Tech Help
Rebuilding Windows XP boot.ini
Monday, July 27th, 2009 | Tech Help | 2 Comments
A customer was concerned with an error they were seeing when booting their XP Home PC. Windows would continue to load correctly but the error still had them worried. I suggested they bring it in for me to take a look.
Invalid Boot.ini, loading from C:\Windows
The problem was caused due to a corrupted boot.ini file which is usually located in the C drive. Since I had a copy of XP Home I tried to rebuild the boot.ini as per the instructions below.
- Insert the Microsoft Windows XP CD into the computer. Note: If you have a system recovery CD or restore CD (not a Microsoft CD) these steps will likely not work for your computer.
- Reboot the computer with the CD and press any key when prompted to press any key to boot from the CD. If you do not receive this prompt and/or are not able to boot from the CD see document CH000217.
- Once in the Microsoft Setup menu press R to open the recovery console.
- Select the operating system you wish to use; if you only have Windows XP on the computer you will only have one prompt.
- Once prompted for the password enter the Admin password and press enter.
- Once at the command prompt type bootcfg /rebuild to start the rebuild process.
- The rebuild process will step you through a number of steps depending upon how many operating systems you have on the computer and how the computer is setup. Below is a listing of the common steps you are likely going to encounter.
- Prompt for the identified versions of Windows installed. When you receive this prompt press Y if the bootcfg command properly identified each of the Windows operating systems installed on the computer. It is important to realize this command will only detect Windows XP, Windows 2000, and Windows NT installations.
- Prompt to enter the load identifier. This is the name of the operating system for the boot.ini. For example, Microsoft Windows XP Home users would enter Microsoft Windows XP Home edition.
- Prompt to Enter OS load options. When this prompt is received type /fastdetect to automatically detect the available options.
- Once you have completed all the available options in the rebuild and are back at the prompt type exit to reboot the computer.
See Microsoft KB289022 for more info on boot.ini.
How to Crack WEP
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 | Tech Help | No Comments
WEP is the redheaded stepchild of WPA & WPA2. For quite some time it has been very easy for someone with limited Google searching skills to crack. In the video below the presenter shows you how easy it is to crack WEP.
› Continue reading
IMF Updates Keep Prompting for Installation
Monday, June 22nd, 2009 | Tech Help | No Comments
With the recent update to the IMF signatures for Exchange 2003 I got caught in a never ending circle of installation prompts. The new update would install, then last months update would ask to install and so on and so on. After realizing what was going on I went in search of answers. The 1st thing to try was to reset the Windows Update Cache. It can be done by plopping the code below in to a bat file and running it on the offending server.
net stop bits
net stop wuauserv
regsvr32 /u wuaueng.dll /s
del /f /s /q %windir%\SoftwareDistribution\*.*
del /f /s /q %windir%\windowsupdate.log
regsvr32 wuaueng.dll /s
net start bits
net start wuauserv
wuauclt.exe /resetauthorization /detectnow
This did not solve the issue for me. I turned out that my WSUS server did not mark the old IMF update as declined. Once the old update’s status was changed to declined the update cycle was stopped dead in its tracks.
Remove a Windows Service
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 | Tech Help | 2 Comments
Last night I moved my PRTG virtual machine to my newly installed ESXi server. The move went well, but when I went to boot up the PRTG VM the service wouldn’t start. PRTG was nice enough to tell me that I had another copy of the service running on the network and even gave me the command to find the PC it was running on.
Turns out it was running on an old monitoring PC I had used years before that was still powered on. Since I still use it for a couple of other monitoring apps I couldn’t just turn it off. As a temp fix I stopped the service and set it to disabled. Now the PRTG VM started up and began collecting data once again.
As the PRTG uninstaller did not remove the PRTG service from the old monitoring PC I still needed a way to pitch it even though I had disabled it. A quick search turned up a couple of options, the easy way and the slightly more difficult way.
The Easy Way:
sc delete “service_name”
In my case the command was:
sc delete PRTGService
The Slightly More Difficult Way:
**Dislaimer: This process involves working in the Windows Registry. Before deleting any file please make a backup in case of borking your system.
Run Regedit Find the registry entry “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services” Look for the service there and delete it.
WSUS 3.1 and the SelfUpdate Virtual Directory
Sunday, January 18th, 2009 | Tech Help | 5 Comments
I came back from my extended leave to find that my workstations and servers had not checked into the WSUS server for months. After a bit of detective work the issue came down to the SelfUpdate virtual directory in IIS was missing. The Microsoft help page details how to fix the issue but wasn’t completely helpful. More on that later.
Here is what I did to get my clients checking in again.
Check the folder permissions on the SelfUpdate directory, located at C:\Program Files\Update Service\SelfUpdate. Make sure the permissions like this;
| Group | Permissions |
| Administrators | Full Control |
| System | Full Control |
| Domain/Users or Local/Users | Read&Execute, Read, List Folders |
| IUSR_ComputerName | Read&Execute, Read, List Folders |
In my case the IUSR_ComputerName permission was missing.
After adding the correct permissions I looked for the re-installation msi, Selfupdate.msi. The only problem is that the SelfUpdate re-installation msi was not found on my WSUS server. Turns out in the recent WSUS update to 3.1 this installer can become corrupted and not installed on the server.
To get the Virtual Directory back I would have to install it by hand. Here are the settings you need to create it;
Open Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager. Right click on the “Default Web Site” and choose;
- New
- Virtual Directory…
- It started the VD Creation Wizard
- Alias = SelfUpdate
- Path = C:\Program Files\Update Services\SelfUpdate
- Finish the wizard.
- Right click on the newly SelfUpdate and choose Permissions.
- I added “Authenticated Users” and gave them the default rights:
- Read & Execute
- List Folder Contents
- Read
After completing these steps I ran “wuauclt /detectnow” on each of my servers. I left the workstations to check in on their own.
Within 12 hours the number of missing clients had gone from nearly 200 to less than 50. Once everyone logs in on Monday morning this number should dwindle to nothing.
Printers = Hate
Monday, January 5th, 2009 | Tech Help | Comments Off
A user reported an issue with her printer this afternoon. Whenever she tried to print it locked up her PC. I tried all my usual tricks to hack out the offending job, but nothing I tried was working. The print spooler would crash seconds after starting. This error kept taunting me:
“Spoolsv.exe – Application Error”
“The instruction at “0×77fcc2c0″ referenced memory at “0×00000000″.
“The memory could not be written.”
I popped out my trusty Troubleshooting Swiss Army Knife (read: Google) and quickly had another tool to fight the tenacious spooler.
It turns out the most common cause of the error is an abundance of .SHD and .SPL files in the spool directory. These files are created by the spooler to save the spooled data of a print job. The .SPL file comprises drawing commands and the .SHD file comprises job settings information of the print job.
To fix spoolsv.exe application error, you will have to remove these files from the system. To do this, perform the following steps on your Windows XP computer:
- Open Control Panel, select Performance and Maintenance, select Administrative Tools and then select the Services option.
- In the Services management console, locate the Spooler services, right-click on it and select Stop.
- Next, open the C:\Windows\System32\Spool\Printers folder. (Here, we are assuming that your Windows is installed in the default C:\Windows folder)
- Delete all the .SHD and SPL files from this folder.
- Next, open the TMP folder and delete all old and unused files from this folder.
- Finally, restart the Spooler service from the Services management console.
Just like that the users printer problems disappeared.
Moving WSS 3.0 Databases
Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 | Tech Help | 2 Comments
WSS 3.0 uses Microsoft SQL Embedded Edition (MSEE) for its data store. When MSEE is installed, the data files are installed to your C: drive by default. Since you do not want to have a file on your system drive that can grow exponentially, you need to move it to another drive. Here is how you do it.
Note: While completing this process your WSS site will be offline to your users.
- Shutdown all Windows Sharepoint services & IIS Admin service: This will ensure that there are no locks on the files you need to move.
- Open a cmd prompt and cd to C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\binn
- Enter sqlcmd -S \\.\pipe\mssql$microsoft##ssee\sql\query -E: This starts the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Command Line Query Utility
- Enter the following commands to view the available databases & hit Enter after each:
- SELECT name from sysdatabases
- GO
- SharePoint_Config_c464b7ce-59ef-4820-9f75-f46a0937c08e
- SharePoint_AdminContent_451452bf-9dc0-40c9-be18-14f14bc23007
- WSS_Search_NETSERVER_86a140c5958d4a5d97c8c2cbee745424
- WSS_Content
- Enter the following commands & hit Enter after each line. Repeat for each database.
- EXEC sp_detach_db @dbname = ‘Content_Database_name’
- GO
- Move the databases to their new location. They can be found in C:\Windows\SSQL\Data\
.mdf and_log.ldf - After the files have been moved run the following commands (Make sure to change the itialic sections to your specifics):
- EXEC sp_attach_db @dbname = ‘Content_Database_name‘, @filename1 = ‘drive:\path\Data\
.mdf’ , @filename2 = ‘drive:\path\Data \_log.ldf’ - Go
- Repeat step 7 for each database you moved.
- Restart IIS Admin services and all Windows Sharepoint services
- Ensure your Sharepoint site is working
You should see a number of DBs, move the following 4 databases (GUID’s may be different):
If this is done before you build your site it will take no time at all to move the DBs to the new location.
More Registry Goodies
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 | Tech Help | Comments Off
We are in the process of installing a policy and procedure management application at the hospital. It has been setup so that users are not required to enter their user name and password to access the site, it is done via LDAP. To get the single-sign-on benefits of the LDAP look ups we needed to add the domain name to the list of trusted sites in IE. This can be done via Group Policy, but, my experiences with this group policy setting has been mixed. Each time I configured this Group Policy Object setting it turned off the option for the user to add sites. Each new site needed to be added by me in to the GPO. While I limit what my users can change and access I do not like getting calls for simple stuff like this. What was I to do?
Set the IE homepage via the registry
Friday, July 11th, 2008 | Tech Help | Comments Off
We just got in a batch of HP desktops and so far they look to be a good investment. There isn’t much crap/bloat ware installed on it, so we can get them out the door to our users quite quickly. We have had only 1 minor issue with them. For each new user who logs in, the system sets the IE homepage to an HP/AOL site, not our corporate intranet. Instead of emailing our users instructing them on how to set the homepage back to our intranet site I logged into our Desktop Authority server and added a new option under the registry settings.
Firefox v3.0 First Impressions
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 | Tech Help, Tech News | Comments Off
Browse Safe with Firefox 3
Firefox 3 was released yesterday to much fanfare. The first tallies are showing over 8 million downloads in 1 day. Of that total 269,901 were by Canadians.
Update June 19: Download total is now over 11 million, 320,000+ by Canada.
I’ve been using it for about a day, here are my initial impressions.
I don’t have any stats to back it up, but Firefox 3 seems faster. Pages come up fast, there is very little lag when switching tabs and so far the memory used by Firefox 3 is not growing by the second. Now I never had the memory issues some users of Firefox 2 have had, but, I regularly have 8-10 tabs open a time, often even more, and Firefox 3 so far seems to hang around 120-140K. Much like my old install of Firefox 2. This may be because I keep the amount of add-ons I use to a minimum, so I was never affected by the memory issues.
After installing Firefox 3 the first thing I noticed was the update interface. Thankfully Mozilla didn’t mess with the standard browser placement like Microsoft did in IE7. I also noticed that a new folder showed up on my toolbar. Firefox 3 adds a “Most Visited” folder. I’m not sure if i will use it yet, but could see how it could be useful.
I’m still learning & playing with all the new features in Firefox 3, and getting used to the new url bar, but, so far I like the new version. This is a required upgrade to all Firefox 2 users. I also strongly recommend IE users to take the plunge and give FF3 a try. I really think you will be impressed.
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