Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Cannot format flash drive or delete partition from SD card? I will help you.


Sometimes Flash drives, storage sticks and cards become useless even if they are not physically damaged. Such drive is recognized by operating system, but the size is wrong (less than should be) and very often the user cannot even format the disk.

Yesterday I've got 2 such devices at once! I was trying to install Chrome OS on my netbook, so wrote the image of Chromium bootable drive to 4GB flash stick and 16GB SD card…

As I understand Google developers think (can they?) that having many partitions on disk is a cool true hackers way! They use 10 (Ten!) partitions on a small 4GB drive!!!

Partitions on Chrome/Chromium OS boot drive, how to delete them?

The biggest problem is that you cannot delete all these strange partitions and unallocated spaces using standard programs. Even Disk manager administrative tool will not help :( So here is a step by step instruction on how to clear unnecessary partitions on the disk and get flash drive or memory card back to normal life.

  • Press Win+R.
  • Type DiskPart and press OK or Enter.
  • Push Yes button in UAC warning window.

DiskPart.exe console should appear, next steps could damage your computer data, so be very careful!

  • list disk - shows the list of all disks in the system.
  • select disk X - where X is a number of disk you want to fix.
  • list disk - call this command again, to make sure you've selected the right disk! You'll see * mark near the selected disk.

Next steps will destroy all data on the disk! Do you want to continue?

  • clean - cleans the disk in 90% of cases.

If clean command fails, you have to delete each partition on the disk manually, by repeating the following 2-3 commands until all partitions are gone.

  • list partition - shows the list of all partitions on the disk.
  • select partition 1 - selects the currently first partition.
  • delete partition override - override parameter allows deleting a locked partition.

When the disk is cleaned, you should create a primary active partition, then format the drive and assign some letter to it. Follow these commands:

  • create partition primary - creates a partition for the whole disk.
  • select partition 1 - choose current partition to perform other operation.
  • active - makes partition active, so it could be a bootable one.
  • format quick fs=fat32 - formats the disk, FAT32 is a standard file system for Flash Drives and SD cards.
  • assign - sets some letter name for the logical drive.

That's all. Now you can close DiskPart.exe console, in a hacker style, by typing exit command or by clicking common x button on the right top corner of the Window :)

Hope this tutorial will help people to get disappeared megabytes back from memory cards and even fix some of "dead" flash drives.




Friday, November 15, 2013

How do I make software products?

Here is a screencast on x8 speed of all processes are required to create the software product and to publish it online:


As you see coding takes less than half of time. Making of screenshots is more important than programming. Pages in social networks are more important than pretty looking website. And so on...

Program in this video is a first public version of Missing Buttons software

Monday, November 04, 2013

Testing Ecwid online shopping platform


KARPOLAN's Autograph
$10.00


Friday, September 13, 2013

Today is 256 Day of Year

So it is the Programmers' Day :)

My first program in 1992 year was something like that:


10 INPUT "Temperature in Fahrenheit: "; F
20 LET C = Int((F + 40) * 5 / 9 - 40)
30 PRINT "Temperature in Celsius: " + C
40 INPUT "Again (Y/N)"; S$
50 IF S$="y" OR S$="Y" THEN GOTO 10

Do you know the languge it is writen on?

Monday, September 02, 2013

Micro USB 3.0 connector pinout

I was spending about 15 minutes googling until I've found the electric pinout of Micro USB connector ver 3.0 (a doubled one)

Also I was not able to get an electric scheme of USB 3.0 that specifies color of each wire inside the cable.

So after some research I've made a paper note for myself. Also I didn't forget to take a photo and share it to everybody:

Micro USB 3.0 pinout and color of wire

Hope this saves time for other people :)

Thursday, August 15, 2013

New software for hidden features

I was not able to find "Monitor Off" feature on any notebook while are using external keyboard. Lots of PCs have no "Hibernate" button even if this feature is turned on. Working on computers using remote desktop software disallows many of system shortcuts. You cannot switch Num Lock or Scroll Lock if there is no hardware buttons for that. And so on...

I've created small software utility to have all missing features right under the hand. Missing Buttons is software for Windows, maybe I'll create a Mac OS version in the future.

Missing Buttons software for Windows
Download EXE file
Download ZIP Archive

The product is distributed as try before you buy, the license costs $9.95 per user.

If you have ideas for other "missing buttons", let me know. I'll add them into the future versions.

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Websites at Different Screen Resolutions

If you are creating a lot of web pages, or have a bunch of own websites, you know how important it is to make the HTML documents are looking good for each user. Different formats of monitors (4x3, 16x9, 16x10), lots of screen resolutions (1366x768, 1920x1080, etc), the variety of mobile devices, half of them with automatic rotation of the screen ... What the hell?

So I've created a simple online web service to view any web page at different sizes and resolutions.

By the way, it's free :)