Installation

Most major Linux distributions have Bootchart already available in their standard repositories. Ubuntu users, for example, could install through the Ubuntu Software Center or from the command line with:

sudo apt-get install bootchart

If your distro does not have a package available, you can get one from the Bootchart download page.

If you installed from source, you may need to manually add Bootchart to your system startup routine. If that’s the case, please see the documentation here.

Running Bootchart

If installed correctly, Bootchart does not need to be directly run by the user. Instead, it is loaded by the OS at boot time. Naturally, this means that you’ll have to reboot for Bootchart to do its thing. Reboot into whatever runlevel you wish Bootchart to monitor. If you don’t know what a runlevel is, just boot normally.

Once the system is back up and running, you can take a look at your chart (/var/bootchart) to find the problem areas.

It’s worth noting that a bar which runs the full width of the chart does not necessarily mean it’s slow. Often these are programs that are initiated during startup and continue to run once startup is complete, like udev or Xorg.

To get an idea how much time each item spends actually drawing heavy resources, take a look at the bar closely and you’ll see different shades of color representing the different states of the program at that time.

The blue sections represent time spent utilizing the CPU, the pink shows disk activity, and grey is time spent idle. If you’re looking for ways to prune your startup, look for items with a lot of blue or pink, as they’re eating up the most resources.

Removing Startup Items

This is where things can get tricky, as different Linux distributions sometimes handle startup in different ways. The “standard” method is known as SysV Init, and we’ve previously discussed startup modifications on Debian’s SysV style startup. This method will work on most Linux distributions.

In short, you’ll probably find the list of startup programs in a location such as /etc/rc2.d. Details of the removal process can be found at the link above, however there is one point that should be emphasized. The files you see in your rcX.d directory all follow a consistent naming scheme. Those starting with S are launched when that runlevel is reached, those starting with K are killed.

This means that to prevent an item from launching, you do not need to edit or remove the file, just rename it so that the S is now a K. This will ensure that the application is not run, and you can leave the files completely intact in case you decide to change your mind later.

Conclusion

With a tool like Bootchart, you can trim your system down to only the things you need, reducing delay and resource usage in the process. With Bootchart and the Window Maker desktop, this author has been able to get a 1.2 GHz Debian system to boot in under 20 seconds, while actively using only 2% of system RAM. You can’t fix it if you don’t know it’s broken, and Bootchart makes that easy.

Those of you who’ve been repairing Windows PCs for years may be thinking “Come on! Everyone knows about msconfig!”. At Make Tech Easier, we actually get quite a few questions about how to manage Windows startup items, and with the proliferation of malicious “repair tools” on the web, the old stand by is as relevant as ever. And why not? Msconfig gives you a fast, clean, simple and effective way to fully control what starts up with your PC. Not only can it have a huge affect on boot speed, but it can be VERY handy when dealing with auto-starting malware. Here’s how to use this basic tool to get your boot back.

Note: While most versions of Windows contain msconfig, the exact options present may change based on Windows version. The examples and screenshots here are using Windows 7.

Launching msconfig

On Windows versions XP and prior, click Start -> Run, and in the run box enter “msconfig”.

Vista and 7 users can simply type “msconfig” into the search box in the main menu.

General Settings

On the initial configuration page, you’re limited to the basic options. While you can set basic boot settings here, and presumably skip the later sections, that’s not recommended for general use. Disabling ALL services and startup items isn’t something you want to leave up long-term, so unless you’re trying to diagnose a problem, leave this area on Normal Startup.

Boot

The boot tab contains several useful options regarding system startup. Arguably the most useful option section here is the one regarding Safe Boot options. The choices are similar to what you’d get by using the notorious F8 key on boot, with additional options depending on your Windows version.

If you have multiple installations, or like me Windows first clobbered the wrong MBR a few times before finding the right one, initial boot images can be selected and managed from the top panel.

Also make note of the Base Video option, which can be handy for troubleshooting video driver issues.

Services

This is one of the most important parts of msconfig. This tab givs you quick and easy access to the system services and can be tweaked as desired. Be careful of shutting down too many services, some might turn out to be more important than you thought. If you’re unsure, it’s probably wisest to leave it as-is.

As indicated on screen, some services are considered vital and can not be disabled.

Startup

Under normal circumstances, this will probably be the place you’d go most often in msconfig. These are programs run at the application level when Windows starts. While some malware might live here, you’ll more often find well-intentioned but sometimes useless software like updaters and so-called quickstarters. On a fairly fresh install (such as the one in the screenshots) you may not see all that many, but on a heavily used family computer the number of entries here can sometimes enter the triple digits.

Tools

The Tools tab is a fairly recent addition to msconfig, and has little to do with system startup directly. This screen merely provides shortcuts to a few other system utilities like regedit and the system restore tool.

It may be old, it may be tiny, but msconfig is as useful as ever. If you’ve used msconfig or similar utilities to bring an old machine back to life, let us know about it in the comments.

What SGD Can and Can’t Do

The Super Grub Disk is essentially a cleverly configured Grub installation on CD. This means it can handle all the tasks that a bootloader can handle, namely launching your OS. You can use SGD to bypass or repair a broken bootloader, but it can’t recover lost files or run virus scans or other such application-level tasks.

Getting the Super Grub Disk

You can download the unbelievably small Super Grub Disk ISO file from here. There are multiple editions available, however I’d recommend that you download the most recent hybrid version available. This image should work on both CD and USB devices.

Burning/Booting SGD

The hybrid ISO can handle being installed to a CD or USB device, however CD method is recommended as the burning tools are generally more reliable and easily available.

From Linux, you can burn the ISO file to CD with just about any CD burning application such as Brasero’s Burn Image option. If you wish to boot from USB, the tool UNetBootin should do roughly the same job for USB.

From Windows, you can find the Burn ISO Image option in your favorite CD burning program or use a free burner app such as Deepburner. For USB, try the excellent tool Lili USB Creator.

Once complete, restart your system with the CD or USB stick inserted. If it does not boot to SGD, check your systems BIOS settings to make sure the device you want to boot from is higher on the boot order list than your hard drive.

Bypassing a Broken Bootloader

First, you’ll want to make sure it detects all existing operating systems. Choose that option from the main screen and verify that the results are accurate to what you have installed.

In this example, we’ve got Windows and Linux installed, but the hard drive’s MBR is broken so we can’t boot either. By simply selecting our detected OS, we can load up Linux or Windows and use whatever repair or recovery tools the OS offers.

Repairs

As noted above, the Super Grub Disk is just a smart Grub installation, not a suite of tools. While this is great for keeping the size down, it means that SGD has some room for improvement when it comes to powerful recovery tools. It is not, however, completely without such features. Grub has its own command line for manually troubleshooting and repairing boot problems, and SGD provides access to this.

After detecting operating systems, hit “c” to enter the command prompt. From here, you can use the minimal shell to do some basic partitioning, manage kernel modules, set video modes, and a few other system tasks. To get a complete list of available commands for this shell, hit Tab on a blank line.

Conclusion

Having something like the Super Grub Disk 10 years ago would have saved me countless hours of frustration, and more than a few reinstalls. Even with just the booting functionalities demonstrated here, SGD already has an important place in my tool kit. Were the Super Grub Disk to be combined with a full application suite geared toward repairs and recovery, it would make for an extremely powerful system repair tool, one that would appeal to just about any PC repair tech, Linux and Windows alike.

In this tutorial, we will go through the way to create a Snow Leopard USB installer disk.

Requirement

• An existing Mac with functional DVD-ROM
• Snow leopard installer DVD (upgrade set or box set)
• A USB thumb drive of at least 8GB in size

Creating a USB installer disk

1. Plug in your USB drive. Backup all the data in the USB drive.

2. Insert your Snow Leopard Installer DVD into the DVD-ROM.

3. Go to Utility -> Disk Utility. You should see the USB drive and the SL installer DVD entries on the left pane.

4. Select the USB drive. On the right pane, click on the Partition tab.

5. Here are few things that you need to do:

• Under the Volume Scheme, select ’1 Partition‘ from the dropdown
• At the Name input field, enter a new name for the partition (I choose to give it the same name as the SL installer DVD).
• At the Format field, select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) from the dropdown.

At the bottom, click on the Options button.

Select GUID partition table.

Click Apply. This will repartition and reformat the USB drive.

6. Once it is done, click on the Restore tab. You will see two input field: Source and Destination.

Drag the SL Installer DVD entry to the Source field.

Drag the newly formatted USB entry to the Destination field.

Click Restore.

This will copy the image from the DVD Installer to the USB drive. You can go for a coffee break now as the whole process takes about 30 mins.

When the whole process is done, you will be able to boot and install Snow Leopard from the USB drive.

To boot your Mac from USB, you just need to select the respective entry in System Preferences -> Startup Disk.

Remove the Windows 7 boot entry

Previously when you install Windows 7, it modifies the bootloader and makes it the default OS to boot up. If you are going to uninstall Windows 7, you will have to remove the entry from the bootloader so that you don’t have any conflicts when booting up later.

Download and install EasyBCD.

Run EasyBCD. On the left pane, click on the Add/Remove Entries.

On the right pane, highlight the Windows 7 entry and click Delete.

Close EasyBCD.

Download GParted iso file and burn the image to a CD.

Boot up your computer with the Gparted live CD. On the main screen, you should see your Windows Vista and Windows 7 partitions.

There are two ways that you can deal with your Windows 7 partition:

1) reformat it and use it as an additional partition to your Vista partition

2) remove the partition and return the extra space back to the Vista partition

Reformat Windows 7 partition

Highlight and right click on the Windows 7 partition. Select Format to -> ntfs.

Click Apply.

Remove Win 7 partition and return it to Vista partition

Highlight the Windows 7 partition and click the Delete button.

Next, highlight the Windows Vista partition and click Resize/Move. Increase the New Size to the maximum. Make sure that the Free Space Preceding and Free Space Following is zero.

Click Apply.

Once all the operations are completed, exit GParted and restart your computer. You should now boot into your Vista. Depending on the option you choose, you will have either a new blank partition that you can use to store data or a bigger Vista partition.

That’s it. Enjoy!

The Windows 7 beta has been released for quite a while now. If you want to follow the crowd and test it in your system, but do not want to burn into a DVD, here is how you can create a bootable USB drive to install Windows 7 on your system.

Format USB flash drive to NTFS format

(For Win XP only. Vista users can directly format the USB drive to NTFS format) In your Windows, go to Control panel -> system -> hardware -> Device manager.

Under the disk drives section, right click on the USB storage drive and select Properties.

Go to the Policies tab, select optimize for performance. Click OK.

Open your Windows Explorer, you should see the USB storage drive in the inventory. Right click and select Format. Select NTFS from the drop down bar. Click Start.

For Windows XP,

Download MBRWizard. Extract the zipped files to your desktop.

Open a command prompt (Start –> Program –> Accessories –> Command Prompt).

cd Desktop/MBRWiz2.0/
MBRWiz /list

Record the USB flash drive disk number

Make the USB drive active.

mbrwiz /disk=X /active=1

For Windows Vista,

On the Start menu, navigate to the command prompt entry. Right-click and select Run as administrator.

Type

diskpart
list disk

Record the disk number of your USB flash drive.

Select the USB disk.

select disk X (X is the drive number of the USB flash drive)

List the current partition. Record the partition number.

list partition

Select the current partition and make it active.

select partition Y (Y is the partition number of the USB flash drive)
active

Creating bootable USB flash drive

Download Windows 7 iso (32-bit) file to your desktop (The download link is no longer valid).

Download and install WinRAR.

Right-click on the Windows 7 iso file and select Extract files. Extract the files to a folder (you can name the folder any name you want, but for illustration purpose, I name it win-7) in your desktop.

In your command prompt, cd to the windows 7 folder.

cd Desktop/win-7 (Change the destination to the folder that you have extracted)
cd boot
bootsect /nt60 X: (X is the drive latter of your USB drive )

Now, copy all the files from the Windows 7 folder to the USB flash drive.

Reboot the computer. Remember to change the first boot device to your USB drive in the BIOS.

You should be able to install Windows 7 from your USB flash drive now.