Category: Samsung

upgrading a legacy notebook with a contemporary ssd

whbeebe

The Samsung R580 is like the Timex watches of yore, when they “took a lickin’ and kept on ticken’.” Or maybe it should be compared to something more contemporary like the Energizer Bunny. Regardless, the R580 continues to do yeoman duty, what with its ‘mere’ 4GB of memory and now-modest Intel Core i5 m430 processor. It was originally purchased with Windows Vista installed back in 2010. It was upgraded to Windows 7 when that was offered as a free upgrade, and stayed that way until Windows 7 decided to corrupt itself. When that happened I installed Ubuntu 13.10 on it in December 2013. It’s been an Ubuntu workhorse ever since.

When I upgraded the R580 to Ubuntu I replaced the keyboard and put a new 500GB hard drive in it to match the size of the original hard drive. Over the years I started to replace the hard drive, first with a 1TB model, then a second just to make sure that at least the rotating media was kept up to date. I thought about upgrading to 8GB, the highest you could go with this model, but I just never got around to it. This December, I decided to be a bit more drastic with my upgrade.

As you’ll note above, I upgraded the R580 with a 1TB Samsung 850 EVO SSD. The price finally dropped low enough to make installation a no-brainer. I’d already upgraded a Samsung 17″ running Windows 10 with a 1TB Samsung 950 Pro, and I’d purchased a mid-2015 MBP with a 1TB SSD built in. So I was quite appreciative of how an SSD significantly speeds up a computer. It just made more sense to spend the money on the SSD rather than more memory, so when the Christmas sale on the 850 EVO was announced I picked up a copy, along with a Sabrent USB adapter. With Clonezilla on a USB thumb drive, I booted into Clonezilla and proceeded to clone the HDD disk to the SSD. Total time took about two hours, most of which was just waiting for it to finish. Once finished I swapped the HDD out for the SSD, booted the system back up, and here I am writing this blog entry on it.

Before you ask: No, dd is not as good as Clonezilla, at least not for this use case. For example, Clonezilla (for which I have extensive experience) will analyze the drive to be cloned and only copy over what needs to be copied over. dd is blind in that it duplicates the entire drive from one device to another. And in order to make that work you still need to boot into a live version of the OS from a thumb drive, so the amount of prep work is identical. It makes far more sense to use Clonezilla.

Needless to say, everything is so much faster, from startup and shutdown to launching applications. And if it goes to swap, well then, it goes to very, very fast swap. I don’t intend to do any more hard disk upgrades, just as I don’t intend to update the OS beyond Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. I’ll keep using the R580 until it literally dies of something, I’m not sure what. I keep thinking I’ll replace it with another used notebook, but its overall combination of reasonable performance, many ports, and the fact it has a Blueray drive make it hard to find a replacement for, now that everybody and their relative wants to drop ports and repairability and upgradability in the name of convenience, cost cutting, and dare I say it? Lock-in.

Here’s to another five years of drama-free usage.

integrating mac os x with linux as a vm to support raspberry pi development

whbeebe

Update 1 January 2019

This is probably one of the lamest posts I’ve ever written. I leave it here as example of how far into the weeds I tend to get. If you want to use macOS (as it’s now known) to support Raspberry Pi development, and in particular to program Linux images onto micro SDHC cards, then download balena Etcher from https://www.balena.io/etcher/ and install it. Etcher is extremely easy to use, walking you through the three steps necessary to create a bootable image on a card. Don’t do what I did below; that’s just an absolute waste of time.

Original Post

You’re viewing CentOS 7 running in VirtualBox 5.0.16, with a micro SDHC card mounted and in turn viewing the Arch Linux ARM ext4 native Linux filesystem I created for my RP3. When I originally created the RP3 micro SDHC card I used my Ubuntu 15.10 notebook as the workbench. But I’ve been wanting to do similar work using my MBP as the primary tool bench, with an eye towards retiring the native Ubuntu notebook with the MBP due to the Ubuntu notebook’s age, rather than attempting to replace the Ubuntu notebook as I’ve written I originally wanted to do. The biggest hurdle to using the MBP was just reading the native ext4 file system on the MBP, as Max OS X has no native provisions to read Linux file systems. This post is about getting to that point. As time goes along I’ll be doing more than just reading the microSDHC, but reading (and then writing) is the foundational requirement, else this is all a waste of time and resources.

Before I go much farther let me properly attribute this from another post, “Mount SD card in VirtualBox from Mac OS X Host,” written by Brady Holt on 21 July 2014. Please note this was done nearly two years ago. This is an update to his post using contemporary software and with my observations.

Software and hardware I’ll be using:

  • OS X El Capitan, version 10.11.3 running on a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015)
  • VirtualBox 5.0.16 with Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-5.0.16
  • CentOS 7 with all updates as of the date of this post with VBoxGuestAdditions_5.0.16 running as a VM

I’m going to create a Linux VM with VirtualBox and use that to mount and at least read the micro SDHC card with the Arch Linux ARM ext4 file system. I had originally looked for a Mac OS X utility to do this, but eventually gave up as the utilities that claimed they could do that had allegedly stopped working with the release of El Capitan because of System Integrity Protection, or rootless, mode. Far be it from me to disable in El Capitan what is supposed to add additional security to OS X. I’m somewhat surprised that I could get this to work, but I suppose that if, at some point in the future, Apple releases a Mac OS X update that breaks what I’ve built here that I’ll be back to using a separate Linux machine.

The first step is to install VirtualBox and then to install CentOS 7 within a VirtualBox VM. I won’t cover that here, as there are plenty of existing how-tos for that. Just make sure that the Virtual Box Extension Pack is installed and that you’ve downloaded and installed the VBoxGuesAdditions and have built it within the VM. That gets everything prepared both on the OS X host side as well as within the VM.

The next step is to get the overall system prepared to mount the RP3 micro SDHC card within the CentOS 7 VM.

  1. Plug in the microSDHC card into the MBP using the microSDHC adapter. I’m using a Samsung 32GB Evo Plus device. Note that it’s named “NO NAME” on the desktop. This is the MSDOS 100MB boot partition on the microSDHC card.
  2. Go to Launchpad and search for diskutil. Launch diskutil. Select “NO NAME.”

  1. Click the Info button at the top right. Note the device associated with “NO NAME.” It’s the third line down from the top, called “BSD device node.” In my case it’s disk2s1. The device associated with this partition is /dev/disk2. We’ll use this later.

  1. At the top of the utility click the ‘Unmount’ button with your mouse. The button text will then change to ‘Mount.’ Please note you don’t want to eject the device, just unmount.

  1. Now we need to create a VirtualBox VMDK file to point to this device. That’s how we’ll get it to mount inside the Linux VM. Open a terminal and type sudo VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename sd-card.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/disk2 at the prompt. The file will be created where ever you run it, so my advice is to change directory to a location where you want this (or preface the file name with a full path) to create the file. Just remember where you left it.
  2. Change permissions on the microSDHC device and the VMDK file to 777. At the prompt type chmod 777 sd-card.vmdk /dev/disk2. This opens up permissions for the file and card to be used later by the VM
  3. Add sd-card.vmdk to the VM’s storage devices. In VirtualBox, under the CentOS VM, select the Storage dialog, and in the Storage Tree under Controller: SATA click the add device button. You will be prompted to either create a new device or add an existing device. Choose to add existing and add sd-card.vmdk.
  4. Check diskutil one more time and make sure that the microSDHC card is still unmounted. OS X has automount and can silently remount the drive. If it does then you will fail to start the Linux VM.
  5. Once the VM is started bring up Nautilus and note two new ejectable entries for the card, a 103MB entry and a 32GB entry. Click on the 32GB volume. You’ll be prompted by Nautilus to enter root’s password for that VM to view that volume. Once that’s done Nautilus opens into the 32GB volume. You can drag and drop files into and out of the midroSDHC’s 32GB volume. I do this to add content as well as pull log files while developing.

One caveat. If you shut down the VM and then want to bring it back up, you’ll need to unmount the microSDHC card like before and execute chmod 777 /dev/disk# again, or the VM will fail to start due to lack of permissions on the raw device.