Death and birth of data and disks

Western Digital Community - How To.

'via Blog this'

This has just saved my data. As a firmware update had bricked my WD ShareSpace, I thought it would be a cinch to mount one of the RAIDed disks and copy the contents over to a temp RAID until I find a long term solution; I was wrong. I thought I had the disks in RAID 1, but it should be easy grabbing the data off them right? hur dur.

While I thought it would be a simple case of getting an EXT3 driver for either the Mac or Win7, the RAID caused problems on the disks.

I tried:

• MacFUSE 2.0.3 with fuse-ext2 0.0.7 - nuttin'
• OSX Fuse 2.3.4 with fuse-ext2 0.0.7 - I was able to mount sdb1 but not sdb4
• explore2FS 1.07 - could read the files off the partition with the data (sda4 or sdb4), but couldn't copy them
• ext2explore 2.2.71 - nada
• ext2fsd 0.51 - could read sdb1 but not sdb4
• linux reader - no
• vv 0.7 - nein
• Ubuntu 11.10 trial off USB in Mac OS X Lion - non
• Ubuntu 11.10 trial off DVD in Mac OS X Lion - niet
• Ubuntu 11.10 trial on PC Win 7

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Yay!

The link on the WD website had a nice simple run-down on the commands to get the RAID going. I didn't follow exactly and got the RAID volume going in degraded mode only using one disk. This was in case it all went wrong; I still had one disk left, see!

Once I had the Win7 notebook working and had mounted both the old RAID disk and a new drive to copy the contents, it only took 9 hours to extract the data. 

Color Palette and the 56 Excel ColorIndex Colors

Color Palette and the 56 Excel ColorIndex Colors:

almost everything you ever ever ever wanted to know about colours in MS Excel.

Force cells in Excel to use Text format rather than Number format - delphi

Force cells in Excel to use Text format rather than Number format - delphi

Obvious solution is obvious. Except for me.

I'm reading in test case values from MS Excel for an automation framework, so many values are coming across as floats, irrespective if I try and reformat them in my code. A simple prefix of a ' and everything is working. So simple yet this has eluded me for weeks.

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Well I have had a fun day. I've made it outside only once to pick up a parcel; a Concept 2 Model E rowing machine, which I put together whilst going through a brain-acher posed by a friend.

The problem is from OS X Address Book no longer playing nicely with GMail contacts.

I'm probably on a red herring, but the log file shows...

2011-08-17 13:23:22:941|AddressBookSync|772|111430|ISyncSession|Error| Unresolved reference encountered during push for client com.apple.AddressBook

2011-08-17 13:23:22:941|AddressBookSync|772|111430|ISyncSession|Error| Relationships causing error:

2011-08-17 13:23:22:942|AddressBookSync|772|111430|ISyncSession|Error|

Record 'A51D87CA-7388-4F9B-BE56-14364B80ED75'(com.apple.contacts.Group) refers to record '1CF84336-07C5-4AA8-8AF0-AD8CD76A3BCD' in relationship 'distribution email addresses'


Apart from stating the obvious that relationships cause error, I'm wondering how to analyse the Address Book DB. The previous post was how to get to the Address Book now that Lion had set the Library folder to hidden by default. 


Once you have access you need to be able to see it. Fortunately we have a number of ways it seems. Address Book uses SQLite for storage. Open Office can view this natively just by opening the database and selecting to connect to an existing database as type 'Mac OS X Address Book'.


Otherwise we need to set up a ODBC connection. Fortunately we have some options.


Within /usr/lib/ there looks to be some suitable files (libsqlite3.0.dylib and libsqlite3.dylib) but I probably didn't set things up correctly. I did find Actual's ODBC drivers, but they wanted $$$ for something that I was sure someone had worked out how to do before. Fortunately www.ch-werner.de/sqliteodbc/ has exactly what you need. Install sqlite0odbc-0.83 and you 're nearly there.


The final step is to ensure the database is associated with the driver to be viewable as a data source.

1. Open up ODBC Administrator as the link above suggests, specifying the location of the driver.
2. Open the  /Users//Library/ODBC/odbc.ini file 
3. Add the location of the database you're trying to access. Database =
4. Open OpenOffice, Select Database -> Connect to an existing database -> browse
5. You can select the data source you have just created.

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