Posts tagged Tips
A Tale of Two Admins.
Oct 15th
Please follow this email chain between myself and our friend Karl AKA ATA.
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ME
Here’s the scenario….
Backed up info off old laptop to external HD.
During XP install I saw two identical drives…nuked the first partition and tried to install. XP said no. Nuked the 2nd one…XP allowed the install. JOY!!!
You know where this is going don’t you…..
Anywho…it turns out XP is able to see external USB HD’s and I nuked the MBR on the drive. Do you know of any freebie tools to recover the data on that drive? I have my bosses personal stuff on it and a lot of my own personal stuff too….and the drive states that it needs to be formatted….
HELP ME Obie-ADMIN, You’re my only hope! :-D
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Karl
Sorry it took so long ive been in windows mobile hell today.
Do not let it format! Knoppix live cd wll fix you right up.
You will be able to see and copy everything even without the mbr.
Let me know how it goes and if it doesnt work i might have some other apps
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Me
I bought a tool to recover the drive….but…..I have a BKF file on
there that is corrupted now….any idea of any tools that are freebies
to be able to recover those files? I suppose I can get the bosses CC to
buy a tool to do it…but I’d rather not…..
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Karl
What OS is the BKF file from? What os are you restoring to? What is the error message?
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Me
Win2k Pro. It is saying that the BKF(windows Backup file) is not valid or something to that effect….
I am running a scandisk on it….we’ll see if it goes. I downloaded a demo of a $ product and I could see the data in the file, but I cannot get at it without paying…..
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Karl
Are you restoring to w2k as well? Did you use msbackup or ntbackup to compress it?
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Me
NTBACKUP to create it. Tried restoring on Win2k server and XP.
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Karl for the win
I’d try to restore on 2k pro but if that doesn’t work check this out:
Backup Exec has the ability to read .bkf files. You can download the trial
version and use it for 60 days for free.If you go to the “Tools -> Options -> Catalog” menus, there is a check box
labeled “Use storage media – based catalogs”. If you remove the check from
this checkbox and run a catalog job on the bkf file, you should be able to
recover any files that are not corrupted. The catalog operation will take
longer to complete, but you should be able to restore any valid file within
the .bkf, before and after the corruption. Its hard to know how much
corruption there is in the .bkf file, so I wish you the best of luck.This link will give you instructions on how to import a bkf file into the
program for restore. Before performing step 6. (The catalog operation),
follow the steps above. http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/241600.htm
———————————————-
Grateful Me
Dude……you rock.
We use BE and I never thought of trying it. Thanks to you I was able to restore….get this…..ALL OF IT.
Rock on Detroit….Rock on Chicago…NAPA, it’s the auto parts store. (If you don’t know what this is…do a Youtube/Google search on Wesley Willis)
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So what have we learned today?
- 1. NEVER, EVER leave a USB HD attached to XP on install and NEVER, EVER nuke a drive unless you are 10000000% certain you have the right drive.
- 2. Karl rocks and has great ideas.
- 3. NAPA, It’s the Auto Parts Store
Hey Cheapskate, Burn ISOs for free on any Windows Platform!
Aug 4th
So you don’t want to dole out the big bucks for some fancy smancy cd/dvd authoring suite just to burn cd’s and disk images? Or how about you don’t want the bloat from said suite?
No it’s probably that you are just like me and a big cheapskate when it comes to buying software!
Either which way this little free solution should float your boat. Check it out!
Reader NotBurntYet wrote in:
I need to burn an ISO on Windows Vista. Long story short I uninstalled the 7gb cd burning suite that came with the machine. I have been able to burn cd’s from Explorer with Windows built in capability. BUT (you knew that was coming) I can not burn ISO’s! I have a older copy of Nero but it is not compatible with Vista! HELP ME! I need to burn my game and can we make it free??
NotBurntYet, Ohio
Hey NotBurntYet, we have a solution for you – real simple like and best of all FREE! It is called ISORECORDER. ISO Recorder is a Window’s power tool that’s installer is around 1.2 mb. It seems to work for all the newer operating systems – XP or better. After you install it you can now automagically “burn CD and DVD images (DVD support is only available on Windows Vista), copy disks, make images of the existing data CDs and DVDs and create ISO images from a content of a disk folder” And all this from the context menu (Right Clicking). Lets check it out:
Download the appropriate package for your Operating System:
XP SP1 or No Service Pack
XP SP2, XP SP2 64 bit, and 2003
VISTA 32
VISTA 64
Next right click on the image you want to burn:
From there the steps are self explanatory – asking you where and how you want to burn from a simple little interface that looks like this:
You can also use ISORecorder as I said to make images dumb quick from cd’s or dvd’s in explorer as well like so:
Cool free stuff with a tiny little foot print! Add this to the how to get Windows XP running on an older machine and yourself a powerful older machine (with burner!) that does not need a huge amount of memory to run!
I have hundres of files to rename help me Admin!
Jun 24th
Yes, we know you have taken a million digital photos over the last year, on your fancy shmancy new camera. And we also know the holiday season is almost upon us. Being the geek that you are, you could not just leave your pictures named digital_image_13456.jpg for your slide shows…
We just couldn’t have that now, could we?
Oh, how well we know you.
Wayne from Florida wants AtA’s help to create a script that will batch rename his purty pictures. Instead we are going to point him to some FREE software our friend Daniel at HackYourDay blogged about.
The software is called Batch File Renamer (clever eh?) from Cerebral Synergy.
Daniel says:
Here’s one software that productivity nuts will love. If you’ve ever needed to catalog files, change extensions, add something to a filename in large batches you know the suffering that is “right click, select, type, enter” done over and over and over again. If you need a tool that can simply edit filenames, rename extensions and so on in a very powerful, customizable way, read on!…
I set out to find some sort of tool because I need to catalog files in batches of 100 about every two days. I get a batch of stuff in txt format and I need to do the following operations.
- I need the files to be in the following format [ID - Number.txt]
- I also need them in this format [ID - Number.html]
Practically this means that I need “032 – 001.txt”, “032 – 002.txt” and so on (all the way to 100), also in .html format and I need to be able to customize all of this because for the next batch I will need “033? at the beginning.
Doing a Google search and trying a lot of free software that popped up I finally found Batch File Renamer. Not a fancy name, not a fancy program, but it gets the job done better than I’ve seen with other apps. First, head over to the Cerebral Synergy download page, scroll down and download Batch File Renamer.
He was able to change file extensions, mass change file names and it comes with all sorts of other free geeky options! Check out Daniel’s article at HackYourDay here and the Free Cerebral Synergy download is here.
What are Thumbs.db and .DS_Store files? Can I delete them? Do I need them and how can i make them stop coming back?
Apr 13th
James from Virginia wanted to know if it was safe to delete these Thumbs.db and .DS_Store files from his network. Check out our answer and step by step removal tips.
Running in a mixed Windows/Mac environment I find it annoying to deal with all the little artifacts the great OS’s leave behind. All of our mixed shares and network drives are full of these frickin ‘Thumbs.db and .DS_Store files.
Each folder with initiated thumbnail views (that is where they have displayed a Thumbnails or Filmstrip view in Windows Explorer) will have a Thumbs.db file.
They do nothing for me. I look at them like litter on the ground. I looked up what they do and started deleting them. But they came back…
Some times I get caught up in doing something after in enrages me enough. So I was now determined to get rid of these files from my shares here on out. I did some research on how to get rid of them permanently and how to prevent them from coming back!
Here is how you prevent Windows and OS X from creating these annoying files.
Prevent the creation of Thumbs.db in Windows:
Prevent the creation of .DS_Store files on Network volumes in MacOS:
- Open the Terminal application from the Utilities folder which is nested in the Applications folder
- Begin by first clicking on the Start Button
- Then click on Search and then Click on the All files and folders option
- In the All or part of the file name: box type in Thumbs.db
- Quickly ensure that the Look in: pull-down menu is set to whatever network drives you want to scrub
- Now Click on the Search button to search for all Thumbs.db files on your system
- In the All or part of the file name box type in Thumbs.db
- After the Search completes, click on the word Edit contained in your top tool bar area
This will pull down a menu for you to now click on Select All - Now Press the Delete key on your keyboard to delete all the Thumbs.db files on your system
- Then Close the Search Results window to return back to your Windows session
Now this doesn’t help you deleting the files that already may exist.
To accomplish that you may be interested in BlueHarvest to scrub your network of .DS_Store files and you can do a simple find and replace on Windows.
Find and Replace:
To delete all the existing Thumbs.db files on your computer you just:
For those of you who are scared to delete system files, the Thumbs.db and .DS_Store files are strictly cosmetic on network volumes and will have almost no impact on pretty much anything! Do you use them for something? Let us know in the comments.
_TheOCAdmiN_
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