Recovering WIM Images

A user came in to helpdesk with a laptop that had a dying hard drive. A coworker was able to recover part of the LENOVO_RECOVERY partition to a new drive that was installed in the laptop, with a intact .WIM image, yet the partition would not boot. We tried rewriting the MBR, rebuilding BCD and other tricks but nothing would work. To make a very long story of us trying everything to get this drive to restore with no avail; we were able to manually make a partition then use GImageX to recover the image.

The new hard drive had the 10gb recovery partition we had copied over, and nothing else on it. So first using DiskPart, we made our new partition for windows.

  1. Boot from a Windows Vista, or 7, or later installation disc
  2. Go to Recovery Mode, and then get to the command prompt (dont do a system restore)
  3. Run diskpart
  4. “list disk” and then “select disk #” for the disk you want
  5. “list partition” will list what is on the hard drive, we then did “add” to make a new partition
  6. “select partition #” will select the new partition if you put the correct number in
  7. Finally “assign” will give the new drive a drive letter

Now that the new partition exists, we used http://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit-tools/gimagex/. This tool will recover the standard WIM windows images to a partition. To make life easy we copied it to a thumb drive and then launched it on the recovery disc. If your windows disc is 64 bit, you will need the 64 bit version of the app. Once we had the app it was just a matter of launching it and going to the second tab of “Apply” to install the image. The laptop we were working on had the recovery image hidden, in a folder called “FactoryRecovery”. By running “dir /AHS” the computer will list all files in a directory, including hidden and system files. While navigated to the directory you know the images are in, running “attrib -S -H /S /D” will remove system and hidden attributes from the files and folders. Now GImageX can see the image and recover it.

That was the end of a long recovery, if anyone has questions post a comment.

Windows Sudo

I am back at RPI, finishing up my degree. Recently I have been working on hour tracking software for several departments at RPI.

Recently I have run into a minor annoyance where I am in the command line in Windows and need to elevate a command or program so that I can do a administrative task. (Such as moving a file to the system32 folder), the normal solution is to right click command line short cut and “Run as Administrator”. While that works its not fast, I’m sure there are other solutions out there, but I wanted to quickly build on in .Net. I did this a while ago for Vista and called it elev, but never saved it and since I am trying to make the transition between Windows and Linux easier I called it sudo.

All you do is put this in your %windir%\system32\ folder, and then at the command line type “sudo cmd” or whatever command you want. Commands like “dir” are actually part of cmd not a separate file called so “sudo dir” wont show anything, it will output the .Net error.

Link to exe: https://github.com/daberkow/win_sudo/blob/master/sudo/sudo/bin/Release/sudo.exe

Link to project: https://github.com/daberkow/win_sudo

Quick Compare

I wrote a quick little program to solve a problem for me. If you have two algorithms in webpages and want to benchmark them to see the difference, the program will work for you. You add the the below code to a PHP page, or do he same thing in other languages, then the app will run as many times as you tell it to and find the result in time. To lower the time it takes to get a result, you can up the thread count. Averages are not returned till all threads return information.

Start of PHP Page:
$time = microtime(TRUE);
End of page:
echo "seconds " . (microtime(TRUE) - $time);


Download:
https://github.com/daberkow/QuickCompare/blob/master/WebTest/bin/Release/WebTest.exe
Git:
https://github.com/daberkow/QuickCompare/

Windows 8 Update

Windows 8 is just around the corner, and I have been using it for a few weeks. Most people look at it and don’t to try the new interface; but after using it for a while, I find that I am faster, and that my computer is faster on it. The Task Manager is much better for those who want to use it, you can get all data at a glance, and drill down to what apps are using which resources. I was told that if you have a screen under about 1300×700 then you can’t do the split screen action that larger machines can. Office 2013 preview is out, it allows users to install office over the internet in about 20 minutes, but it is usable in about 2. This is useful when setting up a new computer.

I was forced to reinstall my laptop, Toshiba Portege Z835-P330, the settings that the built in metro apps had automatically came back. Going back to the Windows Store and telling it to reinstall all the apps I had earlier in Metro was seamless. All the apps that were install in the desktop, including chrome, which bleeds over to metro, has to be reinstalled manually. The year is 2012, and by using Dropbox/Google Drive and logging into chrome reinstalling was painless.

The last note I want to make is that I ran into a weird Toshiba software bug, my laptop has an Eco program that tells the user how much power the laptop is using to the watt. I tried to install it and got “Unsupported Bios”; you have to first install “The Toshiba Value Pack”, then that puts core Toshiba files in and all of a sudden the eco tool will work.

Friend Blogs & IT Jobs

Blogs

Two friends of mine at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) have blogs as well, one is about college food, http://collegefoodie.com/; the other, is for Wine and related foods, http://quintessenceofmediocrity.blogspot.com/. The college food blog run by a contributor for this blog, Kevin Ung, @kevinung.

Jobs

Now that it is senior year of college for me, the job hunt has started. This year there was a good turn out for the Information Technology (and Web Science) program at the RPI career fair. There seems to be two types of companies at the career fair for IT, some know they want IT and what that entails; the other are companies that want Comp Sci but say they want IT. The latter, in their interviews tends to ask questions such as algorithms.

Many companies have rotation programs for IT students, these are designed to start with a generic student and train them in the organizations method and technologies. These programs tend to be 2-4 years, with 6-12 month rotations; ranging from databases to networking. Most of these programs also focus on creating managers out of these students, going back and forth between technology classes as well as management skills.

To any new IT students, I would recommend knowing what path you want to go down early on, do you want to be closer to general (broad) IT, or focus on the computer science components

OpenAFS @RPI Client

Recently I was told “I can’t remember anyone getting OpenAFS to work on their own”, by a staffer at my school. I took it on myself then to figure out how to get this working for students. And in the end I wrote an app that will automatically download and install the AFS client, then configure drives for you. This was an experiment in threading and using WPF instead of Windows Forms.

First the app goes and downloads the OpenAFS client, if it is a 64 bit machine it grabs the 32 bit tools first then the client. While downloading and installing these things it connects via SSH to a school server to get the location of the user’s home folder as well as verify the credentials given.

Once installation is complete the program runs ‘klog’, this goes to the AFS server and requests tokens in the cluster using the credentials given earlier. Once we are past the installing point all these actions need to be run on the campus network. When the program starts it tries to ping a couple internal servers, if it can hit more than half of them in under 75 milliseconds then it considers itself on campus; if it thinks it’s off campus, then it notifies the user. One small problem with the first release is sometimes this system gets confused by vpn taking slightly longer.

Now that we have working token the system recommends drive letters that are not in use as well as AFS spaces to mount including the users folder and ‘dept’ to start. The configure button will activate these drives, they are not set to persistent at this time.

Below is the github link, as well as the direct exe link:

Github: https://github.com/daberkow/RPI_OpenAFS

EXE: https://github.com/daberkow/RPI_OpenAFS/blob/master/OpenAFS%20Installer%20WPF/bin/Release/OpenAFS%20Installer%20WPF.exe

C#/.Net SSH Framework

I needed a SSH framework for a program I am writing for my school. There are quite a few out there for .Net but I ended up going with the one from http://sshnet.codeplex.com. It requires .Net 3.5 or 4.0, but its ease of use makes this not a problem. Below is a example of code using the pre-built binary for .Net 3.5, this code connects to a SSH server, then runs a command and stores the result in a string called ‘temp_holding’.

Renci.SshNet.SshClient MysshClient = new Renci.SshNet.SshClient(server, username, password); //these are varibles of strings
try{
MysshClient.Connect();
}catch{
//Something in here failed
return;
}
Renci.SshNet.SshCommand MyRanCommand = MysshClient.RunCommand(“pwd”);
lock (locker){
string temp_holding = MyRanCommand.Result;
}

Windows Mobile 6.1 PopUp Work Around

WM6.1 Internet Explorer does not have support for multiple tabs/windows. So naturally, it blocks all popups. However, some sites require a popup to authenticate or to advance on in whatever you are trying to do. Here is an example situation from http://www.everythingwm.com/forum/threads/wm-6-1-internet-explorer-popup-blocker.33238/

WM 6.1 Internet Explorer Popup Blocker?

Hope that someone can help me…. I have Q9c running Mindows Mobile 6.1 and I need to disable the pop up blocker but don’t know how to. I’ve been all through the phone settings etc. but can’t see whether the phone even has it!! I use online banking alot and when I get into it, and after introducing my username and password, a new window is supposed to open but this pop up window does not show up. Instead of this a message shows up saying ” your pop up blocker is activated”…
Any sugestions?? Thanks a lot.:wink:

Many suggestions were download a different browser. But nowadays, WM6.1 is being phased out and the browsers have become unsupported. A work around that I stumbled upon requires that you have a physical keyboard.

  • Use the arrow keys to highlight the button that will initiate the popup.
  • Hold down the return key (enter key) until the popup opens within a new window.

Internet explorer will look like it’s freaking out, but hey you’ve been advanced to the next step. Note this has only been tested out on the Motorola MC9090 Inventory Handhelds.

IPv6

As IPv6 starts to roll out more and more, and Windows to update more and more, it may be time to turn IPv6 back on your computer. I wanted to put a reminder out that the IPv6 Cleaner also has a tool built in to change the IPv6 setting of the machine. After changing the setting reboot and Windows will take the new setting. IPv6 Activator is the same code that runs in the 6to4 Cleaner, just as a standalone app.

The following options are avaible:

  • Enable IPv6 – Windows Default
  • Disable IPv6 except critical components – Use if card problem persists
  • Disable native IPv6 interfaces
  • Disable all tunnel IPv6 interfaces
  • Disable all IPv6 interfaces except for the IPv6 loopback interface

Download:

https://github.com/daberkow/daberkow.github.io/tree/master/6to4CardCleaner

Download:

https://github.com/daberkow/daberkow.github.io/tree/master/IPv6Activator