Tips, Tricks, and Tales from the Techs

Over a period of a week or two you realize your computer is freezing constantly.  You check for obvious signs of hardware failure, like bloated motherboard capacitors, and check the cabling.  You take a look at the Windows event viewer (type “eventvwr” in the run command) and under the system you notice a lot of hard drive errors.

After running a utility like HD Tune you realize your hard drive is on the fritz.  If it’s something like a bad block, it can be “repaired” by reformatting you machine as Windows will write around this block and be marked as bad on a clean install.  However a lot of times this is caused by something like the head of the hard drive causing damage to the platter, which usually means it’ll happen again.

So the best course of action is to replace that hard drive.  Today we’ll be looking at what you should do for a typical hard drive failure on a desktop PC.”

1) Order a new hard drive.

Simple enough.  It doesn’t have to be the exact same one, just make sure the bus in the same (IDE, SATA) and get the same size or larger drive to avoid any problems down the road.

2) Transfer your data to a new location.

While your waiting for the UPS guy to ring your doorbell, transfer all the data you have off the hard drive to a new one.  The best way is to boot your computer from a UBCD4Win CD and run the Unstoppable Copier from it.  Copy the ENTIRE drive to either an external hard drive, another hard drive on your computer, or a network location (such as a shared folder on another computer or a server if you have access to one).  Grab some lunch it might take a while.  Subway is good.

3) Install and format your your new hard drive.

I don’t really need to say too much about installing a new hard drive do I?  Just swap the old one out and put the new one in.  Boot into UBCD4Win again to format the drive.  Right click on “My Computer” and select “Manage”.  In the Computer Managment window click on Disk Management.

The new hard drive should look like Disk 1 (however yours should be Disk 0 if it’s the only drive), it should be unallocated and void of anything.  Right click on it and click “Format”.  Run through the wizard and format as a logical drive with a primary partition.  Name your hard drive (”Local Disk” is the norm) and check it to do a “Quick Format”.  After the wizard is complete, UBCD will say you need to reboot.  I’ve always avoided this by running through the format wizard again.  Right click the drive and mark the drive as active.  After that you should be able to right click on the drive that is showing at the top of the window and assign in the drive letter “C”.  Go to My Computer and voila!  Your hard drive is ready to be written to.

4) Transfer your data to the new hard drive

Run Unstoppable Copier again and copy your data from where you saved it to the new hard drive.  Grab some lunch again.

5) Rebuild your boot.ini

After everything is done, reboot your computer and see if it loads.  If it doesn’t you might have to rebuild your boot.ini file.  This is especially true on Dell machines that have that little 50mb partition before the OS partition.   Boot up UBCD4Win and at the main blue screen before you boot into your BartPE OS (the shell you are in when using UBCD) scroll down and launch the Windows Recovery Console.  It’ll take a few minutes to boot, just follow the prompts on the screen when Windows setup asks what you want t do.  When you are in select your windows installation and enter the local administrator password (if you can’t remember it or don’t know it you can use the password tools in your UBCD to create a new one).   At the command prompt type “bootcfg /rebuild”.  Enter these options:

Add installation to boot list?: Yes
Enter Load Identifier:  Microsoft Windows (XP Home, Pro, Vista, Home, Business, Ultimate, whatever the name of your OS is)
Enter Operating System Load Options: (leave blank)

Type exit to reboot the machine.
There you have it.  Windows should now boot properly and everything should look the way it did before.  Windows might ask to reboot itself after it install you new hard drive drivers, so do so.  If you are still having problems you might want to use the “fixboot” and “fixmbr” commands at the Recovery Console in case something messed up during your data transfers.  The disaster you thought you had on your hands, wasn’t that bad was it?

Kevin Hardware, Tips and Tricks

If you’re a web developer you’re bound to come across this. You just designed a great looking web page that excels your expectations.  It’s looks greats, is easy to navigate, and you know it’s going to knock your client off his feet.  You go to preview it in Firefox and it looks perfect, just as it did in the web editor your designed it in.  You publish your site to the web, sit back and relax.  You’re just waiting for the praises from the person who trusted you to put them on the web.

In about three minutes you get a all for the client and you become the one who gets knocked off his feet.  They complain the text is overlapping different parts of the page it shouldn’t, some of the links don’t work, and there’s a blue transparent film around some of the images.

You quickly fire off Firefox and go to the website, but all looks normal.  You are perplexed until it hits you.  They are using Internet Explorer.

Besides being a haven for rogue toolbars that won’t uninstall, spyware, and one of the slowest browsers out there, Internet Explorer also doesn’t support web standards like other browsers do.  It doesn’t have the support for CSS, tables, images (like PNGs), and other elements that Firefox has.

So don’t use Firefox to test your websites, not because it’s a bad browser, but because it’s an awesome browser, created by people who really care about the needs and methods of web developers.  It’s not that Microsfoft is evil (we at STC really like Microsoft), it’s just that they really don’t focus on IE like they should.  Internet Explorer also has the largest market share (even though they are steadily losing it) and most people who view your site will be rendering your page in it.

So next time you need to see if there are any subtle hidden “flaws” in your website, don’t use Firefox.  Firefox is too nice and cares about your feelings.

Kevin Tips and Tricks, Web Development

If you run a website with a secure portal, then you most likely have a certificate (or are self certified, which is not what this article is covering).  At some point in time that certificate will expire and you will need a new one.  But how do you do that?  You cannot generate a new CSR while the current certificate is loaded.  If you unlead the certificate your users will not be able to access your site.  What to do, what to do.

Setup a separate {fake} website
The first step is to go into IIS and create a new website.  It really doesn’t matter what you call it or what ports or whatever.  We really don’t care.  I call mine, ‘Temp-cert site’ and put it on some unused port that I don’t care about.  I also just make a directory, but don’t give any rights to it (just in case).  So what you should have is:

Create the CSR
The next step is to create the CSR based on this new site.  So you go through the normal motions:
Right click the Temp-cert site
Click properties
Click Directory Security tab
Click Server Certificate

The ‘Welcome to the Web Server Certificate Wizard’ will start – Go through this just like you did for the actual website you wanted to get the cert for.  Notice we haven’t actually touched the ‘real’ site yet.
Once you are done, copy and paste the New Request to your Certificate Provider and get your certificate back

Install the new certificate
Now that you have your new certificate, you will need to install it somewhere (not to the actual site yet).  So back to the temp site we go.  Right click and get into properties, and the Directory Security tab.  Click again on Server Certificate.  This time the wizard will go through the installing of the cert.  YES this will install the cert on our ‘temp’ site, but don’t worry we’ll fix that in a minute.  Make sure the cert installed without an error.

Remove the certificate on ‘Temp’ site
Now that you have a brand new shinny certificate on this site, we are going to remove it.  Removing the certificate takes it off that particular site, but does not remove it from the certificate store.  So go back into properties of the ‘temp’ site, and back into the familiar Directory Security and Server Certificate wizard.  Here we want to remove the certificate.  That wizard completes pretty fast and painless.  Now on to installing on the right site.

Install the certificate on the ‘real’ site
Okay, NOW is the time we are actually going to do something to the real site.  Right click on the proper site, and get into properties.  Then into the Directory Security and click on the Server Certificate wizard.  So you should see something like this:

So now you select the ‘Replace the current certificate’ and click next.  From there you should see a list of all the certs that have been installed on the server.  From there you should see your brand new shinny certificate, with the proper issue and expire dates.  Just simply select it, and close out of the wizard….

Thats IT!!!!

Now you have your new cert, and your actual live website wasn’t down, or without a cert at all.  This way will assure you that you have no down time as Certificates can take a few days to get after you give them your CSR.

Sean Tips and Tricks Add new tag, certificate, IIS, SSL, websites

This past week, I attended the Sharepoint Bootcamp at New Horizons in Sacramento.  It was taught by Sharee English who is a Sharepoint consultant and trainer.  You can check out her blog here.  I have to say that I was very impressed by what Sharepoint can do.  Not only is Sharepoint a way to house and store documents, but you can actually run your business off of a properly designed sharepoint installation.  From Sharee’s blog, you can find all kinds of references to sites etc.. that are run from Sharepoint, or you can see a demo site (with great links of all kinds) here. I hope to get our Sharepoint server up and running in the next few weeks, although that will be dependent on us getting our virtual architecture up and running and the servers converted to virtual servers.  But that is another story entirely.

For those of you running Small Business Server as the backend server, you already have a Sharepoint server running.  If you go to http://companyweb from inside the network, you will be taken to your internal sharepoint site.  Now that site is based off WSS (windows sharepoint services) which is the free version of the product, unlike the pay-for product that is call Micrsosoft Office Sharepoint Services, or MOSS, but you get the idea.

Basically with a MOSS or WSS install, you can replace that old network drive as the document storage location and get a more robust, more accessible file storage repository, that does versioning, etc..  I’ll be covering more of what you can do in a future blog.   If you have Exchange 2007, and outlook 2007, you can get rid of public folders and use a Sharepoint backend to house that data.  That way your data will be available to everyone you specify wether they have Outlook or not.  And its all searchable.  Very cool indeed.

Stay tuned for updates to our setup as I get it going.

Sean Tips and Tricks