I love you TestDisk!!!

Well, I have been having some problems with my majorly budget (and majorly cheapo) Sabrent SiliconImage SIL3512 SATA RAID controller lately. It keeps dropping disk 1 "due to a SCSI error." So I ran SeaTools free bootable drive diagnostics on both of my 500 GB Seagate drives in the RAID 1 and they came up good. I then booted into the RAID card BIOS, deleted the RAID and created it back again so that disk 1 would rebuild from disk 0. (It won't let you rebuild without first deleting the RAID.) After waiting for hours for the offline rebuild, I booted into Windows and wallah, all was well. No data loss. It's all there. Everything back to normal...cool...until it dropped disk 1 again "due to a SCSI error."

So...I thought about disabling write caching in Windows but the option shows as grayed out. But ah, the cheesy Windows GUI tool for configuring the RAID allowed me to disable write caching. Okay, now that's done and will hopefully solve the problem. Now to delete and then rebuild the array again, right? Well, at that point I decided to get all creative and perform those tasks from the GUI tool instead of the RAID card BIOS this time...Hmmm...It seems to be taking even longer than the first rebuild, even though I chose the offline option...2 DAYS later it completed and I was pretty sure that I was hosed...Sure enough...Windows showed the entire disk as being unallocated. The GUI RAID tool apparently hosed the partitions. Ouch. Ouch again.

Enter TestDisk...

I downloaded TestDisk (free) and ran it directly from Windows, as my broken RAID array was the tertiary drive. (Also bootable.) Using their website's extremely thorough step-by-step instructions, I was able to confirm my suspicion that the partitions and data were still intact and restore the broken partitions! ...TestDisk asked for a reboot so I booted into Windows and got a dialog that hardware was installed and that another reboot was required...I rebooted and held my breath...and...YES. Everything back to normal again. Nice... Real nice...

I think what I liked the most about TestDisk, is that it does all the detecting for you and really makes partition restoration fairly simple while still being full-featured (and totally free).

I love you TestDisk!!!


P.S. Yup. Finally a post about something other than my iPod!

Watch Netflix instantly on iPod/iPhone

Thanks to awesome info from lifehacker, I am now able to watch Netflix on my jailbroken iPod. I have recompiled the steps from the lifehacker blog post to reflect my personal experience. Here they are...have fun!...

1. Via iTunes, download the Netflix app for iPad
2. Right click on the Netflix app in iTunes and choose "Show in Windows Explorer" (PC)/"Show in Finder" (Mac).
3. Rename Netflix 1.0.4.ipa to Netflix 1.0.4.zip and extract the zip somewhere.
4. Look for the Payload\Netflix.app folder inside the extracted folder. That Netflix.app folder needs copied to the /Applications/ or /private/var/stash/Applications/ folder on your iDevice using WinSCP.
5. Now change the permissions: chmod -r 755 Netflix.app -- This actually threw an error for me but I was able to work around it by setting the permissions using WinSCP. (For setting the permissions recursively in WinSCP, right click Netflix.app, choose Properties then click the check box that applies the permissions recursively.
6. Reboot the iDevice.
7. Download  User Agent Faker from Cydia
8. Make your Safari behave like iPad Safari under the iDevice's Settings>User Agent Faker>Enabled=ON. Set Useragent to Apple iPad and be sure to set Applications>Safari=ON as well.
9. Go to netflix.com and watch a movie instantly! Safari will close and Netflix.app play the movie.

Not too hard, is it?

vWallpaper and adding sources to Cydia

Well, my iPod Winterboard video wallpaper was a little crashy so I decided to try vWallpaper. Very cool and way less crashy (though not perfect). My favorite theme is electricblue. vWallpaper also supports video ringtones, apparently.

To install it, you will first need to add the appropriate source to Cydia. Here's the steps for that:

1. Open Cydia and go to Manage>Sources>Edit>Add
2. Add the source URL, which in this case is http://i.danstaface.net/deb/

Once you have added the source, look for the package entitled vWallpaper and enjoy!

Yay for CLI apps for iPhone!

 
Here's some fun command line apps to install from Cyda on your iPhone/iPod, if you haven't already:

top -- see screenshot above!
(drool)

nmap
(second stream of drool from other side of mouth)

Inetutils
Includes: ping, telnet, ftp, tftp, inetd, rlogin
(ping or die!)

vi
(!)

nano
(!!)

lsof

Lynx
(Who needs Safari? heh...)

netcat

adv-cmds
Includes: ps, last, md, lsvfs, finger, fingerd

diskdev-cmds
Includes: fdisk, mount, quota, fsck, tunefs
(yay, fdisk!)

Be sure to comment if I missed one that you use!

PDF sploit

Well, it looks like jailbreakers don't need the iPhone PDF Loading Warner app anymore in order to try to thwart PDF exploits. Use the PDF Patch app from Cydia to close the very PDF security hole used for jailbreaking! Getting hacked on purpose = good. Maliciously = bad. (Or did you already know that?)

Delete jailbreak apps straight from Springboard

Last week I got pretty tired pretty fast of having to go back into sluggish Cydia just to delete fail apps that I didn't end up liking. This was easily resolved by installing CyDelete which allows me to uninstall Cydia apps straight from Springboard just like Apple apps! Wow, I just saved myself countless minutes of staring at "Reloading data" in Cydia just to remove an app. I am really thankful for Cydia -- truly -- but fact is fact: Cydia is slow.

Ping me!

Yay! I can now ping from the command line on my jailbroken iPod after installing Inetutils from Cydia. Inetutils is a free iPhone app for ping, ftp, inetd, rlogin, telnet and tftp.

Unlike most *nix versions of ping, the inetutils version only sends 4 pings by default. This can of course be easily modified with the -c switch to specify a number of pings.

Example:
ping -c 100 google.com