the help of technologists anymore to do the things they want.

The iPhone was the first in this new kind of computers, but due to it's size it's still a bit of a gimmick. But it was a revolution within the world of smart phones. It was the first device that was actually usable for non- technologists. And the iPad will be the first 'regular' computer that (hopefully) won't be such a nuisance as current home computers are.

You cannot just make a disk copy with dd and then just mount it as a regular disk. You must know where the partition starts on the disk. So first, you need to get the partition table with sfdisk:

sfdisk -l -uS image_file.dd

The output is something like:

Disk /mnt/image/image_file.dd: 9729 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Warning: The partition table looks like it was made
for C/H/S=*/240/63 (instead of 9729/255/63).

For this listing I'll assume that geometry.

Units = sectors of 512 bytes, counting from 0

Device Boot Start End #sectors Id System

/mnt/image/simon-besmet.img1 63 8497439 8497377 b W95 FAT32
/mnt/image/simon-besmet.img2 * 8497440 156280319 147782880 7 HPFS/NTFS
/mnt/image/simon-besmet.img3 0 - 0 0 Empty
/mnt/image/simon-besmet.img4 0 - 0 0 Empty

Next, we need to calculate the actual starting point of the partition. The sector number is in sectors, which contain 512 bytes. So in this case, the starting point of the NTFS partition is 8497440 x 512 = 4350689280.

To mount the image, enter the following command, using the calculated offset:

mount -o loop,offset=4350689280 /mnt/image/disk_image.dd /mnt/disk

Source:

http://lists.samba.org/archive/linux/2005-April/013444.html