Cognitive Tools

After spending an extraordinary amount of time trying to figure out why I couldn’t get NTFSResize to work, I finally found Seppe vanden Broucke’s log entry. For posterity, I’ll record what I did, here, following partly the instructions in the original post and one commenter’s modification:

1. Get the SysRescCD ISO image. (Any live linux CD should work, including Knoppix.)
2. Create a new (larger) VirtualBox disk image (*.vdi) from within VirtualBox.
3. In the VirtualBox Details tab for your Windows instance, set your original VDI as the IDE Primary Master.
4. Set the new (empty) VDI as the IDE Primary Slave.
5. And set the linux ISO as the CD/DVD IDE Secondary Master.
6. Ensure that the instance is set to boot from the CD/DVD first in System->Boot Order.
7. Boot the instance.
8. At the command line, run
   fdisk -l /dev/sda
   You should see a partition there of type 7, NTFS.
9. Then run
   fdisk -l /dev/sdb
   You should see an error message that says there is no partition on that device.
10. Then run the command:
    dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
    This will take a long time. It means copy from the input file /dev/sda to the output file /dev/sdb.
11. Shutdown the system with:
    shutdown -h now
12. Change the Storage->IDE Secondary Master (CD/DVD) from the ISO image to your regular optical drive, or remove it completely so that it will boot into the original (small) Windows image.
13. In Windows, select Start->Run… and type:
    diskpart.exe
14. Type:
    select disk 1
    to select the (large) disk.
15. Type:
    list disk
    to see that you’ve selected the right one with the right size.
16. Type:
    select partition 1
    to select the 1st partition on that disk.
17. Type:
    list partition
    to see that you’ve selected the right partition.
18. Type:
    extend
    to extend the volume all the way to the end of the device.
19. Turn off the virtual instance and select the new (larger) VDI as the Storage->IDE Primary Master.
20. Boot the instance again and you should have a larger system (C:) disk.

So, every time I upgrade my system, it seems like my printers break.  I don’t know if it’s bad management of the cups debian packages, the peculiarity of windows, or my own incompetence.  The breaks have wildly varying symptoms.  So, I haven’t seen a pattern in them that allows me to fix things gracefully.  Sometimes Samba is to blame.  Sometimes CUPS (-PDF) is to blame.  And sometimes Windows is to blame.  Well, when I upgraded from Lenny to Squeeze awhile back, of course it broke my virtual PDF printer that I use to generate electronic invoices.  When I’d try to connect to the printer (as configured in Lenny), I got the following error:

Windows cannot connect to the printer. Operation
could not be completed (error 0×0000000d).

(No, it wasn’t in those colors or with that background… but I figured I’d try to find a way to make you, dear reader, feel as annoyed as I felt when I saw the error.) Anyway, with such a wonderfully informative error, I didn’t know quite where to turn. The logs (cups, samba, auth.log, syslog, etc.) on the server gave no indication that anyone had tried to connect. And I could browse the other shares from the vista machine nicely and those connections did show up in the logs. So, I had a strong indicator that the problem was NOT my upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze. But, being the stubborn idiot that I am, I started fiddling around with the printer and samba configs anyway…. which lead nowhere, of course. The upside is that I am just a smidgeon more familiar with cups and samba. [sigh]

When I finally typed the error into a search engine, I found the answer provided by some participants of Microsoft TechNet, which I repeat here for posterity:

From: AHarsent

I've seen this problem with a few printers now, not
consistantly[sic] between any particular makes or
models. However, I have found a consistant[sic]
fix to connect to any network printer from vista:

Run a command prompt and type the following:

   net use LPT2: \\servername\printer

This sets up a behind-the-scenes connection to
the printer.

Then go through the add printer wizard, choose to
add a local printer, and choose port LPT2… It will
probably ask for a printer driver, and you can just
choose whatever XP driver you might have been using
before. The printer is then installed without any errors,
and works just fine.

Of course, since I’m using CUPS-PDF, I don’t have a printer driver. I just use the Generic MS Publisher Imagesetter, which seems to work nicely. And now that I’ve made the right sacrifices to the right gods, I’m back to being able to generate PDFs from any program on the windows machine.