Angelo’s blog

I stumbled upon this blog entry, where someone describes how to convert bin+cue to iso. I had the same problem as him:

While setting up a new VMWare image I found myself needing to convert an old .bin/.cue disk backup to iso format. Looking for a simple command line utility I came across BinChunker, a GPL-licensed *nix source that fit the bill to the tee. The official site has the source code and RedHat RPM’s but nothing for OS X.

A quick compile took care of that — BinChunker for OS X.

Download the utility, extract it to your Home directory and issue the following command from a shell prompt:

sudo cp bchunk /usr/bin/

To make sure your newly installed utility has the correct execute permissions and that its accessible to you through the terminal, run this code:

sudo chmod a+x /usr/bin/bchunk

To convert a .bin/.cue pair to a .iso, you can issue this command:

bchunk myinputfile.bin myinputfile.cue myoutputfile

If you are getting a not found error, make sure that /usr/bin/ is in your path. To check this, type echo $PATH and look for /usr/bin/ in the result. If it isn’t there, type sudo nano /etc/profile and add /usr/bin; to the PATH=… line. Then press CTRL+x followed by Y to confirm and the enter key to verify the filename to save and exit nano. Then execute source /etc/profile to refresh the path.

I wanted to install Windows Server 2008 on some of our servers (Dell PowerEdge 2850′s and 2950′s), but I soon ran into some problems. The DRAC4 in the 2850′s is enormously s-l-o-w, and on the 2950′s, the Windows Server 2008 setup does not recognize the virtual DVD drive that comes with the DRAC5. Joy. I only want to do installations over the network or DRAC’s, because the servers I’m testing on are in our datacenter, 150km away. And I just want to play around for a hobby, not being in a car half the evening to sit in a loud server room flipping cd’s

Finally, I installed Windows Server 2008 inside a ESX Server virtual machine (works like a breeze, very fast installation), and I installed WDS (Windows Deployment Services), to enable network installations of Windows Server 2008. It really looks nice, and hell of a lot easier than when I last played with RIS, about 4-5 years ago!

I installed the 2850 quite fast over the network (boot from PXE enabled network card, press F12, and off you go), but the 2950 gave me some headaches. It would boot of PXE, but then the installer whould stop, showing only an error: WdsClient: An error occurred while starting networking: a matching network card driver was not found in this image. Please have your Administrator add the network driver for this machine to the Windows PE image on the Windows Deployment Services server.

After googling, I found out I could do shift+F10 to get a console window, and the ipconfig command showed me that the setup was only recognizing the add-in Intel NIC’s, not the onboard Broadcom NIC’s (which are the only ones connected right now).

So I googled and tried for a few hours, and finally, I got to integrate the Broadcom drivers into the boot.wim boot image. (User ‘ozymandeus’ gave the answer in this topic.)

I download the RIS drivers for the Broadcom Netxtreme II from their site. Watch it, the RIS drivers are under a seperate header on the download page. In the following example, I extracted the two files to c:\bc.

On the WDS server, I downloaded and installed the Windows AIK (1GB download, mount with daemon-tools). In the WDS console, I exported the boot image (I only have a x64 boot image) to c:\boot.wim.

I mounted the image to an empty directory, c:\ff.

> imagex /mountrw c:\boot.wim 1 c:\ff

Add the drivers to the image:

> peimg /inf=c:\bc\b06nd.inf c:\ff

Unmount and commit the changes:

> imagex /unmount /commit c:\

Then, I did the same for image 2 in the boot.wim file:

I mounted the image to an empty directory, c:\ff.

> imagex /mountrw c:\boot.wim 2 c:\ff

Add the drivers to the image:

> peimg /inf=c:\bc\b06nd.inf c:\ff

Unmount and commit the changes:

> imagex /unmount /commit c:\

Then, I replaced the boot.wim file in the WDS console, I booted my 2950, and tadaaaa! Installing!

Finally, it’s on the MSDN! They first put the x64 version of Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter on the MSDN, and they will be publishing the other versions later.

Looks like MS really did a great job on server capacity,I downloaded this DVD at 4.2MB/s (yes, thats 33.6Mbps).

Because I’m so busy I don’t have time to upgrade machines here and there (and I do want to wait a while), but new projects will run on Windows Server 2008 and IIS7!

Quote from Slashdot:

“The popular open source privacy tool, TrueCrypt, has just received a major update. The most exciting new feature provides the ability to encrypt an entire drive, prompting the user for a password during boot up; this makes TrueCrypt the perfect tool for non-technical laptop users (the kind who are likely to lose all of that sensitive customer data). The Linux version receives a GUI and independence from the kernel internals, and a Mac version is at last available too.”