Archive for March 31, 2014

Toshiba Satellite P50-A PSPMHA-01D00L Won’t turn on.

If you have this model laptop and it won’t turn on, possibly charge light will be stuck on or off but won’t change state when you plug it or unplug it, the solution might be simple.

On the base of this unit, just near the headphone socket, is a small hole about about the size of the head of a pin.

Push something about 5mm long into this hole and your computer should reset. (Paperclip, earring, strip the plastic off a cable twist tie…)

Icy Box USB3 PCI Addon Card Driver

If you have one of these, and can’t find the driver, try http://www.raidsonic.de/en/products/ac-controller.php?we_objectID=6873

Cloned SSD for Dell causes capacity issues.

Just a quick note on lessons learned while installing an SSD in an old Dell laptop.

The original drive was 80GB, the SSD 120GB.

After cloning the SSD (Samsung Evo 840) claimed it was also now only 80GB, even to Windows’ Drive Manager, Linux’ Disk Utility, etc. There was no way to access the extra 40GB.

It seemed that this was due to the HPA in the drive; so I tried instructions such as http://superuser.com/questions/552833/set-max-address-failed-input-output-error but always received SET_MAX_ADDRESS failed: Input/output error on both a Live USB and a legit Linux Mint desktop machine where the drive was connected to SATA. (I had expected the latter to work.)

In the end, I had to take the drive to a Windows XP PC, and run “HDD Capacity Restore Tool” from http://hddguru.com/software/2007.07.20-HDD-Capacity-Restore-Tool/ which in a few seconds had the problem solved.

I am yet to return to the customer to repeat the process since I didn’t have a desktop PC with me at the time. It is clear now that the problem doesn’t actually happen until the drive is booted in the Dell laptop, and the Laptop’s custom boot code fiddles with the HPA in the drive.

Thanks go to http://www.techsupportforum.com/forums/f16/hard-drive-got-smaller-after-clone-595634.html#post3405099 user fzabkar for clearing up this little mystery which took away four hours of my life 🙂

It remains to be seen if running FIXMBR will solve the issue permanently – will update this post in due course.

 

Classic Shell Not Bypassing Windows Metro Modern Interface at startup.

G’day 🙂

Sometimes – particularly when you upgrade Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 – you will find that Classic Shell no longer skips the Metro startup screen.
This is true even if you go into Classic Shell settings – Windows 8.1 Settings and tick “Skip Metro Screen.”

You might be able to work around this by instead telling Windows to skip the Metro screen and instead boot to the traditional desktop. To do this:

1 – Right-Click some empty space in the Task Bar. (The thing with the clock on it.)

2 – Click the “Navigation” tab.

3 – Try ticking the “When I sign in or close all my apps, go to the Desktop instead of Start” and / or “Show my desktop background on Start.”

Hopefully, problem solved 🙂

 

TrueCrypt Windows Search not indexing index location not shown.

Problem: truecrypt drive is not indexed in Windows Search on Windows 7 or Windows 8

You may also find that in Windows 8 when you open “Indexing Options” from the start menu, your Truecrypt drive is not shown,

Reason: Windows search enumerates the available drives at boot. You need to stop and restart the service after mounting your truecrypt volumes in order for them to be available.

Workaround:

Create a batch file in your user folder with the following entries:

—–

“C:\Program Files\TrueCrypt\TrueCrypt.exe” /a favorites /q

net stop wmpnetworksvc

net stop WSearch

net start Wsearch

net start wmpnetworksvc

—-

Create a shortcut to this in your Startup folder, and change the properties to “Run as Administrator”