Blog: General

I had a word doc with about 115 pages of hyperlinks that I was trying to save as a pdf. Word kept freezing up on me and I had a coworker try with the same results.   You can remove all hyperlinks in a Word document by using: ctril+shift+F9.  Once I did this and tried to save again as a pdf it worked fine.

I had two 8 GB USB flash drives that suddenly started showing up as only one GB (983 MB).  A little research showed that through creating various live CD images for antivirus, freeNAS, Ubuntu, part image, etc., the drives had been partitioned and Windows was only recognizing the first partition.  Windows disk manager won't change the partitions on the flash drive, either. [more]

A solution is to use command-line diskpart.

Diskpart

- LIST DISK

- SELECT DISK X (Make sure you get the right disk!)

- DETAIL DISK

- CLEAN

- CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY

- EXIT

Then format the drive.

If you have difficulty scheduling meetings with multiple people outside of your company Exchange environment when you can't see everyone's calendar, take a look at ScheduleOnce.  It provides several scheduling options for organizing meetings with multiple people.  One option is to upload your calendar to Google Calendar, and others can see your availability without seeing any of the details of your appointments.  ScheduleOnce is free to try with a few basic features and more advanced features start at $5/month.

http://www.scheduleonce.com/

Was working on a Dell PC that had a failed Seagate hard drive. The drive would spin up but could not be detected by the system. I was able to order a new drive and get the PC back up and running. However there were tons of photos and documents that need to be recovered if possible. I found that  some Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives have known firmware bugs. There are two common errors.

• 0 LBA error: it happens when your BIOS can recognize your HDD at POST moment, but as an 0MB drive.
• BSY error: it happens when your HDD enter on a halt state, or BuSY state. In this condition, your HDD will not be recognized by BIOS at POST moment.

The error I encountered was the BSY error, which is recoverable. But it requires connecting to the drives serial interface which is located next to the SATA connector.
I purchased the required RS232-to-TTL Adapter from eBay, followed one of the better sets of directions I found on Google and was able to recover all the data from the drive. [more]

How to recover from BSY error - https://sites.google.com/site/seagatefix/

RS232-TTL Adapters on eBay - http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2047675.m570.l1313&_nkw=MAX232CPE+Transfer+Chip+RS232+To+TTL&_sacat=0&_from=R40

Download link: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897553.aspx

What is PsExec?  "PsExec is a light-weight telnet-replacement that lets you execute processes on other systems, complete with full interactivity for console applications, without having to manually install client software. PsExec's most powerful uses include launching interactive command-prompts on remote systems and remote-enabling tools like IpConfig that otherwise do not have the ability to show information about remote systems." [more]

I needed to reset some WSUS IDs on systems that were cloned in order to get them to check in to WSUS properly.   I used psexec to run commands as though I were typing them into the PC locally to start/stop services, delete a registry key, and check for updates from WSUS Server in the following example.

psexec \\remotePC net stop wuauserv
psexec \\remotePC REG DELETE "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate" /v SusClientId /f
psexec \\remotePC net start wuauserv
psexec \\remotePC wuauclt /detectnow

You can also use this to run ipconfig and it will show you the results from the REMOTE system which could come in handy. 

The other day I got a call from a customer whose laptop was having some major performance issues.  The hard drive was full of bad sectors and was causing Windows to perform very poorly, if at all.  I got the laptop from them and started down the road of data recovery and hard drive replacement.  Thankfully, I was able to boot the laptop with a Fedora Live CD, mount the NTFS OS partition and recover most of the files in the various user profiles.  I purchased a replacement hard drive that was the same size as the bad one and thought I'd first try to image the old drive to the new one.  This proved to be very slow (because of the 1000s of bad sectors) and never really worked.  The old hard drive had a recovery partition at the tail end of the disk.  Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get Windows to perform well enough to burn recovery media from the recovery partition.  So, I was a little stuck.  I decided I'd try to capture the partition table and the recovery partition off the failing hard drive.  To do this, I used the Fedora Live CD and the 'dd' command. [more]

To capture the partition layout from the first sector of the disk:
dd if=/dev/sda of=partition_layout.img bs=512 count=1

To capture the recovery partition:
dd if=/dev/sda2 of=recovery_partition.img bs=512k conv=noerror

Thankfully, since the recovery partition is put on the hard drive long before it starts to fail, and isn't ever re-written, it didn't have any errors.

After successfully capturing the images, I was able to replace the failing hard drive with the new drive.  I booted the machine again with the Fedora Live CD and restored the images using similar dd commands.

Restore partition layout:
dd if=partition_layout.img of=/dev/sda

After restoring the partition layout, I had to run 'partprobe' to have the OS re-read the partitions on the disk.  Then I restored the recovery partition.
dd if=recovery_partition.img of=/dev/sda2

I used 'fdisk' to set the recovery partition as the "active" partition (so it would boot).
fdisk /dev/sda

After this, I rebooted the machine and the HP recovery process started up and I was able to get the laptop back to its original factory condition.

I needed to create a command line script that could remove the local users access from sensitive log folder in Windows XP/7.  You can use a built in command "cacls" with many different switches to get the desired results.  However a word of caution when you do not use the /E "edit" switch.

I had tried to remove the local users account from the folder with command "cacls C:\<folder> /D users".  The /D switch is used to Deny a specified user access.  When I went back to look at the folder permissions, ALL of the other accounts had been removed.  The only thing on the folder was Deny all for Users.  Make sure and use the /E "edit ACL" switch so that all of the other account permissions are retained.

Also, after I removed the permissions for local users, I logged in as a test user and was still able to access the directory.  The reason was that there was another security account called "Interactive" that had read access.  This is a local system account and will apply to anyone logged into the system.  Removing the Interactive account achieved the desired results.

There are times when I’m on the road and need to print a document such as a boarding pass on a hotel’s public computer.  I’d rather not take a perfectly healthy flash drive and plug it into a computer that might be infected with something just so I can print a file on the flash drive.

If you have a Dropbox account, you will find a “Public” folder in your Dropbox folder tree.  You can place files in this Public folder and allow others (including you on another computer) to access these files without the need of credentials.  This is quite suitable for things like boarding passes you want to print from a hotel’s business center computer.

You just need to drop the file into your Public Dropbox folder and then get the associated external URL by: [more]

1. Using the Dropbox Windows explorer context menu by right-clicking on the file and selecting Dropbox -> Copy Public link then paste the link into something that will allow you to remember it so you can open a public computer’s Internet browser and type in the URL to get to your file.

 2. Or – if the Windows explorer context menu isn’t available, you can log into the Dropbox website, navigate to your Public folder and right-click on the file and select Copy public link – and proceed.

 he public link is of the form http://dl.dropbox.com/u/<number unique to your account>/BoardingPass.pdf and just needs to be typed into a browser.

I needed to move a database from a SQL 2005 server to SQL 2008 server.  I had no problems backing up and restoring the database to the other server, but the database had a local user account created for services on the application server with which to authenticate.  I did not know the user’s password to manually recreate the user on the new database server.  [more]

What I found from this helpful article http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/howdoi/how-do-i-transfer-logins-from-one-sql-server-2005-instance-to-another/140 is a script that you can run to get all of the user accounts displayed in a nice SQL syntax that you can copy and paste into the new database server.

After you recreate the user account, the next step is to resynchronize logins to fix permission settings.

Even if you do not have the password for local SQL user, you can recreate the user on another server using this method.