[dba-Tech] Low-Level Format

Back in the day when I used to be a Windows user, there was an awesome boot loader that handled dual booting fantabulously. I forget it’s name though. For some reason I keep thinking partition magic, but I’m not sure. maybe that was just a partitioning tool and, in any case, it’s been discontinued.

Speaking of dual booting Windows & Linux, I never used to have a problem with any of the distros & grub. But, saying that, I haven’t tried it on Vista or any of the more recent versions of Windows. Quite likely, Microsoft has done something to bugger it up. I do recall that Windows had a nasty habit of removing grub if it ever booted up and ran through some filesystem checks.

I guess the best solution is the one you have, which is having a boot loader on a USB drive that boots up a local install of linux. Shouldn’t have to be that way though!

- Hans


On Apr 21, 2014, at 11:13 AM, Jim Lawrence <accessd at shaw.ca> wrote:

> Hi Arthur:
> 
> I really like the BullZip product line. When I first looked at it, it was a pay product with a lot of limitations. There was a demo version that would run but only create the first hundred records in each table. It worked just fine as I would then just go and manually export and import the data.
> 
> Jim 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Arthur Fuller" <fuller.artful at gmail.com>
> To: "Discussion of Hardware and Software issues" <dba-tech at databaseadvisors.com>
> Sent: Monday, April 21, 2014 9:56:16 AM
> Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] Low-Level Format
> 
> Hi Jim,
> 
> What I have decided to do is dedicate a 32GB thumb drive to the Linux
> install. I have checked the BIOS and discovered that I can specify the
> boot-order to USB then CD/DVD and finally hard disk. One of the hard disks
> in my old squeeze is 250GB so I'm going to partition it into 3 pieces, one
> Ext2, one swap and the rest NTFS. Then, I hope, when I install Linux again,
> I'll tell it to use the swap partition for Swap, and use the Ext2 partition
> for data storage.
> 
> On a side note, there's a free utility called MS-Access-to-MySQL available
> from BullZip.com that does just what its title says. It will inhale any
> Access database and then create its equivalent in your MySQL installation.
> I've done this numerous times and it works like a charm. From there it's a
> cinch to copy the Access FE to a new name and then redirect the copy to
> look at MySQL instead of the Access BE. BullZip has two other similar
> utilities which convert Access databases to SQL Server and Postgres. These
> are Windows utilities but once you've got the databases into your Windows
> MySQL then it's a cinch to copy the files into the Linux installation. The
> folks at BullZip have done their homework: pesky things like data-type
> conversion are automatic and painless. For anybody wishing to port their
> Access databases to MySQL, BullZip has my hearty endorsement.
> 
> Arthur
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