Monthly Archives: May 2007

HP Compaq nx6125 or Agency Series laptops boot wacky…

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HP Compaq nx6125 or Agency Series laptops boot Windows XP wacky, due to weird drive geometry.

I had a customer’s machine, an HP Compaq nx6125, also known as an HP Agency Series HSTNN-C12C. The hard drive was failing, so naturally, it needed to be imaged to a new drive and replaced.

I yanked the drive, used Ghost on another PC to image the drive to an image file, then drop the image on a good one. Then, I installed the good one in the laptop. It would not boot. All I got was a blinking cursor.

Naturally, I thought that there was some sort of weird boot sector issue, so I booted to the Windows XP CD and used both FIXBOOT and FIXMBR, to try to correct this. No joy.

I then tried some tools to extract the boot sector from the failing, but booting, hard drive and then write them to the working drive. No success. Next, I tried googling the issue to see if anyone else had this problem. The answer is YES, but noone found a proper solution, or at least they didn’t report their findings.

For giggles, and to isolate some weird kind of “this machine requires it’s original install discs to do something weird to the boot sector” issue, I tried a clean install of Windows XP on the good drive. The machine booted into Windows. AH HA!

My guess was that the laptop has some sort of weird hard drive geometry configuration, so I checked the BIOS. It wasn’t any help. It’s one of those “this is an OEM machine and you are a stupid user so we disable access to any and all useful techie settings because we don’t want you to break it you idiot,” types of BIOS. So, I pulled a solution out of my a**. If a clean install of Windows creates a proper boot sequence, and the files I want are on the old drive, lets just do a clean install, and then overwrite the new drive’s files with the customer’s data.

I began a Windows installation on the new drive, and just after the second part of setup came up, you know, the GUI part, I shut the machine off. Then, I yanked the drive, and attached it and the old drive to another machine. I then used Microsoft’s ROBOCOPY tool with the /MIR, /W:0 and /R:0 switches to forcefully overwrite ALL the files on the new drive with those from the old drive. This gives me the customer’s data, OS, programs and everything, but this time with a working boot sector.

Put the new drive back in the laptop, and voila, it boots up to the customer’s installation. Everything is hunky-dory.

I love being a technician.

I witnessed death

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I had an appointment just south of Utica Ohio at a local concrete wall contracter. I was just finishing up work on the computer there, when I heard a screech and a crash. Both I and the owner swung around and looked out the front window of his business and we saw dust in the air.

“That sounded like a wreck”, I told the owner. We both rushed out and up the street a ways to find a car accident.

We ran up to the yard, where the owner of the property was already calling 911. A truck driver somewhat involved in the accident was on his cellphone with the dispatchers. An old man went to work on the collapsed pine tree, rending branches from trunk, trying to clear a path to the car. Me and the business owner, along with several other people helped clear the tree debris. An off duty EMT just happened to be follwing this young man directly behind the accident. He reached in the car and took a pulse. The driver was still alive, barely.

One minute and thirty seconds later, the Utica Fire EMTs were on scene. In a couple minutes heavy machinery showed up. The jaws of life were pulled out. Doors and hoods came off. Roofs were splayed back in unatural directions. The driver was not moving.

MedFlight arrived. They landed in a field directly across from the scene, a field almost uncannily the perfect size for the roaring green helicopter to land. Their technicians jumped out and aided in the driver’s extrication. But it was too late.

Andrew Richards was drving northbound on Ohio 13. He was driving too fast, playing music too loud, and was paying too little attention to his driving. He attempted to pass a tractor-trailer, overcorrected when he returned to his lane, hit an embankment, flew up 10 feet in the air sideways and snapped a pine tree in half. And his car. His life was cut short just days before his high school graduation.

I witnessed death today. I wish I never do again.

Article on the Newark Advocate

Unable to start RPC Service

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If you get Could not Start the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) Service. Error 2: cannot find the file specified, it’s probably because you are missing svchost.exe from the C:\windows\system32 directory. Running sfc /scannow or copying the file from a working machine should do the trick.

For your security, some settings are controlled by Group Policy

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Nifty trick found today while trying to diagnose a Windows firewall issue, getting error “For your security, some settings are controlled by Group Policy”

  1. Click Start, Run and type Regedit.exe
  2. Navigate to the following location:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \Policies \ Microsoft \ WindowsFirewall

  1. Backup the key and then delete the WindowsFirewall branch.
  2. Close Regedit.exe and restart Windows.

Thanks to this site.