Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Cancel/Stop DiskPart full disk format

Using DiskPart to clean up hard disk partitions and MBR is fast and easy but you can accidentally invoke a full format which can take a while to finish. In that case, instinctively you would press Ctrl+C only to find that you've just killed DiskPart instead of stopping the format process.
Googling around, people suggest to kill the process using task manager (which you can't) or reboot your system. There is yet an other option, which worked for me, and no one mentioned (at least on the sites I checked).

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Converting/Exporting mixed encoding MySQL data to UTF8

I had to move an old MySQL database storing the info of a Greek website, and guess what; the default schema collation was latin1_swedish_ci and the charset latin1, the defaults of MySQL instance (which no one changes during installation) :/
The schema contained a mixture of tables, some of them in latin1_swedish_ci collation and some other with the proper UTF8 settings. Trying to export the data from either MySQL Workbench, phpMyAdmin and host's panel I was getting an ANSI encoded sql file. Normally, that's fine but if your data contains UTF8 characters (i.e. Greek letters) then you've got a problem.