The state of selling off the oldies, July 2024

This might be a regular thing to post, here we are in the seventh month of the year and the specifications of the machines that I am building to sell on Marketplace are increasing to the point when I am sad to see them go, this one is no exception.

 It is a seventh generation intel, an i7-7700 which is a four core, eight thread processor.

Fractal Design, mid tower ATX. 2 fans with an EVGA 500W 80 Plus power supply, MSI B250M Pro VDH Motherboard, Intel i7-7700 CPU 3.60 GHz, Adata 16GB DDR4 RAM single stick, SSD 256GB M.2 NVMe PCIe Boot Drive, HDD 500GB Data Drive, MSI NVIDIA GTX 1060 GPU 6GB HDMI, 2.4GHz WiFi card with blade antenna and a Lenovo Keyboard and Mouse.

Fresh Windows 10 Pro Activated, Reset, fully updated with all drivers installed. $340

A year ago I would have been buzzed to have this as my gaming machine, and it is true, it is a most powerful machine, but the one thing that is making me sell is that it is not Windows 11 compatible, based on Microsofts recommendations, sure, it can run Windows 11, many are hacking the OS to do that, but that means that Microsoft may not update the security features.

The machines that myself and my primary IT Client (the missus) are running are Windows 11 ready, and perhaps six months before the fourteenth of October next year, we will both be running it. I am sure that will be a blog all to itself as I have not heard great things about Windows 11, however, I did not hear great things about Windows 10 either, but that sort of settled out all right over time.

This machine ended up selling for $250

Note to self, cloning a Linux boot drive (to a larger one)

I was thinking about writing this down on a piece of paper and placing it in a biscuit tin somewhere for the future me, then I remembered that this particular strategy never works, so I shall use the old tech geezer blog approach.

In the streaming box I had a solid state 60GB boot drive (SATA) running Linux Mint Cinnamon and a 120GB data drive with my music files (mSATA) and the music player called Clementine only liked the boot drive (they call that sort of behaviour a feature) so I would use the larger drive as temporary storage and move files about within the small limitations of the boot drive. That all became very annoying, so I wanted to increase the boot drive, but of course I did not want to burn the house down.

An ancient, yet free, OCZ solid state drive was obtained, erased, and after some research, and a lot of internet bullcrap as is the way, the solution was at hand. I navigated a process after connecting "all the drives" and discovered that the 60GB boot (SATA) was /dev/sda the 120GB data drive (mSATA) was /dev/sdb and the 120GB OCZ drive (SATA) was /dev/sdc

That information was discovered using terminal and the command : sudo fdisk -l

The following command was then executed : sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc conv=noerror, sync

The terminal then sort of goes off and does it's thing of copying everything from sda to sdc and I wandered off and kept myself busy for a while, probably thirty minutes or so, and when I came back the copy had been made and I could swap the boot drive for the bigger unit. There is a method for monitoring the progress of the write for larger drives, but I just left it alone and went off fiddling somewhere else.

That command would be something like : sudo pkill -USR1 -n -x dd and I assume it would be in a second terminal window. I giggle when I read "something like" when it comes to linux commands because users of command line, linux, unix or bash will know that if the syntax is wrong, things just don't work in a very stubborn way, which I completely respect.

The last step after making the bigger drive the boot drive was to expand the partition, as I cloned a 60GB drive onto a 120GB one, it made sense that there was about 60GB of unused space on the target drive. This final step is not that tricky when you know how, I had to boot from a Linux Mint installation USB drive (so that the new boot drive was not mounted) and execute a program called gparted, then simply expand the partition so that all the space could be used.

There you have it future old tech geezer, I hope that helps!