Confessions of a cat

Nowadays you can buy huge usb drives / sd(hc) cards on the market. 16gb sd cards are selling around USD 30-40 right now - and I imagine it’s the same for usb drives. The theoretical max. of an sdhc card is 32 gb which is enough for a lot of purposes.

Lots of laptop and consumer devices have an sd card slot as well. If you use one such card / usb drive for your computer you might want to partition it for several reasons (just imagine dual booting linux / windows from an sd card - possible! see my previous post on how to make xp boot from an usb drive - it’s very much the same with an sd card as well).

So to the point. The problem with windows (xp) is that if it recognizes a device that is connected as removable (usb hard drive, sd card, etc.) then it will only allow you to format / have one partition on it. This is enough for a lot of users (e.g you use the card in your camera).

Windows also does not allow you to see more than one partition from a removable drive - even if you have partitioned it to 2 or more sections with linux (gparted) or mac os x ( via the built in disk utility).

The problem is that windows only allocates a drive letter to the first partition found on a removable drive - and the rest is just not accessible.

How to solve this problem?

The answer is simple: › Continue reading

UPDATE: (2009/june/10th) - All the below mentioned things are still valid, however I had no luck with installing using this method on my usb drive. I did, however, found the http://usboot.org/ website, and their latest (v. 2.10 this time) version works wonderfully for me. What you need to do to get usboot v2.10 working, in a nutshell:

1. register on their website (you need this later)
2. download the program (a zip file with lots of batch files and stuff)
3. If you do not have a multiboot capable pc, install vmware, or parallels desktop, or qemu or virtualbox (latter 2 are free) - these are virtual machine emulators
4. get a clean copy of windows xp with sp2 or sp3 integrated
5. install this windows in any of the abpve mentioned programs
6. once install is done you may wish to install some drivers for the virtual machine (not required)
7. install usboot, and follow its user guide closely - default options are good
8. with usboot the last step is to copy the files to the usb hard drive - this should be a usb hard drive and not a flash drive, and it should be formatted to fat32 (ntfs puts more burden on it). test if it’s bootable on your computer (check bios settings) - if no luck, use the hp usb disk format tool, that might help.

Many of us have got rid of windows in recent years. Some of you have switched to linux (ubuntu, debian, redhat, you name it), and some of you have turned to Apple’s OS X. Both of them are a better choice in my humble opinion. Anyways, sometimes you just want to play a game that’s only available on windows, or you want to access some hardware for which only a windows application / driver exists. Or you have a PIC programmer and you like Winpic800 (the free programming app), but it only runs on windows.

Many of you have several computers sitting around at home, and you can just keep a windows install on one of them. However if you’re like me, you have one “workhorse” machine, that you spend most of your time in front of. It would be good to have windows at hand when you need it without messing with your internal drive(s).

The net is / was full of articles (from M$) which say that booting windows xp from external USB storage is not possible. You may have heard about BartPE and Windows PE - they are essentially live windows XP images which allow you to run windows xp from a CD / DVD (or even USB) however they are not really the “real deal” - as you are limited in what you can do with them.

Now I needed windows for some hacking with applications that can only be run on windows. But since I use a nice OSX system which I do not want to fuck up and share its space with XP: this solution is the best for me. And maybe for you too.

› Continue reading

As you might be aware, you can connect a PSP slim (psp 2000), or maybe even the latest PSP slim #2 (psp 3000) to a hdtv with component cables. However you might not necessarily have a HDTV nor a component cable for your PSP. You can also buy a regular composite and/or S-video cable for your PSP which should be sufficient given its 480×272 max. resolution.

PSP 2000 / Slim

I had such a cable at home, and wanted to try it with a TV. Of course the “nice” PSP has just emitted a n error message saying something about progressive scanline or what. Never mind, the crucial point here is: it did not work.

PSP Slim AV (composite) Cable

I already had a component to VGA signal converter with which I could have connected it to a computer monitor with a VGA input line - if I had a component PSP cable (which I did not, the picture above depicts the composite one. I know it’s easy to mix up “component” and “composite” though since they are just too similar words…). So just when I was thinking on getting a new cable for it, I run into a nice little program for the PSP, called “FuSa”. › Continue reading