Anyway. Without further ado, let’s start this moment of pure nostalgia with a 1.74 Gb floppy disk:

This one was produced by repeatedly screenshoting the current screen in a Word document. I found it interesting because of the decaying pink color. I think this degradation was the result of cumulative color dithering or any other image compression artifact:

The last ones are not glitches per se but major UI issues. Here automated system upgrades triggered a modal window you weren’t able to close or dismiss, leaving you with no choice but reboot the machine and lose any unsaved work:

If you want to extract mails out of your .nsf database, this might be the tool you’re looking for. Bonus point: it’s written in Python !

Installing nlconverter and its dependencies

Here is how I installed nlconverter on a Windows 2000 (SP4) machine:

1. First I downloaded and installed the official Python builds for Windows (2.6.6 precisely):
   
   
   
   
   
2. Then Python for Windows extensions (build 214 for Python 2.6 in my case):
   
   
   
   
3. Finally I had to download the latest icalendar archive, then extract the \iCalendar-1.2\src\icalendar folder to C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\:
   
4. Next step is to download nlconverter itself and extract it:
   

nlconverter GUI

First thing you have to do is to create an export of your mails as a .nsf database. Follow the previous link to get the instructions.

Now let’s convert this nsf to a mbox. nlconverter’s FAQ tells you to run the gui.exe program to perform the conversion.

Unfortunately it didn’t work for me:

So I tried the alternative approach by using the command line.

nlconverter command line

Again, most of the things I’m writing here are based on nlconverter’s FAQ:

1. First, we have to download the notes2mbox.py script from nlconverter’s mercurial repository, as this file is not distributed in the winnlc-alpha-1.zip archive I unzipped previously. Let’s put notes2mbox.py in C:\winnlc-alpha-1\:
   
2. Now we’ll modify the notes2mbox.py script to set the password (via the notesPasswd variable) and location (notesNsfPath variable) of the .nsf file. Here are the modifications I applied:

   --- notes2mbox.py.orig	2010-09-02 13:49:58.000000000 +0200
   +++ notes2mbox.py	2010-09-02 13:51:24.000000000 +0200
   @@ -14,8 +14,8 @@
    import NlconverterLib
   
    #Constantes
   -notesPasswd = "foobar"
   -notesNsfPath = "C:\\archive.nsf"
   +notesPasswd = "XXXXXXXXXXXXX"
   +notesNsfPath = "C:\\winnlc-alpha-1\\kevin-notes-big-backup-part-1.nsf"
   
    #Connection à Notes
    db = NlconverterLib.getNotesDb(notesNsfPath, notesPasswd)
   

3. Before running the script, we have to register a Notes DLL used by nlconverter:

   regsvr32 "C:\Program Files\Notes\nlsxbe.dll"
   

   
   And make the Python interpreter available system-wide:

   C:\winnlc-alpha-1>SET Path=%Path%;C:\Python26
   

4. Now we can run the notes2mbox.py script:

   C:\winnlc-alpha-1>C:\Python26\python.exe notes2mbox.py
   

If you’re lucky, you’ll get a nice mbox at the end of the process.

But I was not and the notes2mbox.py ended up with the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "notes2mbox.py", line 21, in <module>
    db = NlconverterLib.getNotesDb(notesNsfPath, notesPasswd)
  File "C:\winnlc-alpha-1\NlconverterLib.py", line 43, in getNotesDb
    session = win32com.client.Dispatch(r'Lotus.NotesSession')
  File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\win32com\client\__init__.py", line 95, in Dispatch
    dispatch, userName = dynamic._GetGoodDispatchAndUserName(dispatch,userName,clsctx)
  File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\win32com\client\dynamic.py", line 104, in _GetGoodDispatchAndUserName
    return (_GetGoodDispatch(IDispatch, clsctx), userName)
  File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\win32com\client\dynamic.py", line 84, in _GetGoodDispatch
    IDispatch = pythoncom.CoCreateInstance(IDispatch, None, clsctx, pythoncom.IID_IDispatch)
pywintypes.com_error: (-2147221231, 'ClassFactory ne peut pas fournir la classe demand\xe9e', None, None)

As you can see, I tried hard to make nlconverter working, without any success. But this should not stop you to try. In fact I suspect the Lotus Notes installed on my machine to be crippled or corrupted (can’t really tell). So you may be more lucky than me. In any case, feel free to report any success or failure in the comment section below !

If screenshots were taken with a french version, instructions given here are for the english one. This will give you enough clues to perform the export whatever the localisation is. The Lotus Notes version I used was the 7.0.2 release.

So first, let’s start Notes and open your mailbox. You should be on a screen similar to this one:

Then, go to the File › Database › New Copy menu:

And you’ll get an export screen that’ll let you choose where to create a local copy of your database:

This will generate a .nsf file containing all your current mail.

Now that you have a backup, you are free to delete all your mails in Lotus Notes. By following this procedure regulary, you can create yearly or monthly archives of you mails without reaching the mailbox quota ! For example, this is how my local archive folder looks like:

It’s just a slightly modified version of Ilya Grigorik’s “Desert” color theme, with some tweaks that suit my needs.

First, convert your qcow image to a plain raw file:

qemu-img convert system.qcow -O raw system.raw

Then, create a dummy file (filled with zeros) of the size of extra space you want to add to your image. In this case, 4GiB (=10GiB – 6GiB):

dd if=/dev/zero of=zeros.raw bs=1024k count=4096

Fearlessly, add your extra space to your raw system image:

cat system.raw zeros.raw > big10G.raw

After that you can boot qemu to verify that added free space is available:

qemu -hda big10G.raw

Here is an real case example of what you can see in a qemu image on which Windows XP was installed:

Now, to grow your primary partition, I suggest you to download a Live CD like gparted Live CD or System Rescue CD, and boot on the .iso file with qemu:

qemu -hda big10G.raw -cdrom gparted-livecd-0.3.4-5.iso -boot d

This will allow you to grow and manipulate all your partitions safely thanks to parted and other open source system tools.

Finally you can convert back your raw image to a qcow one to not waste space:

qemu-img convert big10G.raw -O qcow growed-system.qcow

That’s all !

By the way, I think it’s possible to perform the second and third step of this how-to in a single operation using dd only.

Update: I missed it, but this issue is also described in the FAQ from the unofficial #qemu wiki (look at “How do I resize a disk image?” question).