I just got introduced to the amazing world of encabulation, and figured it’s worth coming out from under my rock long enough to link to some YouTube videos which exemplify the importance of this field.

I feel that the seminal work in this area is the classic Rockwell Retro Encabulator, presented by Mike Kraft, which provides a meaningful upgrade over the preceding Bud Haggart version.

Chrysler later released the Chrysler Turbo Encabulator instruction video, where, unlike any other encabulator video I could find, Mike Kraft explains in detail how to diagnose and service the encabulator. It includes the very important piece of advice which many technicians have used since:

If it’s below 10 RGs, you’d be directed to perform a series of tests that will effectively raise the billable hours for the service department but will perform no other useful function.

The Macquarie Telecom SD-WAN Turbo Cloud Encabulator offered a virtualised version of the encabulator, for use in the cloud. However, this pales in comparison with the SANS ICS HyperEncabulator, presented by the legendary Mike Kraft, which not only goes into detail of the history of the encabulator, but how encabulation can be applied to cybersecurity.

There are more encabulation resources online, but I think these provide a meaningful introduction to the subject.

When I built my 2200G PC, I used a 4TB drive I won from TechSpot. The Windows installer initialised the drive to MBR, which meant that only 2TB were available. Since I felt that 2TB is enough, I decided to leave that alone at the time.

For those who don’t know, MBR stands for Master Boot Record. It’s an old way to mark where partitions exist on the disk. The newer format is GPT, GUID Partition Table. It not only allows for drives larger than 2TB, but is also more robust, because it stores the partitioning information in more than one place. On the down side it requires a newer PC, with UEFI support (instead of a basic BIOS) and a modern OS (Vista x64 or newer). These aren’t really problems with PCs from the past 10 years or so.

Windows Disk Management can’t convert a drive from MBR to GPT unless it’s empty, and most of the tips Google found were either irrelevant, hard to do or directed to ‘free’ software which didn’t include the functionality in its free version.

Which is why when I finally found the simple solution I figured I’d post. Google did find it, it’s just not the thing that pops up immediately and depends on the search.

Anyway, the solution is MBR2GPT, which already comes with Windows 10. It’s a command line program and it does the job well. Here’s a detailed explanation of how to use it:

• Click the Start Menu icon (bottom left) and type ‘CMD’ (without the quotes). You’ll get Command Prompt at the top of the search results.
• Right click Command Prompt and click ‘Run as administrator’. Click ‘Yes’ in the UAC dialogue.
• You need to know your disk number. If you only have one disk, the number is 0. Otherwise you can find it either in Disk Management (right click the Start Menu icon and select it) or run DiskPart from the command line you just opened, type ‘list disk’ to get a list of disks, and then type ‘exit’).
• Type ‘mbr2gpt /convert /disk:0 /allowFullOS’. (Replace ‘0’ with the relevant disk number.)

That’s it. Really simple and worked fine for me.

Unfortunately the 2TB Seagate Barracuda in the Phenom II PC died. That had all the videos I recorded on it, many of which I wanted to upload in the long run. Things like the ASRock BIOS and its update procedure, A8 9600 benchmarks, and of course a lot of 2200G stuff. Plus other unrelated stuff.

Of course, none of it was backed up.

This obviously puts a dent into my plans to create a useful blog and YouTube channel, something that already became harder recently due to having even less time for it than before, and with this setback became even harder.

Remember that PC whose RAM I wanted to upgrade? I did that this weekend, but first had to clean it. Here are the before and after pics:

Not perfect, but I didn’t want to disassemble it. Vacuum plus wipes plus compressor then vacuum and wipes again.

So PC had its bath, had RAM upgraded from 2GB to 6GB (unfortunately I didn’t find all 4 2GB DIMMs I had, so made do with 2x1GB + 2x2GB). Also got a new DVD drive (I discovered when I tried to run MemTest86 that the drive wouldn’t open). Now it has another 10 years ahead. 🙂

I carry a phone on me most of the time, but sometimes I leave it behind (such as when I’m with my family) and I often forget to charge it. I’m just not that much of a big phone user to care (I guess my age is showing).

Problem is, when my phone dies or isn’t with me, I’m much more limited these days than I was in the past, because even if I have another way to go on the internet, such as a PC or my wife’s phone, at some places (such as Gmail) the only way to verify my identity is my phone.

This catch-22 where I need to access a service in another way because I don’t have a phone and I can’t access it because I don’t have a phone is pretty annoying.