Tag Archives: Microsoft Windows

HP Pavilion Boot Loop Problem

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Yesterday I ran into a devil of a time with a HP Pavilion slimline workstation at work. This machine was beyond it’s warranty with HP, so no help from them. I had a machine that presented these symptoms:

  • Computer powers up normally.
  • All BIOS-level diagnostics pass.
  • No error codes or beep codes whatsoever.
  • Once the HP BIOS Splash screen fades, the computer should boot into Windows. In this case, Windows 7. It does not. The computer reboots into the HP BIOS Splash screen. Ad infinitum.
  • You can enter BIOS Setup, you can also access the Boot Menu to select other boot sources, however the F11 key to start System Restore is unresponsive.
  • All first-tier efforts to clear the error were taken. BIOS reset to factory conditions, as well as holding down the power button to clear the power supply controller. None of these resolved the issue.

I then plugged in a copy of Knoppix that I downloaded and installed on a USB memory stick. I could have also burned the ISO file to a DVD and used that as well, but the USB was handy. When I use Knoppix this way, I like to enter this “Knoppix Startup Cheatcode” into the prompt right after it boots: “knoppix 2” (without quotes, of course) and this starts the Knoppix system in  the INIT 2 run level, which is single-mode text only interface. I don’t need X-Windows, and in this case, that just gets in the way.

Once at the CLI for Knoppix, I figured the boot flag, the boot manager, or the MBR was shot for the primary partition on the hard drive in the machine. Diagnostics indicated that the primary hard drive was fine, so it wasn’t a physical failure in the HD. I knew that the first (and only) hard drive in systems like these were most likely /dev/sda, you could search the “dmesg” log if you have doubt on where in the /dev the primary hard drive is. Knoppix has the “fdisk” command, so that was my next stop. I knew that this particular HP machine had a Windows Recovery partition stuffed in it, so when I started “fdisk” I displayed the partition map and there were three partitions: /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, and /dev/sda4. I looked at the sizes and figured that the biggest one was the damaged partition, the middle one was probably for swap or scratch or something, and the last one seemed sized properly for the recovery partition. Honestly it was a guess. I turned the bootable flag on for /dev/sda4 and then off for /dev/sda1, then wrote the partition map to disk and then issued the command “shutdown -r now” to reboot out of Knoppix. Technically you could have just unplugged the machine, but I’m a big fan of orderly shutdowns even when the consequences are irrelevant – it’s a good habit to have.

The machine booted to the HP BIOS Splash screen, and then Windows Recovery started. Once the recovery partition got going I noticed a cutesy HP menu appeared offering me a selection of options. I started out with the simplest option which was something like “Microsoft Windows Boot Recovery” and it ran for maybe a second and then offered to reboot. I went for the reboot and that fixed the issue. Windows started but instead of a regular startup it went to the recovery menu, which I found fine since that was where I was going to go anyways by pounding the F8 button like a madman. I selected “Safe Mode With Networking” and then plugged in my USB memory stick containing TRON and got TRON working on the system.

Once TRON was done, I rebooted and let chkdsk naturally freak out about the structure of the NTFS partition in /dev/sda1. Chkdsk did what it had to do, and the system booted normally. I then set it for redeployment.

I figure if anyone else has this issue, this blog post might be helpful. If it helped you out, and you’re willing, maybe dropping a wee tip in Bitcoin or Dogecoin would definitely be appreciated.

Sandboxing FTW

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After I reminded people that I offer a complimentary attachment checking service through my office I got a submission from one of our warehouse operators in Texas. It was an oddly-named attachment called UmjSJCk.zip. I saved it to my Mac and opened Terminal. Then unpacked the zip file and it unpacked to Quotation.exe. I giggled a bit when I ran the file command on it and saw that it was a Windows executable. Exactly what I expected. So I put it in a folder called sandbox and started my copy of Windows XP that I have in VirtualBox. The OS has it’s hard drive set to immutable, so any changes or write activities that the OS does is not sent to the VHD image, but rather to a “snapshot” VHD image on the side. Each time I start the OS, it’s as if I am starting it for the first time, because when an immutable VM finds something (anything) in the snapshot folder, it dumps it first then creates a new snapshot image for writes. I make sure the sandbox can’t see anything beyond my Mac by assigning it’s LAN connection as a Host-Only Adapter. That means that the VM can only see VirtualBox’es fake network host and nothing else.

So start this sandbox Windows XP, mount the sandbox folder as a drive to the sandbox – set as Read Only also, by the way, no baby-backwash here… and then double-clicked on Quotation.exe. It loaded a process and started to grope the network connection. Of course it did. So, with the bug trying it’s best to reach out and fetch it’s payload I clicked on the little red close control and told VirtualBox to power off the virtual machine.

Poof. All gone. Changes and everything. Then I dumped the sandbox contents.

I think whats more concerning here is that my scan using ClamAV on my Mac in regards to this data showed no infected data. Well, it certainly was trying to be nasty.

Then I start to wonder about the inherent usefulness of VirtualBox when it comes to airgapped computing when it comes to privacy and really being paranoid about encryption. But then I realize that when I turn off my Airport on my MBP, that it’s just as good as anything I could screw around with in VirtualBox. An infection in my MBP? Heh… piff.

Geek Excursions: BitMessage

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Along with my curiosity surrounding Bitcoin, there is a similar technology that has been released for public use called BitMessage. This system is a really neat way to securely communicate in a secure method that involves absolutely no trust whatsoever. It’s a completely decentralized email infrastructure and has captured a lot of my spare attention. BitMessage works a lot like how Bitcoin does, you can create email addresses on the fly, they are a long sequence of random characters that your system can display because you have both a public key and a private key. In a lot of ways BitMessage deals with the biggest problem surrounding PGP/GPG, which is key management. Nobody really wants to manage keys or use the system because it’s extra work. Plus even with PGP/GPG, your identity is written on your keys for everyone to see.

Getting started with BitMessage is a snap. First you need to download the BitMessage client, and you can get that at bitmessage.org. There’s a Windows and Mac client available, you can start it and be instantly attached to the BitMessage network, ready to create new “BitMessage Addresses” and throw them away just as easily. So, for example, you could reach me by sending me a BitMessage to this address: BM-2cWAk99gBxdAQAKYQGC5Gbskon21GdT29X. When you send a message using BitMessage, its to this address and from an address that your client makes, so the conversation occurs securely and since every node has a copy of the data it’s impossible to tell who is getting what information. I think an even more secure method would be to cross BitMessage with a PGP/GPG key. The only problem with a key like that is that classically PGP/GPG keys require that you include your email address as a subkey so that you can be identified by a human-readable email address when looking for your public key or when someone else is looking for it, to verify a signature for example. The PGP/GPG system doesn’t require an email address, you can of course create a public and private keypair using PGP/GPG and make the email address up from whole cloth, and instead just let people know the key ID that you want them to use. So technically if Alice wanted to secretly communicate with me, we could give each other our public keys to start and then use BitMessage as the messaging mule. I don’t see how any eavesdropper could make sense out of any of that data flow. It’s unclear what the contents are, the PGP/GPG encryption keeps the contents of the message secure, and BitMessage itself seriously obfuscates if not outright eliminates being able to tell where the messages are ultimately going to or coming from.

I have to admit that BitMessage is very user friendly and very handy to have. My only issue with it is that I don’t know anyone who uses it, but perhaps this blog post will change that. If you are interested in this bleeding-edge crypto/privacy software, I encourage you to chat me up on BitMessage for serious matters or for fun.

OS Tryouts 1: PC-BSD

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PC-BSD

System Setup

The PC-BSD initial setup was pleasant enough, there was only brief exposure to the horror of the console as cryptic text scrolled past. I can imagine consumers panicking when they see these sorts of screens, pages of text they can’t comprehend without a solid understanding that much of it really is meaningless unless the system doesn’t work, and then it rockets from being worthless to priceless. Generally when I think of designing operating systems for consumers, you want to suppress this behind some pretty pictures or a progress bar, which is a clearer representation that everything is proceeding according to plan. Even when everything is working properly in systems like these you can spy error reports in the startup console text screens. The developers either don’t care or expect the errors and they are “worthless” issues because the system starts up normally. To consumers, if they are reading along and have a little bit of training about what they are looking at, they could be unsettled by a line that looks like an error even if it’s a throwaway warning.

After the initial setup, the standard installation questions are rather straightforward. Language and locale settings, however it is good to note that these days the really good systems automatically fetch much of this material from the indigenous Internet address. I would argue that if the IP is in the United States then it’s likely English, and if you know the IP, then you know the location, so time zones are easily set as well. The hostname selection is always different from system to system I’ve found. Some systems are computer-before-person and some are person-before-computer. Since you can set this to whatever you like, it’s not really a quibble.

PC-BSD does a very good job at clearly separating the difference between root access and user access. You create the password for the root account, and then it automatically leads you to create a user account afterwards, with the option for encryption presented immediately, which is a nice touch.

First Login

I was presented with a login dialog box, I selected my window manager to be Cinnamon as it was an installer option when I set up this system. The system attempted to start X Windows and then the desktop manager crashed. I tried to restart it twice and then when that wasn’t working I clicked Cancel and the system started into X Windows without a desktop manager. There are no clear ways on the display to proceed forward unless I wish to use “AppCafe”, “PC-BSD Control Panel”, or the “PC-BSD Handbook”. I tried to use the magic keyboard combination of Control-Alt-Backspace to exit out of X Windows to no avail, the key combination does not work. I then inserted Control-Alt-Delete which reset the system and led me directly back to the login window. This time I selected the default window manager, of KDE and logged in. The system did at this point proceed properly.

I tried to start a basic application, in this case I wandered through the applications and selected “Marble” in the education category. The app failed silently. After that I went to system update and started the update search. The wait for progress was rather long at about five minutes, but I did see there were “Base System Updates” available, what they are is not stated, but I elected to install them anyways. The progress bar does not really fill up in the way that a consumer would expect, but rather as a quarter-inch blue rippled box that bounces slowly left and right.

Generally when the system is installed and updated it seems to be competent. The fact that you can’t really stray from the KDE interface is a little bit of a concern, but generally not a huge problem. I would say that PC-BSD really isn’t ready for prime time consumer use yet. Then again, no Linux OS is, at least yet.

BSD and Linux Tryouts – Four Distributions

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I’ve got a pile of dead hardware that I’m going to be surplussing soon here at work and much of it won’t be able to handle Microsoft Operating Systems, either because the system lacks a restore partition or lacks a Microsoft licensing sticker to make the install of Windows XP work properly. So we’ll have to live without Windows, which means some other operating system. There are four that I’m looking at currently:

  • PC-BSD
  • Linux Mint 17
  • ElementaryOS
  • CentOS

Generally I think none of these are really ready for prime-time consumer use, but maybe I’ll be surprised.

Williamsburg – November 15th 2010

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Today was the official beginning of the Sage Millennium Symposium. This is the direct result of all of the user base griping about how we missed this place and how we wish we had a little conference all on our own, like the way it used to be. Much like a magic genie, Sage granted us our wish and here we are again, for my coworkers who joined me in this trip it’s old-hat to them, it’ll be my first time staying at Kingsmill Resort.

We arrived last evening and I found this place to be very expansive, definitely charming, and a great place to “Get away from it all”. The price tag, well, that’s definitely on the high side, but the quality is unmistakably there. My room is laid out very spaciously and everywhere they could have skimped out they did not, which earns my respect.

Last night we went to the Red White and Blue, which is a Blues-themed Memphis style BBQ Rib restaurant in Williamsburg. The food was okay, the ribs were done well. What more can you ask for while traveling into a tourist trap?

Overnight everything went well, my iPad doubled as a noisemaker/alarm clock very nicely as well as a book, a newspaper, a game of Uno and a window into the world of all my collected RSS feeds that I aggregate through Google Reader.

In the morning we all visited Colonial Pancake House. We’re in the middle of Pancake House Central and this one got a 5-star review so we decided to give it a shot. There wasn’t much that was remarkable about the place, the food was good, the atmosphere was what you’d expect and the prices were fair.

After breakfast we talked for a little while and then my coworkers settled on hitting the local outlet mall. I didn’t have anything else better to do since the meat of the convention wasn’t due to begin until 2pm, so I tagged along. We found it easily enough as the two coworkers who had been here before knew the path to the outlet mall very well. I pulled in and parked, scanned the shops and immediately noticed the kitchen outlets, which are (I think) identical to the ones in Michigan City. We only had an hour and then one of my coworkers who knew I was fond of Under Armour pointed out that UA had a factory store in this particular outlet mall. UA is kind of like my Kryptonite, I’m quite fond of their clothing and seeing the store put a foolish grin, even for a short flash, on my face. As we walked along everyone sort of split up and went their separate ways. I joined my boss on a search for a replacement tote-bag to replace the flimsy bag provided by Sage when we registered the night before. We weren’t able to find anything for her and as we walked we met up with our other coworkers and while they went looking in a nearby shop I decided since there was only about twenty minutes left that I should at least check out the UA shop. It only took me ten minutes to pick out some things I liked and went to try them on. I did buy some Under Armour, but it was on the clearance rack, $10 off plus 20% after that so I wasn’t feeling too upset about the cost. Under Armour is mighty expensive stuff, but it’s durable and it’s one of my few vices that I get to indulge in from time to time.

Afterwards we put all our winnings in the back of the rental SUV and headed back to Kingsmill. We heard the welcome song-and-dance from Sage regarding their database software, Millennium, which powers our alumni and donor record database.

Sage laid out the Millennium roadmap for us, telling us what to expect in the future and some of us were mildly jilted that they delayed the “Rip out that damned Java!” request we lodged with them last year. Now we’ll have to wait for version 8 to roll around, we’re currently on 7.6.1 and we’re dallying with the notion of upgrading to 7.7.1 or 7.8, maybe on the outside chance, 7.8.2. This software is very competent at what it does, there have been some missteps and from what I can perceive they essentially rushed a RDBMS product into a “web enabled” paradigm by using shortcuts. In the short-term this worked great, they were able to convert their Windows only application interface with one that worked via a web-browser. On closer inspection this greatness tarnishes because you can only use IE6 or IE7 on Windows XP, not Windows 7. (Windows Vista works, but it’s abomination, so we don’t speak it’s name). The key sticking point is that the software relies in very specific and vital parts on loading the Java runtime library. In ways, they cheated. They got a product rushed to market and it worked well as long as you had all these backup-singers in place to provide the parts to make the entire production work. This would be not-an-issue if it wasn’t for the fact that in order to use this core-to-our-business-case software, we are effectively stuck using Java 1.5.11. This in and of itself isn’t harmful, but this old copy of Java is vulnerable and opens up computers to a heaping batch of security vulnerabilities, add to that damning fact that another piece of software we use, BSR’s Banner requires an updated jInitiator and JDK update which forces a machines JRE to the most updated version, breaking Millennium. So we have two products we need so that we can do our jobs and Java is the pinion of suck that we’re stuck upon. Removing Java is only the first step, as they really ought to only push their web-based product (and it’s the only thing that they can really push, so get to it!) and that product really ought to be W3C compliant. If that was the case then all my users could have the freedom to select whatever operating system they liked to interface and use the database. They could use Chrome on Ubuntu or even Safari on the Mac. The benefits of switching out Java for AJAX and Javascript are pretty compelling, even as such that by doing so they would effectively enable other non-Java OS’es to be able to login, such as iPhones, iPads, Galaxy Tabs, and Androids. Technically one of our staff could query our database on a color Nook. It’s not the particular devices that I’m in love with (despite the fact that I am quite smitten with my iPad) but rather that standards are respected, that the software follows a logical and plain design and works well, simply.

After the chat and the disenchantment discovering the delay with tearing out Java we waited around for the Welcome Bash at 5:30pm. Sage puts this welcome on whenever they have an event like this one, open bar, nibbly bits, the works. I chatted with a new Millennium client that’s coming out of Boston, MA. The school starts with a B, I’m terrible with names unless I have business cards and as dumb luck would have it, I totally forgot to bring business cards with me on my travels this week. Duh. We waited and schmoozed until about 7pm when we had to gather everyone up and head to an Italian restaurant here in Williamsburg called Donelos or something. We did more eating, more chatting, and only now did I have any time to myself. I was going to call Scott and relate to him the days events and then I looked down at my watch and felt wrong to make a call after 9pm. So, instead of a call, I thought I would write a blog entry and share this with all of you. Tomorrow we’ll have presenters and I’ll write a lot of ‘neat ideas’ that ‘I’m definitely going to get to work on’ until I actually get to work and that occupies all my time and this entire batch of ‘neat ideas’ falls by the wayside. It always seems to happen this way. When I don’t have life pushing me around I can get all creative and clever with the database, but without fail, life butts in and I’m right back where I started.

On high notes, I have discovered Whitley’s Virginia Peanuts. These are hand-picked giant peanuts in a variety of preparations. I ended up buying two little 16oz. sacks, one Honey Roasted and the other Honey Toffee. They will serve as snacks during this week when I can’t get free of my meetings and end up missing the snacks they lay out for us just outside our meeting halls. These peanuts are exceptionally good and the lady in the little shop we went into had a great sense of humor.

I’m thinking about contacting my family out here and see if they’re available Tuesday or Wednesday night, perhaps I can manage to get the rental SUV for the night so I can get down to VA Beach and then back up again, we’ll see how my coworkers feel and if my family has time.

Shuffle thy mortal coil

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Everything is done, for the Apple Digital Lifestyle project for our soon-to-retire management person. Getting to this point was a challenge only in terms of getting the data off of the old computer. The old machine was a Dell Dimension desktop loaded with Windows XP. I got the machine running and everything was fine, as far as Windows XP can be fine and I inserted my Knoppix DVD into the disk drive and rebooted. Then began the hurdles, the system was configured to boot first to the HD, not to the DVD, so I changed that and rebooted, the disk wouldn’t read and the system booted to the HD anyways, up comes Windows XP. Turns out, this computer is so old that it doesn’t have DVD, just a plain CD-ROM drive that I errantly mistook for a DVD drive. So I swapped out the Knoppix DVD and traded it for a Knoppix CD, rebooted and finally was up and running in Knoppix. I mounted the volume where the user files lived and used the tar utility to copy them over the network to my iMac on my desk. Once that was done I switched Knoppix out for DBAN, a popular hard drive erasing utility and booted into that, set it to chew away using DoD short wipe and proceeded to unpack the tar file I had copied over. I had unpacked the users data, trimmed out the meaningless Windows junk and ended up with about 800MB of user data in the end, mostly music and pictures and a few documents peppered in. I made a new ‘tar’ file and then copied that over to the new iMac using my handy-dandy USB file transmission cable. I had utterly blanked on the fact that both my iMac and the new iMac had fancy FireWire 800 capability, and only now that I reflect upon it do I feel rather silly in forgetting FireWire.

Once the data was over, I moved all the documents where they needed to be and then I thought about how I would manage the music and pictures. First was the pictures, I opened iPhoto ’09 (which came with the iMac!) and clicked on File, Import, pointed it to the directory that held the mishmash of user data and in about 45 seconds (I couldn’t help but time it) all the user pictures were now in iPhoto. I did the same thing with iTunes for the music and that took a whole 30 seconds. I then threw all the rescued remains in the trash (because they were now in iPhoto and iTunes) and then rescued bookmarks, that took a whole 10 seconds and into Safari it went. Cleaned everything up, installed the ‘Free’ HP All-in-one, and that took 2 minutes to unpack and 30 seconds to set up, I had a test print a minute later. Packed it all up, walked it to the manager’s office and he’s all set to enjoy.

What will he enjoy? His big thing is email and using iChat Video Chat. That’s the biggest selling point I think for this entire adventure. He can see his daughter and her budding family, full audio/video Mac goodness for as long as he likes to do so. I suggested that he could even set up a link in the morning and have a virtual “magic mirror” run all day long so they could spend time close to their loved ones without the expense or trouble of traveling.

After this entire adventure it struck me that I effectively ran an entire micro-sized Apple Store from inside my head. I had a Genius Bar (my office), I was the Genius (don’t have a fancy apple shirt, tho) and I got the user interested, sold, migrated, and trained – just like in an Apple Store. If Apple ever were to establish a store in Kalamazoo I would definitely moonlight there, without a doubt. The last time I did enter an Apple Store was with my Father in Syracuse a few months ago, the salespeople approached and I was busy pointing out a 21″ iMac to my Dad and as the sales guy approached he heard me actually running through his script. He chuckled and smiled and stood behind me. That’s why Apple succeeds, because they impress people like me and we become evangelists. Walking around, free Apple advertising and when someone comes up and asks, we show them all the wonderful fun they could have and then they go and buy into the dream as well, the cycle continues.