Not every proprietary program can drive a person crazy, right? Some, like Norton Ghost, are superb tools for anyone to use. But, the fact that these tools are proprietary can drive open source fanatics up a wall. It’s not the price of the software that makes the real difference (although it’s a reason to migrate from one software to another for many people); it’s the idea that proprietary software comes with boundaries that keeps the user experience confined to…well, being the user. That’s enough to drive any developer crazy.

How to install Ubuntu 11.04 on external hard disk, showed how to install Ubuntu 11.04 on a portable USB hard drive. This tutorial, written for Ubuntu 11.10, takes it a step further by showing how to add an NTFS partition at the end of an external drive – after installing Ubuntu.

Nowadays hard drive manufactures are switching to a new hard drive technology which uses 4KB sectors size instead of conventional 512B. This new technology requires little tweaks to get a better performance in comparison to out-of-the-box settings. This article will describe some simple to follow instruction on how to partition the WD EARS hard-drive to get better overall performance.

If you are looking for the best information gathering, vulnerability assessment, exploitation, privilege escalation, reverse engineering, RFID, stress testing, forensic and anti-forensic applications, you will find it on BackTrack.

This tutorial shows how to install it on an external hard drive.

If your hard drive is unbootable due to corrupt partition tables, computer viruses, system errors, and other non-mechanical issues, you may consider using a hard drive data recovery tool to save your precious files or data from being permanently wiped out. Thankfully, there are tons of available Linux-based rescue tools that can get the job done quickly and easily.

...one of the computers ran out of hard drive space. So I had a bigger hard drive with four times the disk space handy, and swapped them. The steps:

With the abundance of netbooks and other optical drive-lacking computers, a USB external DVD drive is quickly becoming an essential accessory for any geek. Unfortunately, a new one will run you about $50 from most stores. Luckily, you can upgrade most external CD drives for half that.

Installing Ubuntu 11.04 or any other distribution on an external hard drive connected to a computer via USB is about the same as installing it on an internal hard disk. The key is to remember, after partitioning the disk, to install GRUB, the boot loader, in the MBR of the external disk, rather than in the MBR of the internal disk.

This tool has four uses: list hard drive partitions, size of particular partition, check partitions on hard disk, and repartition the drive.