Archive for February, 2008
Why do I get a BSOD when I moved my hard drive from one machine to another?
Feb 29th
- Run a Repair installation to make Windows reinstall on its hardware.
- Find a new motherboard that contains a chipset from the same manufacturer.
- Run the following cool procedure…. :))
Thankfully, there’s a working workaround straight from Microsoft’s Knowledgebase (KB314082). What we will basically do is to tell Windows that it already “knows” all of the generic IDE types from all vendors. that way, when it will boot up, it will only install the new hardware and not refuse to boot because it is missing the old one.
The procedure described in the article takes you through extracting some drivers from the I386 and importing some registry data from a text file to the system.
But as you all already knows- I like Automation!!
1. Run the script while the disk is still installed on the original machine.
2. Shutdown, Relocate the disk to the new system & boot.
3. Windows will do it’s hardware recognition magic and you’re up & running :)
1. we’ll connect the drive as a secondary disk on a working machine (so it will appear as drive “D” for example….)
2. we will have to make the file copying manually. according to your Windows version (2K/XP), copy & rename these 4 files as follows:
- atapi.xp –> d:\windows\system32\driver\atapi.sys
- pciide.xp –> d:\windows\system32\driver\pciide.sys
- pciidex.xp –> d:\windows\system32\driver\pciidex.sys
- intelide.xp –> d:\windows\system32\driver\intelide.sys
* The d: stands for the drive letter as it appears on your system.
3. Using RegEdit, we will load the System hive of the drive we’ve connected, and we will import the registry data to it.
a. open RegEdit, stand on Local Machine.
b. in the File menu choose “Load Hive”. now browse and select the file:
d:\windows\system32\config\system.name it as “OldSys”. it will now appear as another hive in Regedit.
c. to import the registry data found in the file Merge.xp (or merge.2k) we will first need to update it to fit the new situation:
Open the file Merge.xp using Notepad. Run a Find & Replace from “\SYSTEM\” to “\OldSys\”
Now save the file as: Merge.reg
Double-click on it to make the actual import process.
d. when finished, stand on the “OldSys” hive and choose “Unload Hive” from the File menu.
That’s it! now replace the drive into your new system and boot to victory!Note: if you’re changing your system from and old IDE drive to a brand new SATA drive, this procedure can only work if your Bios can turn off the “SATA Native mode” and emulate it to be recognized as an IDE.
Cheers,
Is there a free way to quickly remove duplicate files from my computer?
Feb 29th
Some time duplicates are good things like in this image on your left. (feeling patriotic today?) But most of the time in the tech industry dupes are bad.
Today we got a question about how to kill duplicate files with different names quickly.
We immediately thought of one of our favorite old command line applications that was sitting on my shared application folder… Somewhere
We got a question from one of our readers:
Hi AtA,
Can you recommend me a program that will scan for duplicate files? I have a external HDD with multiple files with similar name, example:
filedocument.doc 2KB
filedocument-1.doc 2KB
filedocument-2.doc 2KB
Thanks,
Keep up the good work on AtA
We have been using this little application called Finddupe since Windows 98! Its free and works wonderfully! It’s chock full of command line geeky goodness. Delete duplicates, compare directories, do a test run and much more. Recover your lost space from gigz of the same porn with different names Duplicate MP3’s. Check out this info on the application and a download link below:
Finddupe is a tool for quick detecting of duplicate files on a hard drive under Windows. Duplicate files can be just detected, hardlinked, or deleted.
Deleting duplicate files
When working thru somebody else’s photo collection, or MP3 collection, this tool is useful for deleting the files that are duplicate. Depending on how the media is organized, there can be a lot of duplicate files in a collection.
Freeing hard drive space
Sometimes its intentional to have certain media in multiple places. By running finddupe, and hard linking the identical files, you can keep the files in multiple places, while only having one physical copy on the hard drive.
Detecting changed files for backup
Finddupe is useful for detecting which files have changed and need backing up. Simply back up the media, and then run finddupe to eliminate those files in the copy that are already contained in a previous backup.
Finddupe is a command line program. If you don’t know what a command prompt under Windows is, you may have to do a bit of learning before attempting to use this program. The command prompt is not DOS (before-windows), although it looks and acts a lot like that, and people unfamiliar thing that it is dos. Please don’t ask me for help if you don’t know how to use command line based programs – learn about that first.
finddupe command line options
finddupe [options] [-ref] <filepat> [filepat]…
- -hardlink
Delete duplicate copies of file, and replace duplicates with hardlinks to other copy of the file. Works only on NTFS file systems, and with administrator privileges. (The C: drive under XP is almost always NTFS, and most people log in as administrator)
-del
Delete duplicate files
-sigs
Pring computed file signature of each file. The file signature is computed using a CRC of the first 32k of the file, as well as its length. The signature is used to detect files that are probably duplicates. Finddupe does a full binary file compare before taking any action.
-rdonly
Also operate on files that have the readonly bit set. I use this feature to eliminate shared files in large projects under version control at work.
-bat
Do not hardlink or delete any files. Rather, create a batch file containing the actions to be performed. This can be useful if you want to inspect what finddupe will do.
-ref <filepat>
The file or file pattern after the -ref is a reference. These files will be compared against, but not eliminated. Rather, other files on the command line will be considered duplicates of the reference files.
filepat
File pattern matching in finddupe is very powerful. It uses the same code as is used in jhead. For example, to specify c:\** would indicate every file on the entire C drive. Specifying C:\**\foo\*.jpg specifies any file that ends with .jpg that is in a subdirectory called foo anywhere on the hard drive, including such directories as c:\foo, c:\bar\foo, c:\hello\workd\foo and c:\foo\bar\foo.
Example uses
If you have a previous backup in a directory tree on c:\prev_backup, and just copied your work files to a directory tree on c:\new_backup, you can remove any files that are in the previous backup with the following incarnation:
finddupe -del -ref c:\prev_backup c:\new_backup
If you have a large photo collection on c:\photos, and you wish to replace duplicates with hard links, you can run:
finddupe -hardlink c:\photos
Note that this only works on NTFS file systems (such as the C drive under Windows XP). It won’t work on FAT file systems, like the ones used on most external hard disks or USB flash drives.
If you just want to know which files are common between two directory trees, you can run:
finddupe -bat work.bat -del c:\media\** c:\media2\**
This will create the file “work bat” with file delete commands in it. The ‘-bat’ option tells finddupe to not do anything, but rather store the actions to a batch file. This allows you to review what finddupe would do before taking any action. The ‘**’ tells it to recursively do all the files.
So it does what it says and it gets rid of your dupes! What do you guys use for this? Anything or do you suffer?
Ask The Admin updates and a few words from the Admin.
Feb 28th
Hey Guys!
We broke 900 RSS readers this morning (again!) hopefully these new readers will stick! Our feedburner numbers have been fluctuating worse than the stock market!
Thanks goes out to one of our readers John. Thanks to him we have spent the whole day working on SEO and trying to beat the crap out of the Google duplicate content penalizer (is that not a word??)…
It turns out after moving off of the normal blogger templates, some time ago, we have caused AtA some real deal SEO issues. This was because all of our post pages had the same title as our home page -and that’s where that duplicate content penalties were coming from! Who knew?
But during our mad dash to make some changes I noticed that our site is #3 on a Google search for just the word ADMIN! That’s big!
People pay mucho dinero to come in ranking #3 on a single key word! Check us out:
We have been making some subtle changes as well as getting Intense Debate up and working. We have just imported All Most of our comments from Blogger to ID. It seems there were some issues and some of them will have to be done manually (Arrrg…) Is it worth it? In addition to all the comments not coming over we have some script errors that tell you your comment WAS NOT saved – but surprise surprise… It does get saved, leading to loads of duplicate comments. Hopefully everything will be worked out soon. But if you see something that’s wrong let me know by leaving a comment or sending an email to bugs at asktheadmin dot com.
What do you guys think – keep Intense debate as our comment system or dump them? The recent comment module works (displays comments) but the links are a little fucked. I will be getting a Poll up ASAP! so scroll down and vote for or against ID.
Do you use a different 3rd party commenting system? What do you do about SEO? Just want to try out the Intense Debate commenting module?? Then post away kiddies we want to see what this bitch can do!
Sync Windows Mobile Calendar, Tasks and Contacts between more than one device.
Feb 28th
Hey boys and girls!
Have you ever been in a situation where you wished you could sync calendars with somebody who is seemingly unconnected? On top of that, you wished that somehow, by some magical force, those calendars can sync automatically, wirelessly and invisibly; involving no further effort beyond the initial configuration, and that this calendar should follow you wherever you go. Naturally (who wouldn’t, right?).
So here is my situation:
Fiance’ 1.5 wants to perform a systems upgrade to wife 2.0.
Now we’ve teamed up towards common goals before. Planning a vacation, weekend getaway or even organizing a trip to the movies takes some collaboration right? After all, we’re busy people in this day and age. We have our own agendas. But now we are faced with the largest team effort we have ever faced collectively, together. It’s not the vows I’m talking about, it’s not the commitment. It’s not the prospect that this is the person you will be staring at for the rest of your life. No. That doesn’t scare me one bit. What scares the holy crap out of me is planning the wedding. This big, monster of a team collaboration project. If you succeed, you win the reverence and admiration of over 150 guests, including family members, friends, coworkers, and possibly bosses. If you fail, FOR SHAME TO YOU (as my Russian family would say). Pure embarrassment. So basically, failure is not an option. So fiance’ 1.5 and I were faced with a conundrum. How do we stay in sync? How do we go about speaking to multitudes of wedding service providers and making appointments with these people simultaneously, while being able to see at a glance whether or not there are any appointment conflicts. So this is our problem – we need to stay connected, within a 10 minute lag time from one another – no more, no less. But who has the time to call each other every 5 minutes, and in between other phone calls, to make sure were not conflicting?
So first I’ll list what we are working with:
- A PC at home with Activesync and Outlook, synced nightly with:
- An AT&T 8525 HTC Hermes with an unlimited internet plan – this is my phone.
- An AT&T Samsung Blackjack – this is my fiance’s phone – never synced, EVER, WITH ANYTHING – she never even knew it could do that.
At first I started insisting that her and I come home at the end of each day, and enter any and all appointments into MY outlook, and then add herself as a meeting attendee. This creates an email which is sent by Outlook that automatically enters the appointment into her phone, and is updated on my phone when I sync via USB every night. This idea looks great on paper, but requires a bit of a commitment to come home every night and devote X amount of time transferring scribbled notes into outlook.
So at first I searched for a way to sync via IP address. No Dice. It seems M$ removed this after version 3.4 of Activesync . My only recourse was an Exchange server. Now I’ve never used Microsoft Exchange, and I’m only now becoming familiarized with what Exchange can do for a person, team, or organization. In my case, Exchange would allow my fiance’ to enter an appointment into her phone, real time and it syncs with my phone. Since Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone Edition doesn’t allow you to add attendees to an appointment, and Windows Mobile 6 doesnt know what to do with vCal items in email, Exchange Server is a requiem for this to work. Considering we’re on a tight budget for time and money as it is, enter mail2web.
From the mail2web site:
“mail2web LIVE, our free Exchange Email solution goes beyond webmail to provide calendars, task management, contact lists, advanced rules for sorting messages, and even ActiveSync capability.”
mail2web LIVE is just one of the many services this site offers. You basically sign up for a FREE (love that) mail2web live account. A free live account comes with alot of task and personal management features. It’s no coincidence that it supports all the various PIM information types that Outlook supports such as Calendar, Tasks, Contacts, Email, and others. For my purposes, I only wanted to use the calendar feature, since I didn’t want any of my fiance’s contacts, nor did she want any of mine. So of all the features mail2web LIVE offers, Calendar was the magic bullet.
I started off by opening the free mail2web account. This process entailed divulging practically no personally identifiable information about myself. Basically choosing a username, and the desired email address to which I’d like the account associated. As soon as that was complete, there appeared an interesting button with the words “configure your mobile device for this account”. Hmm sounds almost too tempting… could this be a trap? It’s just too convenient. Clicking this link yields a popup with links to downloading auto-configuration files. For some strange reason this config file didn’t work for me. However further digging revealed a “Control Panel” page with an “Activesync Settings” sub-panel. This page is dynamically generated to contain the exact settings for your mail account. Which is the main reason I can’t link you guys and girls straight to the page. This page contained all of the settings needed to manually set up my phone to Activesync via this Exchange server, which contains my personal account hosted by mail2web. At this stage I’m presented with a choice on my phone, by activesync, as to which points of information I’d like to have synced with this server. Since this mail2web account is strictly for the purposes of synchronizing my calendar with my fiance’s, I was very careful to be sure that only the “Calendar” checkbox is checked. If you’re using this service as your personal activesync server, that you and only you will be using, you can just as well check every box and have all your information conveniently backed up to mail2web’s servers. But I have a different evil scheme.
My scheme involves both mine, and my fiance’s phone, syncing to this ONE account for the sole purpose of retrieving and synchronizing the calendar, and only the calendar.
While this is not what the service was originally meant for it is technically possible, and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t go against any of their policies or T’s & C’s, so I used it to my advantage.
When I was done setting up activesync on my 8525 to sync over the air every 10 minutes with my new mail2web account, I grabbed my fiance’s Blackjack and did the same with her phone. I set up her Activesync to connect to the server provided to me by the mail2web Account Control Panel’s Activesync Settings sub-panel. Now her phone and my phone are magically sharing 1 calendar. And this calendar updates the Exchange Server every 10 minutes when her phone syncs up. This information is grabbed by my phone every ten minutes when that syncs up, and this information is transferred to my home PC’s instance of Outlook when I hook up to USB to charge every night. This works perfectly vice-versa as well, when I enter a calendar item into my 8525.
It is now a seamless and invisible background task that her and my phone perform, and we are totally in sync. Now, when she makes an appointment with a florist for Wednesday of next week at 8:30 PM, My phone knows about it no more than 10 minutes later. And when I look at my calendar to make my own appointments with a Videographer, I’ll see instantly not to mess with Wednesday evening of next week, unless I want to be watching other peoples wedding videos at 10:30 PM on a weeknight, after spending 2 mind-numbing hours in a flower shop.
This is truly the closest I’ve ever felt to my girl, and we really are connecting in a way that not many other couples have connected in. My only gripe with this process is that I keep thinking I have a manicure appointment on Tuesday. She better hope I don’t show up and try to claim it.
I hope this helps some new couples get their schedules together, or some business partners sync their collective work schedules up. I’m positive this free service mail2web provides will help lots of people discover the benefits of collaboration, Windows Mobile style.
Peace
Commodore 64 (the one you used to paly Bruce Lee on)
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