Windows

Windows 7 God Mode

Alexander Griesser — 2010-01-20T11:46:02+01:00

Create a folder anywhere on your windows 7 installation and give it the name GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}, then open the folder. Might come in handy.

Fixing registry permissions errors when starting services on Windows Vista

Alexander Griesser — 2010-01-16T17:01:18+01:00

Today I got a notebook in my hands which failed to start several essential network services, like NLA, DHCP, ...
The error message shown in the event log when trying to start the NLA service was:

The service "NLA (Network Location Awareness)" has stopped with the
following service specific error: 3221226008

The system might also show the following error code:

1073741288

The solution to this fix is pretty simple, it's a registry permissions problem. Although I do not know what actually caused this issue, the system internal user "SERVICE" (or "DIENST" in german) needs to be added to the services registry hive in CCS and assigned special permissions to read and create values as well as enumerate subkeys.
To do this, start "regedit" and browse to the location of the failing service. For NLA, this is

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NlaSvc\Parameters

Right click this key and add the user "SERVICE" to the list of allowed users. Assign the following special permissions to it: READ VALUE, CREATE SUBKEYS, ENUMERATE SUBKEYS.
That's all you need to do to fix this issue, start the service again then and repeat these steps for all other services too.

I used sysinternals (err, Microsofts) Process Monitor with some filters to find out the failing registry key, I suggest you have that running in the background too, it makes finding out the failing keys pretty easy.

If you have a lot of registry permission errors or if something is seriously f*ked up, try to restore the registry permissions to their default values with the following command:

secedit /configure /cfg %windir%\inf\defltbase.inf /db defltbase.sdb /verbose /areas REGKEYS

More information about this procedure can be found in KB313222.

Captain, we need more storage space!

Alexander Griesser — 2009-12-14T10:30:33+01:00

Running performance tests on Microsoft Cluster Servers is pretty funny sometimes, especially when you're about to do storage performance testing. Some of the tools (like SIO) require you to create a big file on a provisioned LUN which these tools will then use to run their writes and reads on. On unixoide operating systems, this is pretty easy to accomplish, thanks to "dd", Windows doesn't have that out of the box as to my knowledge, so what I tried to do then is to zip compress one of the 5g dd files from one of my linux machines and copy it to the windows machine to extract it there. Oddly enough, the 5g zero-padded file was compressed to 5MB (zip sucks, _I_ would have compressed that much better). Anyhow, I copied the zip file to the windows server then and tried to extract it there. I ended up copying the 5g file without compressing it first.

Modifying Crystal Report (.rpt) files

Alexander Griesser — 2009-03-11T23:54:26+01:00

Today I was in the need to modify some text passages in a predefined crystal report file (.rpt) used by a very old application which is still an essential tool for the customer.

Of course, things like cellphone numbers, etc. change over years and that's where the need arose to change some things in the heading of the printouts of this application.
After googling a lot, I found a finally working application to modify these reoprts (the latest version of crystal report viewer didn't support these specific rpt files, because they were too old):

http://www.recrystallize.com/merchant/softwareforces/rptinspector.htm#Download

It's a 21-day free trial and works a treat, I have completed this task in two minutes after the download of this tool has completed. Woohoo, bookmarked

Analyzing Microsoft Minidumps

Alexander Griesser — 2009-03-11T23:49:21+01:00

This entry is more a virtual, searchable post-it than something I'd like to blog about, but to help me not forget that anymore, here it is (maybe it even helps someone else who asked google about how to analyze a minidump file):

   1. Open a command prompt (Start -> Run -> "cmd")
   2. cd \program files\debugging tools (Or wherever they are installed to)
   3. kd -z C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini???????-??.dmp
   4. kd> .logopen c:\debuglog.txt
   5. kd> .sympath srv*c:\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols
   6. kd> .reload;!analyze -v;r;kv;lmnt;.logclose;q
   7. You now have a debuglog.txt in c:\, open it in a text edit (Notepad?).

Information borrowed from http://www.memecode.com/docs/minidump.php.

Installing Vista SP1

Alexander Griesser — 2008-03-06T08:32:28+01:00

Well, you know the good old saying: "There's life in the old dog yet"? Let me explain. Yesterday I tried to install Vista SP1 on my notebook and failed miserably. I tried three different ways of getting this installed (using the offline installation file, trying some tips mentioned on winfuture.de, applying a registry key so that my system will get Vista SP1 through windows update) but none of them worked.
At first it looked quite well, but after the second or third reboot (I don't know exactly as I've been away from my laptop while installing it) it reverted all changes and told me that the installation was unsuccessful.

There were different error messages, e.g. 0x800f0826 and later on there was also 0x81000109. Googling for these error messages didn't really help, besides telling me that I should deactivate Anti-Virus software (desperate as I was at this moment, I really did deactivate it...), run a filesystem check, run `sfc /scannow`, etc. Needless to say, that didn't help at all.
Grepping through the CBS.log file generated during the SP1 install didn't help either and so I continued my search on Google by finding out _WHAT_ changes SP1 provides to get an idea about what could cause the problem. After reading quite some articles I found out that the (BCD-like) bootloader gets updated too. Doh!
Although I suppressed my last experience with BCD bootloaders, I guessed that this might be the cause for my new problems too and so I started fixing this old issue.
It took me quite a while to find out what's really wrong with my system but after all, it was very easy to fix.

You remember, `bcdedit` and its evil friends weren't able to find the default BCD store which I created on C:\boot\BCD. So why is this? Using some tools out of the sysinternals package and monitoring a standard `bcdedit` invocation showed that it didn't look for some files on the hard drive before replying with "Can't find BCD store"-like messages.
Long story short: I had the wrong partition marked as active. As this system is configured for triple-booting Linux, Windows XP and Windows Vista, I thought that the Vista partition needs the one to be active but that assumption was simply wrong. After making the XP partition active again (using `diskpart`), `bcdedit` was able to find the default store again and additionally, `msconfig` would let me modify my startup entries again (previously, the "Startup"-tab in `msconfig` was empty). So it seems as if `bcdedit` is looking for the active partition in your current partition table rather than for a specified folder which is nice, BTW, but I wouldn't have expected that from Microsoft ;)
So, should that be the solution for my problem? I tried to install SP1 again and what should I say - it worked perfectly. After about half an hour of automatic reboots and funny numbers counting up to 100% it was alive. So far, I'm quite satisfied with SP1 (copying large amounts of data seems to work better at the first glance) but what really makes me happy is that the problem with the BCD store is now gone and with it, I regained the possibility to hibernate my machine

Automating Windows Backups for Workstations

Alexander Griesser — 2006-01-12T13:58:08+01:00

Today I wrote a small Windows command line script for automating Windows backups on ordinary workstations (My Documents folder, Outlook PST files and several application directories).

The script runs fully automatic and is therefore very user-friendly because the technical barrier for making backups on workstations must be as low as possible, otherwise no backups are made (this is my experience). The script is also capable of copying files from remote computers to back them up on a local CD burning device.

So here we go.

Assumptions:
I assume that the destination folder for the temporary backup files and the directory where all the tools needed reside is "C:\Backup".
I also assume that you run Windows XP (because of the "rd" command (older versions of Windows don't have this command, but you can use deltree instead).

Installation of the tools:
First of all you need some parts of the UnxUtils package. For this script we only need "tar.exe". If you want to compress the generated tar file you will also need either gzip or bzip or some other compression utility.
The reason why I create a tar file to be saved on disc is because of the long filenames that may occure on Windows systems (more than the ISO9660 standard would allow).

The next thing we need is the cdrtools package for Windows. From this package we need "cdrecord" and "mkisofs".

Discover the CD burning device
To discover the CD burning device for cdrecord, use the following command:

cdrecord -scanbus

Which produces an output like:

        0,0,0     0) 'SEAGATE ' 'ST318453LW      ' '0003' Disk
        0,1,0     1) *
        0,2,0     2) 'TEAC    ' 'CD-ROM CD-532S  ' '1.0A' Removable CD-ROM
        0,3,0     3) *
        0,4,0     4) *
        0,5,0     5) *
        0,6,0     6) *
        0,7,0     7) *

In this case, your CD burning device would be "0,2,0".

The directory structure:
If you did everything right, you should have a directory structure like this one listed here:

Directory C:\BACKUP

12.01.2006  11:57              .
12.01.2006  11:57              ..
12.01.2006  10:43             1.655 awbfw.cmd
17.05.2005  15:16           314.368 cdrecord.exe
03.07.2005  02:30         1.295.582 cygwin1.dll
17.05.2005  15:16           421.376 mkisofs.exe
11.11.2001  00:00           114.688 tar.exe

The script:
Please keep in mind that the synthetic linebreaks (\ at the end of a line, etc.) are not functional in Windows command line scripts. I just put them in here so that the Code-Block doesn't get to wide.

@echo off

rem Automatic Windows Backup Script for Workstations
rem
rem This script tars the files to be backup'ed together into one archive,
rem creates an ISO-image of the tar-archive and burns it onto a CD with the
rem help of cdrecord
rem
rem (c) 2006 by Alexander Griesser 

rem Get the current date
set TODAY=%DATE:~0%

rem ============================ CONFIGURATION ========================
rem Specify an Identifier for this Backup
set ITEM=Tagname

rem The Backup-Root directory (the necessary tools also have to reside here)
set BACKUP_ROOT=C:\Backup

rem Path to the logfile
set LOGFILE=%BACKUP_ROOT%\Backup-%ITEM%.log

rem cdrecords burning device identifier (use cdrecord -scanbus to get
rem that info)
set CDDEVICE=2,0,0

rem Activate this setting if you need to copy files from another
rem computer in your network to this computer
rem set BACKUP_DIR=%BACKUP_ROOT%\%ITEM%
rem ===================================================================

echo Automatic Windows Backup for Workstations
echo
echo Please ensure that the CD burner is connected to your PC and
echo that a CD is inserted and press Enter when ready.
pause

rem Activate this command to copy files from another computer to this
rem machine for backup (you will need the robocopy utility from the
rem Microsoft Windows Ressource Kit for this - or any other utility
rem that does the trick)
rem echo Copying files from remote computer(s)...
rem %BACKUP_ROOT%\robocopy.exe \\otherpc\C$\application \
  %BACKUP_DIR%\application /E /R:5 /W:5 /LOG:%LOGFILE%

rem Creation of the backup archive by either using local folders (for backing
rem up this computer) or by using %BACKUP_DIR% as source (when copying files
rem from remote computers)
echo Creating Backup Archive...
%BACKUP_ROOT%\tar.exe -cf %BACKUP_ROOT%\%ITEM%-%TODAY%.tar \
  C:\\application1 C:\\application2 "%USERPROFILE%\\Eigene Dateien" \
  "%USERPROFILE%\\Lokale Einstellungen\\Anwendungsdaten\\Microsoft\\Outlook" \
  >%LOGFILE%

rem echo Creating Backup Archive for remote computer(s)...
rem %BACKUP_ROOT%\tar.exe -cf %BACKUP_ROOT%\%ITEM%-%TODAY%.tar %BACKUP_DIR% \
  >>%LOGFILE%

echo Creating CD-Image...
%BACKUP_ROOT%\mkisofs.exe -J -v -o %BACKUP_ROOT%\%ITEM%-%TODAY%.iso \
  %BACKUP_ROOT%\%ITEM%-%TODAY%.tar >>%LOGFILE%

echo Deleting temporary files...
del /F /Q %BACKUP_ROOT%\%ITEM%-%TODAY%.tar >>%LOGFILE%

echo Burning CD
echo This make take some time, please be patient. A progress meter is being
echo displayed during the burning process and after the backup has
echo completed successfully, the CD will be ejected.
echo
%BACKUP_ROOT%\cdrecord dev=%CDDEVICE% gracetime=0 -tao -verbose -eject \
  -data %BACKUP_ROOT%\%ITEM%-%TODAY%.iso
echo Deleting temporary files
del /F /Q %BACKUP_ROOT%\%ITEM%-%TODAY%.iso
echo
echo Backup completed successfully
echo
echo Please check if the CD is readable and that it contains a file
echo named %ITEM%-%TODAY%.tar
echo
pause

Downloads:

awbfw.cm_ (rename to .cmd after downloading)
Syntax highlighted version of awbfw.cmd