Vaio recovery

Prashant got a sony vaio recently and one fine day it stopped booting up and started to give a blue screen. He and Mahesh tried to recover it using sony vaio recovery center but it failed with a mysterious error 320/330. The restore of C drive was happening and in between recovery fails leaving the windows o/s files in unusable state (cant boot into vista). Mahesh tried to do a XP installation as well which did not succeed.

I took the laptop and tried the same recovery and also tried to recover using windows vista recovery CD. I had to download SATA drivers and load them initially for the disks to be recognised. The recovery using recovery CD failed as the vaio recovery had left the windows o/s files in a unusable state. I tried to launch the vaio recovery process after loading the recovery CD but could not.

Then i tried to install ubuntu linux from CD. The copy kept failing then installed it from USB drive. This worked and the installation went fine. So atleast we can have linux running if nothing else runs as well.

Next option we thought of was to install XP. To have XP installed (which by default does not come with sata drivers), i got a XP home CD. Slipstreamed sata drivers and SP3 using nLite. Then tried the installation using BartPE cd with sata drivers loaded. The XP SP3 installation copied the installation files and when i booted back , it did not copy the sata drivers so the installation never began after pre-installation copied the files. So was thinking of copying the driver files and modifyig the txtsetup.sif to load sata driver on startup while installing.

Sumit also bought same laptop. So another option was to reimage prashant's laptop using sumit's laptop. The partitions occupy whole disk. If i had to copy partitions, i will have to shrink Sumit's partition first and then use g4u or gparted live cd or other tools to copy the partiiton to temporary USB drive and then copy it back to Prashant's laptop. Instead i tried to copy all files from Sumit's laptop (arond 30 GB) to USB drive and then copy it over to Prashant's laptop and try booting. I used live gparted CD and then mounted the two disks and then started to copy everything in C Drive to the USB drive. The USB drive has a fat32 filesystem where as Sumit's hard disk partition was ntfs.

I initially tried the copy with vista running. It did not copy OS files. Then i used gparted and mount and the copy failed. I tried the copy by booting into BartPE. It failed as well. Both failed due to errors while copying files from winsxs directory which holds the manifests and .NET related files. The problem was the directory in FAT 32 filesystem seems to have a limit on no of files/dirs - ~7500. This caused the copy to fail. So had to zip the winsxs directory and unzip in Prashant's hard drive after copying rest of the files.

Then after a startup recovery with the vista recovery CD to set the windows folder and boot partition , vista was up and running in Prashant's laptop. It has been a good learning exercise.

Still i do not know fully why the XP slipstreamed drivers did not install even though it worked with BartPE.

Totally three full days of work and finally we have vista running in exactly the same way it did.

Resources used: BartPE/PE2USB , GParted , Vista recovery CD , nLite

Captcha rendered of no use

I was checking yahoo mail and saw a Ad of BigAdda.com and clicked on it by mistake.
I was taken to http://www.bigadda.com/yahoo/y_register.php
It is their registration page and i saw a captcha (word verification). The image had the characters "NXMRX" and i checked the image url -- http://www.bigadda.com/system/wordverification/verify.php?T=NXMRX

It already has the verification word. Any computer bot can now defeat the captcha happily :-D

So all computer bots if you are interested to register on this networking site, go ahead !!

USB safely remove hardware

When you plug a USB device, a icon appears in the system tray. This is the safely remove hardware icon. I used to wonder what is it needed for. May be the OS is writing some journal information when i am just performing the read. I would not want to try to plug the disk when some copying of files is happening to the USB disk.

I got into the properties of the device accidentally and saw it. You can get here by double clicking on the safely remove hardware icon, select the device, click properties, go to policies tab. The image explains it all. I guess all devices should be set to "optimize for quick removal" by default to enable anytime plugging out.

Now i know that i run zero risk of losing data when i pull out my USB disk from the computer. Still i would suggest, if you can safely remove it, do it. If not, you know that you don't run a risk of losing data.

Also sometimes when you try to safely remove hardware, there is an error saying that "there is some process still using the device or it is busy" or something like that. If you do have anything using it, close it. If you don't, kill the explorer.exe process and you should be able to remove the device safely.

Installing Google desktop in custom location

I have been using google desktop in office for over 1.5 years now. I basically use it to search my files and my history (web history , deleted files , deleted emails). I am more interested in the history part. Google Desktop comes handy in searching the deleted stuff.

I use lookout to search my office mails. It does a better job of indexing moved items. Google desktop fails to open the item in outlook many a time. But that is fine.

Recently in my company, google desktop became an illegal software to use. I am not supposed to install it and use it. In my company they officially support microsoft desktop search to be used. But i have too much of "history" information in my google index which i dont want to lose. So i do want to keep running google desktop on my company PC.

My company has an internal monitoring tool whose job is to ensure that only allowed software is installed and running on the computer. It blocks the installation of googledesktop. So to install it, we temporarily kill the process, complete the installation. Then start the monitoring tool again. I wanted to have a better way to do it. I found that the monitoring tool does not touch stuff in folders with "recycle" as part of the name.

But google desktop does not give option of choosing the folder to install. It must be picking up and using a default folder. I found that it uses the folder setting of registry key ProgramFilesDir in "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion" path. So i changed the registry entry to point to a folder with "recycle" in the path. I installed Google desktop, it got installed fine and the monitoring tool did not touch it. I also set the %ProgramFiles% environment to this path (just to be sure). I now have googledesktop in a non-default location. I reverted back the setting after the installation was done.

This change applies for all google applications (i think - did not test it). So now you can install google applications in non-default locations. Do add a comment if you find this tip useful.

It still is not configured smartly to kill the running processes of google desktop and remove the files. It is fairly simple to do. Hope they don't do it soon. I will keep running googledesktop till that day and may be another hack will get over it as well !!

Form Auto completion

I am on gmail home page and i type "p" in the username form field and i see my username in the autocomplete list and i press the down arrow key and it is filled in the username. I save a few key strokes. It also helps sometimes when i forget the username on certain sites ! It is too hard to remember all of them. It helps me autofill. It is a nice feature.

All browsers by default store form information. You can always disable it.

I was paying by my card on a particular secure website and it asked me my Card number and CVV number. I had done a transaction on this site before. When i keyed in the first digit of my card number, it showed me my card number in the autocomplete list. That is ok. Then i went to next form field to key in my CVV number and i keyed in the first number and i got my CVV number in the autocomplete list. This is not at all good.

My card number and CVV number are in formhistory.dat (under firefox profiles directory) and will be accessible to any form field with same name for any user to key in. Ofcourse it cannot be accessed by plain javascript. Hence it is safe. What happens if somebody breaks in ?

Those fields were to be marked with "autocomplete=off". If you are making a web form and feel that certain form field would not need autocomplete or has sensitive information, switch off autocompletion.

I actually went and checked the formhistory.dat which has been there in my laptop for almost 2 years now. I was surprised to see the kind of form field data stored in it. There was a lot of it. I deleted the formhistory.dat and i do make it a point from now on to delete it often. But it is still a nice feature. I will use it.

PS: Always make it a point to clear all history and prviate info from any browser once you are done using a computer/laptop outside.

Asimo

Asimo, the most advanced humanoid robot around. He has made lot of public appearances and is a big traveller. He has travelled more places than all of us !!

Check more about him.
Warm Technology Ad - "More Forwards"

.name domain

Today i came across a domain name ".name". I did not know such a domain name existed.
Any person or entity (not fictional) can register under this domain.

Read more about it ..
Top Level domain on Wikipedia
List of Top Level domains on Wikipedia
Whois info for .name domain

Unlimited storage

Recently i noticed that i have unlimited storage in yahoo mail.


Even though i knew about the announcement, i did not know when i was going to have it. It is fine, i dont have to worry about my mailbox size any more.

i use gmail more over yahoo mail for the interface experience and also tagging.

Also yahoo integrated chat into the mail interface. It is a cool thing like chat in gmail where you dont need the client.

Google Gears

Google gears enables web applications to provide offline functionality. It is now in Beta and the early release happpened in last week of may.

The first application to be gears enabled is Google reader. You can download 2000 posts and go offline and work with reader in offline mode (read posts /star items) and when you come back online, it synchronizes the changes back.
Oh Sam I Am, can I read it on the tram?

It is an interesting thing. Once gmail application enables the offline functionality, all my mail will be downloaded and i can still search and check my mails in gmail even when i am offline. There will be many more apps which will provide the functionality and it will be cool.

Check out the gears session in google developer days
GD Day London: Building better AJAX aps with Google Gears

So i thought i will get a feel for it. I downloaded the installer on windows and tried to install on my office machine. I started the installer but it erred with code - 0x80040800. It basically means that it could not connect to google site to download the gears setup. Seems like the GoogleUpdater has some issues with downloading gears - working behind corporate proxy servers. I got my proxy settings right for WinHttp api which is used by GoogleUpdater and even then it continued to fail. Finally i tried to install it on my laptop where it went fine and i got hold of the download link for the Google gears setup.

If you also face the same problem while setting it up, download the gears setup file directly instead of using GoogleUpdater to download the gears setup and install it.

On linux you just get an xpi and install the extension in firefox and you are ready to go.

I will read more on gears api and play with it.

Nokia N95 Ad

I liked the ad of new nokia nseries N95 mobile. It was too simple and too cool.
Check it out at nokia website.

N95 is a cool phone to have. Costs around 750 USD. I am thinking of changing my phone. Lets see if i buy this or the iPhone or something else.

You can win a N95 every week by making a video of "a thing in your pocket" and uploading it to nseries.com.

Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)

I am making this post from firefox browser running in ubuntu !!

I installed the latest version of ubuntu today on my laptop.
I wanted to try the upgrade distribution first but it failed not being able to download a package constantly. Hence i switched to full install as i wanted to clean the system as well.

The install was smooth as usual. I was up and running with a new linux installation in ~20 mins time. I was happily browsing the net on the live system while the install was happening in the back.

I still have windows also. I did not try the windows migration wizard part of the installation setup as i felt i would not need that data in linux.

I did not have any restricted devices which needed the restricted devices manager.

Straight out of the box installation played a flv file. This was cool. There is better out-of-box multimedia support and easy to use codec download wizards. Anyways vlc is there to play everything.

I am yet to try the 3D effects.

Wireless support has been made better. It detected my router password settings and automatically got connected after i gave the password. In edgy, i used WPA supplicant package to enable the wireless support with WEP-TKIP encryption. It is integrated better in this version.

Network sharing is made easier. I have got nfs and samba installed. But i will be rarely using them in my local wireless network.

Also virtualization support is better in feisty fawn version. I am yet to use it. I will try it sometime.

I just experimented with Microsoft virtual pc and check if it will run linux and it did. It was ok. I was surprised. My mouse did not work - need to check why.

Try ubuntu and enjoy !!