Monthly Archives: December 2012

General/Misc

Acer D2D erecovery corrupt

At a client location, I had to reimage an old Acer desktop computer. Installing it traditionally using the CD would have taken hours and then finding and installing the drivers. ALT+F10 usually works on Acers for factory restore but was not working on this computer. I checked in the disk management and the recovery partition was there. Using Hiren’s Boot Disc, I was able to mount the partition and see the files in it. Then the question was how to use it to restore, after a deep search on google, I followed these steps to make D2D work and do a factory restore:

  1. Confirm if the recovery partition is still there by going to Control panel > Administrator tools > Computer management > Disk management (Sometimes, a reinstallation or an attempt to do so may corrupt the partition)
  2. Once the partition is there, you can use any of those partition mounting tools available on the internet to mount the recovery partition and see if you are able to browse through the files and folders and also try to copy a file to your C drive to double confirm that the partition is okay and not only showing ghost files.
  3. If all looks good, browse the root of the recovery partition and you should be able to see these two files: mbrwrwin.exe & rtmbr.bin
  4. Now that all seems good, launch CMD and go to the drive letter of the mounted partition and type: mbrwrwin.exe install rtmbr.bin and hit enter. It will take some time and you will see some activity on the CMD window once finish, you can restart the computer and use the D2D recovery console.
  5. Immediately after you see the ACER logo on the screen, press and hold the ALT key on the keyboard and start tapping F10 until you see the Acer recovery wizard. You can follow the on screen prompts to recover your computer to the factory settings. One important thing to keep in mind is that it will delete everything on the C drive so you may keep your data on the D drive.

**This method has been tried and tested personally by me on 20 dec 2012 and found to be working. Before this, ALT + F10 was not working but worked on the first try afterwards.

Microsoft

Red X on network icon – Windows 7

Today I thought I should take care of this long pending issue of Network icon in the system tray showing a red x even though the internet is working and it is connected.

red x on network
Annoying Red X on network

After googling for some time regarding this issue, I discovered that uninstalling Oracle VM virtual box has helped people in this case. That reminded me that I did install virtaulbox when I was trying to make a virtual Xen server which was possible on Oracle VM virtual box.

uninstall virtual box
Uninstalling Oracle VM Virtual box

Without waiting any longer, I uninstalled Oracle VM virtual box as it was not being used any longer and BANG! the red x mark disappeared immediately.

red x gone
Red X gone

So the suggested resolution worked like a charm. Thanks google!!

General/Misc

TimeClock Plus 4: Not allowing to edit time

We recently did a network upgrade where we upgraded from Windows server SBS 2003 to Windows server SBS 2011. Client was using TimeClock Plus 4 to manage employee attendance which was successfully moved to the new server. There was no problem in accessing the old data or pulling out any reports and users were able to punch in/out normally. The issue surfaced when the supervisor tried to manually update the timesheet for an employee and the system didn’t allow that. Timeclock works in client server configuration where the server application is installed on the server and the folder is shared so that users could install the client application and mark their timesheets which happens on the shared folder on the server.

After reinstalling and reconfiguring, it still didn’t work. Here is what was happening:

    • Supervisor was able to edit the timesheet when done on remote desktop of the server and the changes were showing while accessing it elsewhere.
    • Supervisor was not able to edit when opened from shared folder.
    • The network share permissions were given to everyone.

I figured out that somehow the software is not able to edit the files from any other machine but the server (where we were connecting using remote desktop and administrator account) so changing the NTFS permissions was worth a try and VOILA! it worked.

I was able to fix the issue by adding the windows username of the supervisor to security tab of the shared folder. The issue occurred as the user did have full Share rights but no NTFS rights.