May 2008 Archives - scriptflipper.com Archive

Archive for May, 2008

XP stuck in Safe Mode

May 15th, 2008 | 1 comment

Some guy I work with brought in his home computer for repair that was absolutely taken over by spyware. Normally I don’t mind taking a look at friend and co-worker’s home computer for free, because usually it takes very little effort to clean up things, but this one I wish I wouldn’t have even touched.

It was a Dell Dimension 8110 that was so infected, it couldn’t even detect a USB drive so I could load some anti-virus software or establish an internet connection, even in safe mode. So I pulled out the HD to hookup to another machine to scan as a slave drive, it found a bunch of viruses and “repaired” about 50 problems. So I was hopeful that maybe it was in better shape to at least get some software installed. I installed the HD back into the Dell, to find out the Dell machine no longer could detect the Primary Disk 0 (hard disk). I tried severally different things, swapping out the IDE cable, making sure the jumper settings were correct, I even went as far as trying a different HD, no luck. So it led me to believe that maybe the IDE controller on the board was toast, I did some research and apparently it’s a pretty common problem and the only solution I found was to “wait it out, it will eventually start detecting the primary disk again”. I thought that was funny, so I pulled out everything from the board, and let it just hang out on my desk overnight. I came in the next day, put everything back together and it boots, no problem. Finds the HD and loads right up! unfortunately it was still taken over by spyware to a point where I decided to reinstall Windows.

Windows XP stuck in Safe Mode
This was where i ran into my biggest problem, while troubleshooting I had went into msconfig (Start -> Run -> “msconfig”) within the BOOT.INI tab and checked the /SAFEBOOT option under Boot Options, which basically sets the system to boot in safe mode without jamming on your F8 key while your system is booting. Problem was I never removed this option when I decided to re-install Windows. I came to find out, that although you completely reinstall XP it somehow keeps the bootcfg in memory and uses the options set in your previous installation.

So at the finally steps of the XP installation where your machine reboots and you are asked to set the language and all those settings, it would come to a halt and say “Windows XP Setup cannot run under safemode. Setup will restart now.” Which doesn’t really give you many options because this will happen each time you try to boot from your HD, since the XP installation is only partially complete.

Solution: change bootcfg options from Recovery Console

boot from the XP CD and into the recovery console.
Once you chose the number OS you want to repiar (usually 1) type in this command: bootcfg /list to see what was going on in the bootcfg.
Then enter the command bootcfg /rebuild and reenter the necessary info. If you’ve never done this, first you select the Windows installation to use and enter the corresponding number (default is “1″). Then it asks you to enter the load identifier. (Microsoft Windows XP Professional).
Finally, it will prompt you for the OS load options. Here you would type in:
“/noexecute=optin /fastdetect“(without the quotes). Restarted the machine, and the setup continued normally.

Right now I’m reinstalling all his Dell drivers and migrating all his Documents and Settings back to the new installation. It’s been a nightmare with this Dell, and this guy is probably missing his computer, but at least it didn’t cost him anything and now I know that the bootcfg does not get reset during a fresh installation of XP.

Insufficient access privileges

May 11th, 2008 | 2 comments

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After recovering my Macbook Pro using the OS X Archive and Install. I had to manually restore all my documents and settings by dragging and dropping everything from the Macintosh HD/Previous Systems/Previous System 1/Users/mike to my new user’s directory.

Once I got everything in place I was having trouble working with my files on my admin account. I was unable to make changes or rename the recovered files, without giving “Everyone” Read & Write access through the Get Info menu, which obviously wasn’t the solution.

For example when trying to rename a directory; Users/mike/Sites/PSD I would get this Error Message:

Although when I checked the info of the PSD directory, it looked fine (see below):

So OS X was contradicting itself because it was telling me “You Can read and Write” but at the same time telling me “You do not have sufficient access privileges to rename the item “PSD”. I tried a series of things as far as running the Repair Permissions within the Disk Utility, creating a new admin account to try to reset all the permissions enclosed within the Users directory. Nothing was working.

So since the notebook is very new, I still have some free telephone support from Apple so I gave them a call. Spent about an hour on the phone with Tech support and we finally got it working. Here are the steps that we took.

Boot your system from the OS X 10.5 install disk. To do this put the install CD into your computer, restart the system while hold the “c” key on your keyboard. This will force a boot from CD.
Once you select your language from the Installation wizard, you will notice the menu bar appears at the top of the screen, from here go to Utilities > Password reset.
From this screen, select your user account from the combo box. Then without entering a new password, go down towards the button and you will see a “Reset” button that will reset this accounts Privileges and ACL libraries.
Once this is done you can Quit the OS X Installation, and reboot your system to your HD. You may need to remove the CD from your machine.
once the machine boots, open a Terminal and enter the following two commands, entering your password when prompted. (be sure to replace “Mike” with your own Short Name)
- sudo chown -R Mike ~
- sudo chmod -R 755 ~
The last steps are simple, open up Macintosh HD/Users then command+click on your Home directory (in my case this was mike) then go to Get Info. In the info screen, Make sure the admin group is in the list, if it’s not then add it with Read & Write Access. Also change everyone in the list to “Read & Write” access temporarily. Then click the tiny Gear icon to and chose “apply to enclosed items” which will apply these permissions to all the files within this directory.
Once this is set, go see if you can now make changes to the files. If so then your just about done, you need to only go back into the Get Info screen you were just in for your home directory and change the permission of “Everyone” to Read Only access. Then Apply to enclosed items again.

Hope that works for anyone else having similar insufficient access privileges. After doing a bunch of research on this problem it appears there is quite a bit of issues out there with permissions on OS X Leopard, so if this did not help take a look at these two links:

Macbook Pro Recovery

May 7th, 2008 | 5 comments

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Last week my Macbook Pro crashed. It would hang on the startup screen with the Apple logo and the spinning gear for about 5-10 minutes then restart it self, and continue to loop. The culprit may have been a recent firmware update from Apple, but I have a hunch it had something to do with me messing around with the permissions on the HD.

Ever since I setup Leopard I was having problems installing software on my main admin account, mike. So I made an alternate account to install software, I figured this had something to do with permissions, so I decided to try adding a custom permission on the entire Macintosh HD to allow “mike” Read & Write permissions. It took like 20 minutes for the permissions to apply to the enclosed items, after it finished I rebooted, and was never able to recover.

Steps to Recovery
First thing I tried was the obvious, Safe Boot, which is Mac’s equivalent to Microsoft Window’s Safe Mode. To do this as soon as you power on your computer start holding the Shift key down. I had no luck with Safe boot, so I was hoping I could boot to CD still in order to run the Disk Repair utility thats built into the startup disk that came with my Macbook, or at the very least reinstall the operating system.

To boot from CD, the steps are similar to Safe Boot only as soon as you power on your computer start holding down the “C” key, once your CD is in the drive of course. This was successful, So I proceeded to load the startup disk. Without Clicking next on the Setup Wizard I chose Utilities from the Menu at the top of the screen and went into the Disk Utility. From here I was able to run a “Disk Repair” and also a “Permissions Repair” both returned no errors, so I was pretty sure the problem wasn’t fixed.

I eventually came to the conclusion I needed to reinstall OS X. Although I didn’t want to lose all my files and settings only thing I wouldn’t be able to recover was my Thunderbird e-mail and folders. As i started the setup wizard I notice the installation method chosen for me by default was called “Archive and Install” after doing some research I discovered OS X will make a directory of all your user’s files and settings from any previous installations of OS X. This is completely new to me, when reinstalling Windows everything will be erased during the re-installation, unless you chose to do a repair install, which I guess may be similar to the Archive and Install. Anyways the installation took a little over an hour, when I was finally up and running again I opened Macintosh HD to find a directory named “Previous System 1″ that contained all my users’ directories, and application folder. So I was able to drag and drop the contents of my old Libraries folder, Documents and Applications over to my freshly installed OS.

So everything is back and better then it ever was. I can now even install software on my main user account. Only problem I had was with Adobe Photoshop CS3. Apparently if you do an Archive and Install on OS X, then the system doesn’t copy the Adobe Unit Types file to the ScriptingAdditions folder, you can read more details in this Adobe Technote.

Conclusion
After this experience I will no longer procrastinate setting up Time Machine to get a backup of my system as frequently as possible. I also know that if all else fails, the Archive and Install method works great and makes it simple to recover files and settings from a previous installation of OS X.

Trick your iPod during software update

May 3rd, 2008 | 1 comment

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This afternoon I decided to restore my iPod Mini back to default factory settings. During the process iTunes suggested that I “Upgrade my iPod to the latest software” so I went ahead and answered yes to the upgrade. After a couple seconds all I seen was a little “plug iPod into the wall charger” icon thing.

After doing some research, apparently to complete a software upgrade on most iPods you have to plug your iPod into the wall charger. This is so the iPod doesn’t die mid-firmware flash, in result turning your iPod into nothing but an expensive paperweight. Probably a good call on Apple’s part, but what if you don’t have a wall charger handy? In most cases you would be out of luck.

Besides the obvious (borrowing a wall adapter) there is a surprisingly simple solution. If you’ve ever looked closely at a FireWire or USB cable you’ll notice that two of the pins stick out a little farther than the rest. Those are the pins that carry the electricity to charge the iPods while the other prongs are used for data transfer (right?).

The Fix:
Trick is if you plug in the USB or FirmWire (while the other end is connected to the iPod) into the computer just a little bit so only the two charging pins touch the accompanying pins on the computer, you should be able to fool the iPod into thinking it’s a wall charger. The firmware will update, and you’ll have a working iPod again.