Profile backup – Mozilla FireFox and Thunderbird

At work, a colleague is struggling to get his pc up and running for a few days now. To add insult to injury, he also lost some of his Microsoft Outlook back up emails.
Seeing what happened to him, I shall back up my files and emails too.

I use Mozilla Thunderbird (2.0.0.22), and I found a very nice tool to back up the emails (a.k.a profile). It’s called MozBackup.

I thought I should share this with others who use Thunderbird too.

SQL: Update with values from another table

UPDATE Log
SET Username = u.Username, Name = u.Name
FROM Users u
Where u.Id = userid

Source: codesnippets.joyent.com

MS SQL: Reset identity seed

Occasionally, I need to reset the value of the identity column in MS SQL database. I keep forgetting how to do this, and have to search all the time.
So here is a note to myself:

DBCC CHECKIDENT (TableName, RESEED, 0)

Restore Grub Boot Loader

Warning: this guide is only a personal note to remind myself when I have to restore Grub again.

In my previous post, I had just installed Windows 7 as a dual boot with Debian on my Toshiba laptop. The following describe the steps taken to restore the Grub boot loader so that Debian can be started again.

I booted the laptop with Ubuntu Live CD, then open a Terminal. To get the partition tables, as a root execute the fdisk command:

# fdisk -l


In my case, / and /boot reside in /dev/sda6. Once the device has been identified, I need mount it using mount command:

# mkdir /mydisk
# mount /dev/sda6 /mydisk


Next use chroot command to start interactive shell with special root directory.

# chroot /mydisk


Now, we can reinstall grub with grub-install command:

# grub-install /dev/sda


In my case, I have a SATA drive, so the device is sda. If you have an IDE drive, it should be /dev/hda.

Reboot the system. I saw the Grub menu again, and I can boot to either Windows 7 or Debiain.

Credit: Restore Debain Linux boot loader

Windows 7 64 bit on Toshiba Satellite A200

I just finished installing Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate edtion on my 1+ year old Toshiba laptop. The model is Satellite A200-*****.

The installation went smoothly, well almost. On the first boot, the graphic card driver, the finger print reader were automatically updated with Windows update. The only two devices which weren’t detected are: unknown device “ACPI\TOS6205″ (bluetooth) and the Texas Instrument 5-in-1 card reader. The 64-bit driver for the bluetooth can be downloaded from: http://aps2.toshiba-tro.de/bluetooth/ thanks to this post at Toshiba Laptop forum.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found the place to download the driver for the card reader yet. Oh well, it doesn’t bother me that much; so I’m just gonna leave it for now.

What’s next? I have to restore Grub bootloader so that I can boot back into Debian.