Archive for March, 2009

Restore a HP Pavilion 6000

By bo, 10 March, 2009, No Comment

Had bought a old HP Pavilion for my son. This thing has a broken display but :) if you buy this days a new LCD Monitor you can get this stuff for under 200 $ here. What i have found is that the HP Laptop has a “secret” partition from where you can restore the whole system. This save me a lot of time because i have found this instructions for how to recovery the system from there.

you can restore the MBR, the procedure is given below and then use the
Quote:
F11
key to restore your system completely. After that you can burn your recovery discs.

This procedure will perform a destructive restore ( delete all data on the hard drive). So make sure you backup your data before starting out.

The recovery partition is visible as
Quote:
D:
after a clean install. It may be another drive letter on your system so make sure you change it to D: . Explore this recovery partition, the files may be hidden so you may need to go to
Quote:
Tools > Folder Options > View >
, select
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show hidden files and folders
, and uncheck
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Hide Extensions for known File types
and uncheck
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Hide protected operating system files ( Recommended )
. Then you must be able to view a folder named
Quote:
miniNT
and inside this folder
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System32
.

Make sure you have two files inside the D:\miniNT\System32 folder, the first one
Quote:
MBRInst.exe
and the second one
Quote:
MBR.ini
now go to
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Start > RUN >
type
Quote:
D:\miniNT\System32\MBRInst.exe /ini D:\miniNT\System32\MBR.ini /r /q
and hit enter.

restart your system, your system will boot into recovery mode & resotre your system completely, after which you can create your recovery disks.

hope this helps somebody

Resize image in bulk on a MacBook

By bo, 7 March, 2009, No Comment

sudo port install ImageMagick will install the ImageMagick open source port for MacBook.

This software has powerfull command line utilities for converting, resizing, croping, in one word to say managing all kind of operations on images.

If you want to make thumbnails, for a list of files in a directory there are few ways. Here is one of them:

ls *.JPG | xargs -I {} convert -thumbnail 128x96 {} _{}

This reads all JPG files and pipes the output to xargs. xargs is another great utility that applies the input from ls to convert

convert is one of the great utility pieces that comes with Image Magick. This utility has the option thumbnail that resizes the given image and make a new thumbnail (in my example the thumbnail has the underscore in the filename (_filename).

Great if you want to make 1000 thumbnails on the fly :) . I just love the shell and the power of shell commands :) .