1TB HDD turns to 31MB

The other day I transferred a bunch of files using Mageia to a drive which I believe was partitioned and formatted in Windows 8.1. A few days later, I noticed that Windows was reporting the drive to be 31MB in size. After a bit of research, I learned that there are some hidden areas on drives named HPA and DCO.

Of course, linux provided some handy tools to solve this issue. Using

hdparm -N /dev/sdb

I noted that HPA was enabled and only a fraction of the available sectors were indicated as available in max sectors. So, I set the max sectors equal to the available sectors using

hdparm -N p78165360 /dev/sdx

Please note that the numbers and drive identifiers are samples only (my drive didn't contain 78165360 sectors and I'm not sure it was sdb).

Credit is due to this post.

Business Intelligence

I thought I would share my unsettling experience with Business Intelligence in Visual Studio.

When I first decided to install Business Intelligence templates, it was for Visual Studio 2012. At that time, I initially failed to have those templates installed correctly. After realizing that updates weren't applied, I was able to activate these templates.

Eventually I was interested in running these templates through Visual Studio 2013. I found out that the templates came out months after Visual Studio 2012 did, and that it would be the same for Visual Studio 2013. After a long wait, the templates came out. However, a few days later the templates were pulled back due some issues that were found.

After waiting for more than a month, the templates are finally out once again: http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=42313