2010-12-17

Cloning To Bigger Hard Drive

I was bumping my Windows 7 computers head against its hard drive space limit and I wanted to clone the install to a bigger drive. I did not want to spend anything so after a search I found Clonezilla fit the bill. I was not changing any hardware except for the bigger drive (going from 250 GB to 1.5 TB). Using Clonezilla Live .iso, I created the boot CD. I plugged in the new drive as a second drive and made sure I formatted it first (NTFS within my WIN 7 Drive Manager). Formatting was necessary so the cloning would recognize it as a viable drive. I followed the instructions here to the letter. Read carefully because at one point you will want to switch to Expert mode to toggle a switch on. Afterwords, I unplugged the old drive and plugged the SATA cable to the new drive, rebooted, and crossed my fingers. What do you know, Windows wanted to do a chkdsk and after that, booted to the new drive like nothing had changed. That wasn't so bad. I now have plenty of space and my old drive will serve as a backup. As things change, I will probably wipe that drive and give a shot at creating an image backup of the current drive (another option in Clonezilla).

2010-12-07

Raster inserted without path

Our company has proprietary drawing files that we do not give to our customers for final documentation. Our customers now require that we give them these drawings. They understand that they are proprietary and do not require them to be in AutoCAD but still need to see them and have them with their title blocks in AutoCAD. The method to accomplish this is to insert a raster image of our drawing file into the AutoCAD drawing. To do this and not have the path or the raster image as a separate file, I use a method that was prescribed on the Cadforum.cz site. I open the tif in a raster editor (I use Infanview because it is free and works great), and then select COPY and then in AutoCAD select PASTE SPECIAL. From this I select DEVICE INDEPENDENT BITMAP. It puts it in as a OLE object and the path is blown away. I tried copy and paste from Explorer and also inserting as an OLE object but those methods did not work. One note. Even with this method, an issue arose with the image. After a save, the reopened file had a blank rectangle instead of the image. After many iterations of various settings, I think I have a fix. I analyzed the TIF image we were using to paste in the drawing. Always A2 size images worked but A0 and A1 failed often. Hmmm, I tweaked the image properties of the file (using IrfanView) and then saved it with the image at 50 percent of its original size and repeated my steps. What do you know. It opened back up after a save and the image was visible.

2010-12-02

Crosshairs at Isometric/Angles

A setting I always seem to forget is how to rotate the cursor/crosshairs to draw at different angles. A quick refresher: Variable SNAPANG rotates the cursor at the angle you specify. Variable SNAPSTYL toggles between and isometric cursor and rectangular cursor.