Archive for category Brain Busters

Aagh, The Serenity

Posted by Ken Thompson in Brain Busters, Journal, The PCs That Kevin Built, Work on April 11, 2009

Finally some time to relax; the past week has been more than hectic. I got all my new gear last Friday night and thus spent all weekend Iincluding Monday which I had off work) painting the internals of my new case, assembling everything and the majority of the time unsuccessfully truobleshooting the issues that I came across. At the end of the weekend I had 2 non-functioning, yet assembled computers.

I was planning to get some work done on these during the week, but work was insanely busy with a critical issue we had with our primary domain controller. For some reason, when any user attempted to log on it was a lottery whether the domain controller would respond properly and load their profile and security settings over the network. It was functioning to the extent it would accept/deny a user for the correct username and password; but beyond that it was pot luck whether the computer would pull down security / profile settings, scripts etc. You could get it working by restarting the PC / logging on and off, as many times as required to make it work…there seemed to be no logic in the problem or solution what so ever. I ended up sounded exactly like the guys from The IT Crowd, “have you tried turning it off and then on again?”.

Fortunately I resolved the problem via use of dcdiag.exe and also by setting up a secondary domain controller on a virtual machine. I resolved several issues using dcdiag.exe and then troubleshooting individual problems, but a key problem we had was that the schema for our domain was not a 2003 schema, even though we are running a 2003 domain. We upgraded our domain from 2000 to 2003 in mid February, part of which you have to run forest and domain preps to upgrade the schemas from 2000 to 2003 before the upgrade; without this the upgrade installation will not continue. Which puzzles me, as the upgrade needed the upgraded schema before installing…yet this week I find that the schema was not the appropriate version. Anyway, while setting up a VM as a domain controller it would not join itself because the schema was incorrect which was the only way I found out about this. After upgrading the schema as well as fixing a few other errors all my domain login issues dissapeared…which was great, I didn’t have to spend all day restarting and re-logging people in until it magically worked!

Anyway, back to the computers, I am still reinstalling my gamer and server and have a heap of photos etc of the whole process which I will put up later in the weekend as well as a bit of documentation on the process and problems encountered…time for another beer.

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Installing XP on a Dell Inspiron 1525

Posted by Ken Thompson in Brain Busters, Work on March 30, 2009

Dell Inspiron 1525 - Red

I just got a new work laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1525. Pretty snazzy little unit, with a red cover making it as fast as a Ferrari…well maybe not that fast.

Specs:

  • Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 Duo Processor T6400 (2GHz/ 800 FSB/ 2MB Cache)
  • 4GB DDR2 SDRAM Memory
  • 320GB Hard Drive
  • 15.4″ Widescreen WXGA (1280×800) TFT Display
  • Intel® Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator X3100 Graphics Card
  • 8X DVD Burner
  • Dell™ Wireless 1395 802.11g 54Mbps Wireless Mini Card
  • AverTV DVB-T Tuner Card

The laptop came with Vista Home Premium 32bit and while I like Vista, I am going to put on XP Pro as this is the OS we utilise at work. So it will be better for any error replication I might need to do and guarantees that everything will be compatible with work systems (as we have some custom made programs / database packages). Not to mention being able to log onto the domain, which Home versions of Windows cannot do.

So after hunting around for a correct version of Windows XP Pro with a valid key it was time to install, but I ran into a hiccup. Windows XP setup could not find any hardware drives. The problem here is that it comes factory defaulted to have AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) enabled. You can rectify this be either slip streaming the SATA drivers for the Dell’s HDD into the installation, or add them during setup with a floppy (which it doesn’t have, and XP doesn’t support adding them from USB). But that’s too much mucking around for my liking and AHCI is going to give me no benefits. So I simply disabled this in the BIOS and set the drive to perform as a normal ATA device. Before you can do this I had to disable “Flash Cache Module”, which basically turns part of your HDD into a “flash disk” so it can be used with Windows Vista’s ReadyDrive to supposedly increase read speeds and reduce battery drain. But because I’m not using Vista this won’t be an issue what so ever.

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Trouble installing Office 2007 on Windows XP Pro SP3

Posted by Ken Thompson in Brain Busters on March 25, 2009

This is the first of many posts in my “Brain Busters” category, which will be documenting all the horrendously stupid problems that I encounter with computers that aren’t simple fixes. The kind that take a bit of detective work, and hopefully by documenting them I can save someone else out there the headaches in trying to get to the bottom of the same problems.

I have just reinstalled my  eeePC with XP Pro (That will definitely get it’s own Brain Buster article later…what a PITA!) and during it I thought it would be a good idea to streamline Windows XP Pro SP3 into my installation, seeing as though the installation disc I have is only SP1. All was going swimmingly, I installed all the updated drivers which improved my battery life quite a bit as well as some study programs to use over the weekend in preparation for my 70-290 Exam. That was until I tried to install Microsoft Office 2007, which in one word, FAILED!

When installing, the installation would continually just stop and start rolling back installation, with no other explanation than:

The Windows Installer service cannot update one or more protected Windows files

Worn out from work and vegging on the couch watching TV while doing all of this; I just didn’t have the brain power to try and work out what the issue is, so I just started doing stuff without any thought what so ever. I figured it must be my virus scan software preventing a file from being modified, so first disabled it; no success. Then I uninstalled it; no success. Then I tried installing in safe mode; no success.

Finally I decided there wasn’t any easy fixes to this problem and I would actually have to start the brain going and work it out. I opened up Event Viewer to see if I could find something in there, which i did:

Source: MsiInstaller
Type: Error
Description: Product: Microsoft Software Update for Web Folders (English) 12 — Error 1933. The Windows Installer services cannot update one or more protected Windows files. SFP Error: 21. List of protected files:\r\nc:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\40\bin\fp4autl.dll

So finally we are on to something, I open up windows explorer to go and have a look for the file…which doesn’t exist. So obviously it can’t modify a file that doesn’t exist, but just spits back at you that its “protected”. So I set about finding where I can find this file and stumbled across this Microsoft Support Article. It indicates that you can find fp4autl.dll in a cabinet file on the XP installation cd; \i386\Fp40ext.cab. So i extracted the specific file from that cabinet to the directory it needed to go in. When I ran installation again, it was a complete success and installed perfectly!

I suspect from the file name and location that it is a Frontpage file that generally gets installed with Windows XP. But because I had streamlined the SP3 into my installation, it must not install it for some reason. When Office 2007 installs, as it has Frontpage, it tries to update this “system” file. But because it doesn’t exist, it can’t, and therefore installation halts. A simple fix in the end though.

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