Windows 7 – Basic Troubleshooting For BSODs, Random Crashes and Lockups

I can barely remember the last time I had to troubleshoot the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) on a Windows system. But, as luck would have it, I have been suffering from a spate of random freezes, lock-ups and BSODs for a few weeks now on my Windows 7 x64 box.

I did try installing some freeware that looked at the few mini-dump files that these crashes left behind but the diagnosis was not very helpful. I also updated all of my drivers and even installed all the ‘recommended’ updates from Windows Update in the hope of fixing something.

I didn’t want to reinstall Windows without knowing the cause and that turned out to be a good decision. I had to learn a few new tricks to track down the problem though.

The first thing that I did was to install the Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 4. I installed the Debugging Tools for Windows which installs WinDbg which we can use to analyze Windows mini-dumps from crashes and BSODs.

Run WinDbg as an administrator and then click File and then Open Crash Dump. Browse to C:\Windows\Minidump and open a .DMP file. When prompted to Save information for workspace click No.

At this point you will see basic Bugcheck Analysis and you can click the !analyze-v link to view detailed debugging information.

Depending on your problem this might be enough to point you in the right direction – but I found that the crashes and BSODs that I was experiencing were not often creating mini-dumps. When my computer blue-screened it automatically rebooted and I could not read the BSOD either.

To try and get some more information to troubleshoot we can adjust the following settings in Control Panel and Windows Services.

In Control Panel click Advanced System Settings in the left pane then click the Advanced tab followed by the Settings button in the Performance section.

In the Performance Options window click the Advanced tab and then click the Change button in the Virtual memory section.

Make sure that the Automatically manage paging files for all drives check-box  is checked.

Click OK until you get back to the System Properties window and then click the Settings button in the Startup and Recovery section.

In the System failure section make sure that Write an event to the system log is checked and un-check Automatically restart. In the Write debugging information drop down menu select Small memory dump. Amend the Small dump directory to %SystemRoot%\Minidump.

Click OK and exit the Control Panel. Do not restart your computer just yet.

Click Start and then type services and then press the Enter key.

Scroll down to Windows Error Reporting Service then right-click it and select Properties from the menu. Set the Startup type to Automatic and the click the Start button to start the service.

Click OK and reboot your computer.

Now that we have taken care of error reporting we can configure a Windows driver verifier utility called verifier.exe.

Driver Verifier is included in Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 to promote stability and reliability; you can use this tool to troubleshoot driver issues.

Click Start and then type verifier.exe and then press the Enter key.

Click the Create custom settings (for code developers) radio button and then click Next.

Make sure that Standard settings, Force pending I/O requests and IRP Logging are all checked and then click Next.

Click the Select driver names from a list radio button and then click Next.

Click the Provider column header to sort the drivers and then scroll through the list and check all listed drivers except for Microsoft Corporation.

Click OK and reboot your computer.

At this point I found that my computer BSOD during boot and the BSOD identified dtsoftbus01.sys (a component of Daemon Tools Lite) as the problem.

So I booted into Safe Mode and uninstalled Daemon Tools and was surprised that this was the fix for weeks of BSODs, system freezes and crashes. I let verifier run on my system for 24 hours (without any further issues) before turning it off.

If you cannot boot in to your computer because of BSOD while verifier is running you can turn it off in Safe Mode.

Run verifier and then select Delete existing settings and then click Finish and reboot.

I was quite surprised that one piece of software could cause so much trouble and variety of symptoms. It was well worth going through this process to isolate the problem. If I had reinstalled Windows I would have most likely installed Daemon Tools again and been back to square one.

I had been using Virtual Clone Drive instead of Daemon Tools for a little while because of some issue that I cannot now remember – but had been a long time user of Daemon Tools until now.

Many thanks to karlsnooks and the Windows Seven Forums for pointing me in the right direction here and here.

 

Windows 7 – Joining .mp4 Files Together Using The Command Line

I was looking for some freeware to join two .mp4 files together (because VirtualDub would not do it) and I stumbled across a handy command line option.

Open a command prompt and type something similar to this:

copy /b "C:\File.mp4" + "C:\File1.mp4" CombinedFile.mp4

This is great and simple option – and no installation required!

Source: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1375818

 

How To Create A Virtual Floppy For VMware vSphere

Last week I needed to create a virtual floppy disk to load drivers for a Windows XP Virtual Machine (VM) during the boot process. This is not a scenario that crops up too often – but in this case I wanted to restore a physical Windows Home Server backup into a VM.

I downloaded the 30 day trail version of WinImage and created a virtual floppy with the drivers that I needed as follows.

Click New and then accept the defaults for a virtual floppy:

If you want to create folders in your virtual floppy click Image then Create folder:

To add files click the Inject icon:

Browse to the location of the files you want added to the virtual floppy and select them to add them:

Here you can see that I have multiple folders created each with a different set of drivers:

To save your virtual floppy click File and then Save As:

Type a file name for the virtual floppy and add the .flp file extension to the file name.

This allowed me to take the vSphere Windows XP drivers from a VM that was backed up on WHS and put them in a virtual floppy. With the virtual floppy I was able to boot the WHS restore CD in VMware vSphere are restore a physical Windows XP WHS backup to a VM.

It’s a handy way of moving WHS backups to a VM so that you can “retire” a backup from WHS to vSphere and make room for other machines to back up.

 

Hotmail Not Working In Firefox – Windows 7

I just experienced an issue with Firefox 5 on Windows 7 where I could no longer navigate Hotmail.

Clicking on emails did nothing and clicking on mail folders also did nothing. Quite a few people seemed to be experiencing the issue and the fix for me was to simply clear the Firefox cache:

Click the Firefox button at the top left and then click Options and then Options again.Click Advanced followed by the Network tab and then click the Clear Now button to clear the offline cache. Restart Firefox.

 

Ubuntu Server 10.4 Lucid – Backing up Feng Office 1.7.4 (Community Edition)

The Feng Office Wiki has instructions for backing up the Feng Office installation folder and the MySQL database. This can either be done with scripts and a cron job or with a plugin that allows for configuration via the Administration web console and a cron job.

In this post I will look at the scripts and cron job – I intend to look at the plugin later on.

Backing up Feng Office for me this means backing up /var/www/feng_community as well as the fengdb database.

In my previous post I mounted a share on my Windows Home Server in Ubuntu Server using the following mount point /mnt/whs-backup.

Note: Your Feng Office installation folder, database variables and backup destination may differ so adjust them as required.

To run a nightly backup I need two brief scripts, a secure file that contains the MySQL username and password, and two cron entries to run the backups.

Update: In the comments potion pointed out that the cp command does not file owner/group or permissions. So I have added his suggested scripts for the tar command.

Here are the explanations of the tar switches used:

-c, --create               create a new archive
-f, --file=ARCHIVE         use archive file or device ARCHIVE
-x, --extract, --get       extract files from an archive

Note: the following two scripts are saved in my /home/username folder.

The first script will back up /var/www/feng_community:

Original script:

#!/bin/bash sudo cp -R /var/www/feng_community /mnt/whs-backup

Tar script:

#!/bin/bash
today=$(date '+%d_%m_%y')
sudo tar -cf /mnt/whs-backup/"$today"_feng_community.tar 
/var/www/feng_community

I saved this file as backup-feng-community.sh

The second script will backup the fengdb database and query a secured file /etc/fengdb.cnf for MySQL credentials:

#!/bin/bash
mysqldump --defaults-extra-file=/etc/fengdb.cnf fengdb >
/mnt/whs-backup/fengdb.sql

I saved this file as backup-fengdb.sh.

Now we need to make these two scripts executable:

chmod +x backup*.sh

Create a file called /etc/fengdb.cnf:

sudo nano /etc/fengdb.cnf

Add the following lines using your MySQL fengdb username and password:

[client]
host = localhost
user = fenguser
password = yourfengdbpassword

In nano press Ctrl + O and then Enter to save and then Ctrl + X to exit.

Secure /etc/fengdb.cnf as follows:

sudo chmod 600 /etc/fengdb.cnf

At this point we could execute the two scripts manually and backup Feng Office to our Windows share.

To automate the backup we use cron. This is what my cron settings look like (my two scripts are set to run everyday around 1am).

# m h  dom mon dow   command
15 1 * * * /home/username/backup-feng-community.sh
*  1 * * * /home/username/backup-fengdb.sh

Change username to your Ubuntu Server username.

To edit your cron settings use the following command:

sudo crontab -e

You can use my settings or you can easily generate your own cron settings using the online cron generator.

If you have configured Feng Office to communicate with email accounts such as Gmail be prepared for the backup of /var/www/feng_community to take a little while (depending of how many email and attachments have been downloaded).

As with any backup we also need to know how to restore the backups. For this we need two scripts. The first I named restore-feng-community.sh:

#!/bin/bash sudo cp -R /mnt/whs-backup/feng_community /var/www

Tar command:

sudo tar -xf /mnt/whs-backup/*_feng_community.tar 
var/www/feng_community

In the tar restore above the * refers to the date of the backup.

The second script (to restore the MySQL database) I named restore-fengdb.sh:

#!/bin/bash
mysql --defaults-extra-file=/etc/fengdb.cnf fengdb <
/mnt/whs-backup/fengdb.sql

Again, make both of these scripts executable:

chmod +x restore*.sh

For the record I did test the restore process before posting! Please take precautions when you test restoring your backups (and make sure that you change the appropriate variables in the scripts to match your environment).

Sources: Feng Office Wiki, serverfault.

 

Ubuntu Server – Mounting a Windows Share Using the Command Line

When I started writing this post I wanted to mount a Windows share in Ubuntu and backup files from Ubuntu  onto my Windows Home Server (WHS).

Since then I have begun looking at other options like TimeDicer and rdiff-backup - so I have not decided yet on which path I will take to backup /var/www directories and different MySQL databases.

Nevertheless I did succesfully get a share on my Windows Home Server (WHS) mounted, as follows.

First I chose to create a new user on WHS called vmbackup and this process created the vmbackup user share //WHS/Users/vmbackup.

Now on to the steps that we need to complete on Ubuntu Server.

I like to use nano to edit files on Ubuntu Server – and you can install nano as follows:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nano

Because I want to backup to a Windows share I also need to install the Samba filesystem:

sudo apt-get install smbfs

The next step is to edit the /etc/hosts file and add a reference that points to my Windows PC:

sudo nano /etc/hosts

The IP address of my WHS is 192.168.0.50 so I added the following line to my /etc/hosts file:

192.168.0.50 whs

In nano press Ctrl + O and then Enter to save and then Ctrl + X to exit.

Now create a local directory that we will use to map our WHS share to:

sudo mkdir /mnt/whs-backup

To mount the Windows share we need to edit /etc/fstab with the path to the Windows share and the local mount point as follows:

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Add the following line to /etc/fstab:

//whs/users/vmbackup  /mnt/whs-backup  cifs exec,credentials=
/etc/cifspw,rw,uid=ubuntu-username 0 0

Note that the above line points to /etc/cifspw for credentials for mouting the Windows share. Also note that the uid refers to your Ubuntu Server username. If you do not include a uid and username then only the root user will have write permissions to the Windows share.

Create the /etc/cifspw file:

sudo nano /etc/cifspw

Enter your credentials to the Windows share:

username=vmbackup
password=password

Obviously you will need to specify your own username and password.

Secure /etc/cifspw as follows:

sudo chmod 600 /etc/cifspw

Mount the Windows share with the following command:

sudo mount -a

At this point reboot Ubuntu Server so that it can pick up permissions for the Windows share:

sudo reboot

Quickly check that you have write permissions as follows:

cd /mnt/whs-backup
touch text.txt

You should be able to create the test.txt file without any issues.

Hopefully this will help you is you are having issues mounting a Windows Share in Ubuntu.

Sources: industriousone and the Ubuntu Forum,

 

How To Download a Picasa Web Album Without Installing Picassa

I recently got sent a link to a Picasa album online and wanted to download the whole album without having to install Picasa.

The solution was to install the DownThemAll add-on in Firefox and use that to download all of the images in one go.

These instructions are for Firefox 4.

Click the Firefox button at the top left hand side of the Firefox window and then click Add-ons:

In the search bar at the top right hand side of the screen type down them all and then press Enter.

Scroll down and click the install button that belongs to the DownThemAll add-on:

Restart Firefox.

Next goto the Picasa web album that you want to download (for me this involved simply clicking on a link that I was sent in an email).

On the right hand pane click on the RSS link:

Right click and select DownThenAll from the menu:

In the DownThemAll window you change change the destination directory if you want to – otherwise just click the Start button to begin the download:

This worked for me and was preferable to installing some software that I would otherwise rarely use.

 

Windows XP – Virus Removal Again

Today I had to troubleshoot a virus infection on Windows XP for a relative … the virus stopped any executable file from opening and also disabled Antivirus software, made changes to Automatic Updates, Firewall and proxy settings.

The first thing that I did was to run a virus scan using an Ubuntu Live CD as detailed here.

The scan cleaned some files but alas the infection remained.

So I downloaded the free version of Malware Bytes on another computer and copied it to a jump drive. Because the infected computer would not open .exe files I changed the file extension of the Malware Bytes setup file to .com by renaming it.

I had to open My Computer and then click Tools, Folder Options followed by the View tab and then un-check the Hide extensions for known file types check-box to be able to change the file extension:

With the Malware Bytes download renamed I could install it on the infected system.

I then had to change the file extension of mbam.exe located in C:\Program FIles\Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware\ to mbam.com to run the software.

This helped deal with the infection quite well but the browsers had proxy settings that prevented them from connecting to the internet.

In Firefox 4.x I clicked Options, Advanced, Network [tab] then the Settings [button] followed by the No proxy radio button.

In Internet Explorer I clicked Tools, Internet Options, Connections [tab] then the LAN settings [button] followed by the Automatically detect settings check-box. I also unchecked the Use a proxy server for your LAN check-box.

The next issue to deal with was the Windows Security Center alerts for Windows Update and the Firewall – both of which were set to be monitored by the user.

Security Center told me that Automatic Updates are not yet configured for this computer and when I clicked on the button to enable them I was told  We’re sorry. The security center could
not change your automatic updates settings.

I changed the settings through the Control Panel but the Security Center alert would not go away. I found the solution here – simply click Start and then Run and enter the following one at a time and then click OK. Wait for the confirmation before entering the next command:

regsvr32 wuapi.dll
regsvr32 wuaueng.dll
regsvr32 atl.dll
regsvr32 wucltui.dll
regsvr32 wups.dll

This took care of the alerts for Automatic Updates – the next step was to re-enable the Windows Firewall.

To do this I clicked the Recommendations button under Firewall in the Security Center. I then unchecked the I have a firewall solution that I will monitor myself button and clicked the Enable now button for the Windows Firewall.

I also reinstalled AntiVirus software (which sadly was not enough to prevent the infection in the first place).

 

Installing FreeNAS 8 on VMware vSphere (ESXi)

FreeNAS is an Open Source Storage Platform and version 8 benefits not only from a complete rewrite – it also boats a new web interface and support for the ZFS filesystem. It is also worth mentioning that FreeNAS supports Advanced Format drives (something that my Windows Home Server does not).

The features of ZFS are many but it is the data integrity and large capacity support that caught my attention when I first started to ponder alternatives to Windows Home Server (WHS).

The other ZFS contender that has piqued my interest is Nexenta whose community edition has an 18TB limit (although you can run the Nexenta Core version with a community developed GUI without any storage limit). One key difference to be aware of (and these will be moving goalposts) are the versions of ZFS that both of these projects are running. At the moment, for example, it looks like FreeNAS does not support de-duplication of data while Nexenta does.

FreeNAS is designed to be run from a flash drive which is nice in that all of your hard drives can be dedicated to storage. A 1GB drive is recommended as the minimum requirement and this can hold several FreeNAS images – so you can roll back to a previous installation if you experience troubles during an upgrade for example. I will be installing FreeNAS to a 1GB virtual hard disk instead.

I have yet to decide between FreeNAS and Nexenta yet – but for today wanted to get the ball rolling installing FreeNAS 8 in VMware vSphere 4.x.

First download the FreeNAS 8 .iso and copy it to your vSphere datastore.

Create a new virtual machine and specify the following Guest Operating System properties – Other and FreeBSD (64-bit).

I configured 4Gb of RAM with the default LSI Logic Parallel SCSI controller with a 1GB vitrual hard disk.

Finally point the virtual CD-ROM of the virtual machine to the uploaded FreeNAS .iso and boot the virtual machine:

Press 1 to begin installation:

Press Enter to install to default device:

Press Enter again to install to the VMware virtual disk:

Press Enter again to confirm installation to hard drive (installation to USB is the preferred method for FreeNAS but this is not practical on ESXi):

Wait for FreeNAS to copy the image to the virtual drive:

Reboot the virtual machine:

As you can see there are various options for configuring FreeNAS when it boots. For now I will take a quick look at the Web interface.

Open Firefox and browse to the IP address of your FreeNAS installation (as detailed in the previous screenshot).

Use admin for the Username and freenas for the password.

Welcome to the FreeNAS interface!

As you can see there are plenty of options available to configure FreeNAS and (now that installation is complete) that will be the topic of a later blog-post.

 

Windows Home Server – Once Upon a Failing Hard Drive

A few of days ago I began experiencing multiple error messages with a failing hard disk on my Windows Home Server (WHS). Dealing with a bad drive can be a pain – particularly with the downtime experienced – but it is for scenarios like this that I like to have duplication turned on for all my WHS folders …

The first sign of trouble was that my Media Center could not access and files on WHS. I checked Event Viewer and found lots and lots of disk errors like this:

The device, \Device\Harddisk2, has a bad block.

The Event ID was 7.

At this point I was already anticipating that I would probably have to replace the drive. For good measure I ran chkdsk /r to check all my drives and rebooted.

Then I started to see tons of errors that looked like this:

File record segment 10001 is unreadable
File record segment 10002 is unreadable

Once these had finished checkdisk started to repair these issues but that process hung so I had to give up on that.

At this point I turned my WHS off until the replacement drive arrived (I added the drive to the storage pool without any issues).

As I mentioned earlier I have duplication turned on for all my folders on WHS – for me it is a small price to pay for being able to have WHS rebuild my data from the duplicate files and get me back to where I was without too much fuss. It does however take a while to do this.

With a new drive installed I set about trying to remove the bad drive from the storage pool. Event Viewer told me that it was harddisk 2 that was having issues and thanks to my previous organization this was drive 2 in my tower connected to Sata cable number 2 on my motherboard.

I was also pretty sure that harddisk 2 was the second disk listed in the Storage tab of the WHS console – but I was not 100% confident as I had other drives with the same name listed in my storage pool too. So I downloaded and installed the free version of HDTune to double check. Sure enough the second drive in my HDTune list did not respond when I tried to list it in HDTune. HDTune let me get the serial numbers for all the working drives and by a process of elimination I used this to double-check the problem drive (I have the serial numbers written on the rear of each drive so that I can see them when I open the case).

I hoped to be able to remove the problem drive with a few clicks in WHS but I found that WHS could not remove the drive due to “file conflicts”. So I shutdown and physically disconnected the drive.

With the drive disconnected I rebooted WHS and tried to remove the now missing drive from the pool. Again I got an error message about file conflicts. I had a look around and saw that WHS was calculating sizes in the Storage tab (which I figured that was to be expected). However, when I clicked on the Network Critical button I found that I was getting an alert for each folder that contained files from the ‘missing’ drive that I had removed. I had to wait for WHS to work through all the files and folders that it expected to see on the missing drive before it would begin removing the missing drive from the storage pool.

Even then this process failed due to file conflicts. The culprits I found were my Media Center and the online backup software that I had installed on WHS. I shut these both down and rebooted WHS and finally the missing drive could be successfully removed.

The drive that I removed was a 2TB drive and it took a long time for WHS to repair itself. I probably had about 5 days of downtime in total which is far from great.

Having WHS repair itself from folder duplication saved me a lot of hassle though as there is nothing like trying to organize a couple of TB of files from a backup.

The only thing that I lost were the backups of my Windows computers. I plan to install an add-in called Windows Home Server Backup Database-Backup (BDBB) so that I can backup my backups to a network share on another machine and/or enable duplication on my WHS.

For now I am just happy that WHS did its job. Folder duplication can be a life saver when a drive fails – but I still have a backup (offsite) of my most critical data.