Author: Yazeed

My Seagate ST3000DM001 failed me, it was no longer detected by the BIOS, when the PC starts, you can feel the disk spinning, and the head moving in the usual way, but after spending a minute waiting for it to be detected on the post screen, the computer simply ignores it (Does not detect it) and boots without it. meaning the operating system does not detect it !

Before i blame Seagate (I prefer western digital in general), this drives is more than 5 years old, was only used for storage, and never ran any software, but still, more than 5 years old.

2- Diagnosis

the most likely cause seems to be the PCB board as the BIOS does not detect the disk altogether, nonetheless, I have had excellent results with the freezer trick before (Even though the freezer trick is not something that is suitable for this type of malfunction, the freezer helps with mechanical issues often denoted by unhealthy sounds coming from the drive). so I froze it (Within a bag to avoid condensation), and tried it a day later, but absolutely nothing was different, no surprise there.

I also, for no reason whatsoever, removed the LID and took a look inside, no idea what i was expecting to find, but i did anyways, everything looks normal inside, and hopefully no significant dust went in there.

So i decided it was most likely the board, considered this my diagnosis, and will now act accordingly

3- Work

3.1 – Find a donor board

Before looking online for a board, I took a look at the drives I had at home, turned out I do not have two of the same drive, but i do have a 2TB ST2000DM001 which had the exact board (100687658 Rev: C) ! obviously, the BIOS on the board is different between the two boards, so that has to be flipped from one board to the other (Basic soldering skills required), but otherwise, the boards are identical between the 2TB and the 3TB, I might end up losing both in this operation, but getting the data out is certainly worth the try

3.2 – Copy the data from the donor 2TB drive to a third drive (western digital 2TB drive)

To begin with, I started by finding a similarly sized hard drive to copy the data that resides on the donor disks before i take its board out, luckily, I found a western digital green drive of identical size and sector size, namely a (Western Digital Green WD20EARX), this third disk is to make sure i don’t lose any data from the 2TB donor drive, so here is how it is done

After connecting both disks to a Linux PC, I identified which disk is which using the fdisk command

fdisk -l

Now that i know which one is the source and which the destination, I started the process of copying the data from the donor (2TB), to third disk (The western digital).

by moving the data on the 2TB drive (The healthy one) to a similarly sized drive , this copy procedure is the simplest task, with both connected to a Linux machine I used my favorite cloning tool (Nop, not DD, I switched to PV the moment i first tried it).

pv < /dev/sdd > /dev/sdf

Now, All i can do is wait for 4:30 hours (According to PV), then come back, take the drives out, and start the surgery. it is copying at 115MB/s probably because the WD is a green drive that uses SMR recording.

Now that it is done copying, I took out the boards (Few screws), de-soldered the bios chip as you can see in the video, and soldered the one from the 3TB board onto the donor board and the one from the 2TB board onto the presumably malfunctioning board

the disk BIOS chip is the one branded winbond and has 8 pins (usually the only chip with 8 pins).

out of curiosity, I connected the 2TB drive (Now With the bad board after the swap), and it worked ! this is defiantly bad news, the problem was not the board after all ! connecting the 3TB disk yielded the same old problem exactly !

Who said you can’t mix and match between Laravel and code Igniter. well, you will face some issues, but they are not that hard to resolve.

It all starts with a cool package called EFTEC/BladeOne, which is simply blade without laravel !

to install it, you go to your CI application folder, and run the command

composer require EFTEC/BladeOne 

At this stage, we have Blade up and running, to use it, create a file under core for example, and let’s say we will call the controler /core/bladeController.php

NOTE: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

It is a rather old PC, 4th Gen intel at best, I have this motherboard with an Intel Xeon XPU, and 64GB of ram, so it is worth a try, I will start by ordering this TPM module from Amazon (here)

Once i receive it, I will come back and explain the whole experience, and if this works out of the box with windows 11, or if i need to fiddle with anything

I used to think screen protectors were applied in three steps, peel, stick, peel the other side, Not this one though !

NOTE: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

This is one different screen protector that comes with it’s own UV lamp ! it is the MOWEI (evatmaster) ! but is it worth all the hassle ? (See it on Amazon)

The claim is that it is a 9/10 on the hardness scale (Mohs scale), which is obviously hard to believe ! actually, I am very darn sure it is not, that is literally 1 step below diamond, so we all know the claim is not true, but it probably is scratch proof to a good extent. (Some guy tested the hardness, turned out to start scratching at 6, and get heavily scratched at 7, which is not bad, but again, nowhere near 9, (example: sapphire, the material the iPhone glass is made of is only theoretically a 9, but the impurities put it at around 8)

Okay, So let me start with installing it ! it comes with 3 Videos on how to install, how to remove bubbles, and how to remove the protector.

Let me give you the lowdown first, Up to now the experience is perfect, no lift with any of the covers I have, fingerprint sensor works perfectly, and cameras are very clear, also before curing with the UV lamp, you can drive the bubbles out easily, spills from the glue are easy to remove by hand, and up to now, the phone cover does not cause any lift, but i cured it far longer than the 2 minutes in the instructions.

If the excess glue is not going into dangouris places (your USB port or speakers, cure first, and then the glue comes out easly)

If you are like me, running only your own projects on a server, you might want to skip authentication

the changes I generally make to the file /etc/redis/redis.conf are

1- At the very beginning, limit the RAM redis can use with the line

maxmemory 2gb

2- Change the supervisor to systemd by modifying the line

supervised no

to

supervised systemd

Now, to test the new config, from the command line, run the following commands

systemctl restart redis-server
redis-cli
ping
config get maxmemory
quit

You have just configured redis and tested your new settings.

The reason I am enabling this in my virtual machine is to develop with android studio under windows or Linux in a dedicated development machine (Let us call it an android development virtual machine), you will need to enable nested virtualization for the virtual android phone that comes with Android studio, there are many occasions where you need nested virtualization, so let us see what we need to do.

1- Check if our system allows nested virtualization with the following line

cat /sys/module/kvm_intel/parameters/nested 

If this returns a Y or a 1, then we are good to go to the next step, if not, then execute the following to enable the feature on the host system

echo 'options kvm_intel nested=1' >> /etc/modprobe.d/qemu-system-x86.conf 

Now, with that out of the way, we can move to the next step

2- Enable nested virtualization in the config of the virtual machine, either with virsh edit or edit the file manually and reload it, whatever you are used to doing should work

virsh edit androiddev

Now, specify either host-model OR host-passthrough, host model is more compatible when moving the virtual machine to a new CPU, while host-passthrough will deliver absolutly all CPU features to the guest os, but is very unfriendly to moving the machine to a different KVM host

<cpu mode='host-model'> 

The original firmware based on debian did come with a DLNA server, in this post, I am only dealing with openWRT (You need to change the firmware due to a serious security issue on the NAS drive as shown here)

In openWRT, i recommend you install libffmpeg-full before miniDLNA, since miniDLNA will install libffmpeg-mini which will conflict

opkg update
opkg install libffmpeg-full
opkg install minidlna luci-app-minidlna

Once the above are done, you can setup your DLNA server from the web interface of openWRT

I would recommend that the database and log files be on the data partition to save space, something you can manually set from within the web interface

to rebuild that database (re-index the files), you will need to stop miniDLNA, run the update and then start the server again

service minidlna stop
minidlnad -R
service minidlna start

After an apt-get upgrade, phpmyadmin stopped working, I would see a blank page that sets a session cookie but does not show a login screen , just a blank page and the source of the page is also blank

So, i added the following line to my config.inc.php

$cfg['environment'] = 'development';

An right after, the following appeared

Array ( [type] => 1 [message] => Uncaught TypeError: PhpMyAdmin\ConfigStorage\Relation::__construct(): Argument #1 ($dbi) must be of type PhpMyAdmin\DatabaseInterface, null given, called in /var/www/html/pma2/libraries/classes/Twig/RelationExtension.php on line 22 and defined in /var/www/html/pma2/libraries/classes/ConfigStorage/Relation.php:62 Stack trace: #0 /var/www/html/pma2/libraries/classes/Twig/RelationExtension.php(22): PhpMyAdmin\ConfigStorage\Relation->__construct() #1 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/ExtensionSet.php(426): PhpMyAdmin\Twig\RelationExtension->getFunctions() #2 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/ExtensionSet.php(411): Twig\ExtensionSet->initExtension() #3 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/ExtensionSet.php(385): Twig\ExtensionSet->initExtensions() #4 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/Environment.php(810): Twig\ExtensionSet->getUnaryOperators() #5 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/Lexer.php(457): Twig\Environment->getUnaryOperators() #6 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/Lexer.php(108): Twig\Lexer->getOperatorRegex() #7 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/Environment.php(466): Twig\Lexer->__construct() #8 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/Environment.php(516): Twig\Environment->tokenize() #9 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/Environment.php(348): Twig\Environment->compileSource() #10 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/Environment.php(309): Twig\Environment->loadTemplate() #11 /var/www/html/pma2/libraries/classes/Template.php(123): Twig\Environment->load() #12 /var/www/html/pma2/libraries/classes/Template.php(156): PhpMyAdmin\Template->load() #13 /var/www/html/pma2/libraries/classes/Core.php(145): PhpMyAdmin\Template->render() #14 /var/www/html/pma2/libraries/classes/Config.php(684): PhpMyAdmin\Core::fatalError() #15 /var/www/html/pma2/libraries/classes/Common.php(169): PhpMyAdmin\Config->checkPermissions() #16 /var/www/html/pma2/index.php(48): PhpMyAdmin\Common::run() #17 {main} thrown [file] => /var/www/html/pma2/libraries/classes/ConfigStorage/Relation.php [line] => 62 ) 

Turns out, this is an incompatibility (related to session storage) that has only been fixed in the 5.2 snapshot, download that version of phpmyadmin and everything should be fine

The following is a list of plugins I have installed to help with Laravel Development, I will add to them as I go, I will also remove the ones i don’t think were worth it from the list as well

Plugin	What for	How to use	Publisher
Prettier	Very popular plugin to format your code so that it looks tidy	Do take a look at the plugin’s config to tweak it to your liking	Prettier
PHP IntelliSense	Advanced Autocomplete and Refactoring support for PHP		Felix Becker
PHP Intelephense	Cooler than PHP IntelliSense		Ben Mewburn
Laravel Extra Intellisense	Self explanatory name !
PHP Namespace Resolver	Import and expand PHP namespaces		Mehedi Hassan
laravel-blade	Laravel blade syntax highlighting		Christian Howe
Laravel Snippets			Winnie Lin
Laravel Blade Snippets	Laravel blade snippets and syntax highlight support		Winnie Lin
Laravel goto view	Quick jump to view !		codingyu
Better Align	Align code without selecting them first		wwm
Laravel Blade Wrapper	Speed up wrapping code with Blade directives	CTRL + SHIFT + T	lHunte
Laravel-goto-components	Takes you to Blade components <x-… with a click	CTRL + CLICK	naoray
DotENV	Syntax highlighting for .env files !		mikestead
Tailwind CSS Intellisense	If you use Tailwind (A css library), this plugin will do all the tailwind magick		Tailwind Labs

This is probably very easy to use on windows, but i could not find a windows machine,

A quick solution that was not very clear at first was as follows, before you do this, make sure you have unmounted the SD card !

apt-get install exfat-utils

And then run the command

sudo exfatfsck /dev/mmcblk0p1

Got a few of the following error, and answered yes to all

ERROR: unknown entry type 0xc1.
Fix (Y/N)? y

And that was that