Random Synapses

I love Acronis TrueImage. It’s one of the essential CDs in my toolbox, always handy for backing up data on hard drives, cloning disks and saving a lot of time. Even Seagate is using a custom version of TrueImage for its hard drive installation tool.

By the way, if you’re into Open Software, my second choice is GPartEd – free and just as powerful!

Having cloned so many disks and systems before, today’s seemed to work as a breeze. After all, I was transferring the software between two laptops of the same model, from one with lower specs to another one beefed up with RAM and a bigger hard disk. On the new laptop, Windows started normally and needed drivers only for the new wireless network card. Perfect, right?

Wrong.

Double-clicking the “Safely Remove Hardware” icon in the System Tray returned the following error: “An exception occurred while trying to run Shell32.dll, Control_RunDLL
hotplug.dll”

At this time, I was fearing that either I’ll have to fix some crazy DLL by running sfc /scannow in command line (to check all Windows core files and restore them from the hidden repository) or by doing a repair install. I also suspected the RAM, although earlier tests proved it to be error-free.

Google came to the rescue by identifying a similar problem and its solution here. The explanation makes sense.

Basically, Windows adds in the Registry some code for each hardware component it finds. This also applies to the hard drive. After Windows is cloned on another hard drive, on the first start-up it will obviously detect the new hard drive and create another code for it as well. The problem is that, for some reason, this code is corrupted in the Registry, missing the invisible “Null” character at the end of the “Generic volume” text – the code marks the end of the text. Consequently, the new hard disk’s name is crippled, which in turn crashes the Safely Remove Hardware functionality implemented in the hotplug.dll library. So there, we know what’s wrong.

Why does this happen? It’s not clear to me (or even relevant) if it’s a bug within Windows that shows up only in specific circumstances, or if it’s a bug in Acronis TrueImage. Some people say that Acronis is actually inserting the code for the new hard drive into the registry of the Windows installation it’s cloning, but I find that hard to believe.

There are two ways to fix this, depending on your PC Power User skills and desire to assume risks.

The simple way to fix this is to delete the offending disk from Windows’ list of identified hardware components, restart the computer and let the operating system redetect it and add the code correctly. For this, you right-click My Computer and select Properties, then go to the Hardware tab and click the Device Manager button. Alternatively, go in Control Panel and open System. In the Device Manager window, enable Show Hidden Devices option in the View menu, then expand the Storage Volumes section below and find the offending drive there – you’ll recognize it because of the weird characters in its name, instead of Generic volume. The options now are to right-click on it and select Delete, or double-click the volume and click the Update Driver button in Driver tab, let it find a driver automatically, and restart the computer.

The more complicated way (and somewhat more dangerous) is to find the corresponding registry entry for this volume, double-click it to edit it, then just hit OK without making any changes to it. This will force the Registry Editor to add the missing Null character at the end of the text. More specifically, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\STORAGE\Volume\somelongcodehere and edit the DeviceDesc key – it should contain the name Generic volume. Restart the computer after finishing opening all keys for all volumes detected by the system.

Another day, another mistery solved The new laptop is a snappy little fella, and the cloning saved me probably 10 good hours of installing and configuring everything from scratch. Awesome!

I’ve got a couple of Dell Latitude C610 laptops with sufficient power in the 1 GHz Pentium III Mobile processor for playing a DivX video full screen. What they are particularily great with is power consumption, running easily for 2.5 to 3 hours on a full charge, and they’ve got room for two batteries each! Obviously, this comes at a cost: the weight.

But one thing drives me bonkers: one came with a 24x CDROM drive, and the other with a flimsy 8x CDRW drive. With the omnipresence of DVDs, these are annoyingly limited for reading and writing optical media.

Option 1: Purchase an external drive. A fair option I actually considered, however it would require a fully functional USB2 or FireWire port. The laptop has only one USB 1.1 port, and the extra CardBus USB2 controller is not very reliable for intensive data transfers.

Option 2: Purchase a DVD-RW drive from Dell. Not only these drives are expensive, but also very difficult to find. Over the years, Dell changed the removable tray format, so there’s no way I could find a brand new DVD-RW drive for the ancient Latitude C600-series laptop model.

Option 3: Purchase a standard slim DVD-RW drive and replace the existing drive in the plastic caddy. I managed to find a Pioneer slim DVD-RW drive for a very reasonable price (30€ give or take) which arrived in the mail today.

It was immediately obvious that the new drive won’t fit. Its front bezel is flat and square, unlike the extruded, rounded-corners bezel of the existing drives. It was also slightly wider, only by one or two millimeters, but enough not to fit through the hole in the caddy. The bezels from the old drives didn’t match the button position, nor did the clips securing them to the drive tray.

I decided that, instead of trimming the excess from the new drive’s plastic bezel, I could file off the caddy to make room for the new drive. This was a fairly easy job and didn’t take more than 10 minutes of carefully filing the plastic, beveling the edges and cleaning everything.

So, here’s the story of modding the Dell Latitude C610 CDROM tray to fit a standard slim DVDROM drive, in pictures.

The original drive in its caddy:

Note the rounded corners of the drive bezel:

New drive on top of the old drive, removed from caddy. See how the original bezel is shorter with two millimeters at the right?

After using a file to make room for the new bezel, this is what the modded caddy looks compared to the original:

Detail on the filed corners – not an extremely pleasant result, but it’s functional:

Mounting the original connector to the new drive:

Mounting the new drive into the modded caddy – perfect fit:

Caddy fully assembled, ready to be inserted back into the laptop. Miniature screwdriver on top was a must have tool for working with the tiny screws.

Any suggestions or comments would be greatly appreciated!

Man, what a nightmare this project has turned into!

I have never seen so many unexpected restarts and problems. I have gone through all the distributions — FreeNAS, ClarkConnect, OpenFiler — and ended up pulling hair with despair. Nothing worked, and the symptoms made no sense at all.

So, filled with hope for putting an end to this journey, I went back to installing Windows. It worked just fine before, so I should be thankful for having a solution, right?

Wrong. Windows was acting up just like the Linux and BSD distributions did. It installed and ran flawlessly. But if I dared turning it off during a weekend out of town, it wouldn’t start up again. It would reboot at some point before the GUI was initialized, then go in safe mode which didn’t work either, and so on. Can you imagine the frustration built up in so many hours of trial-and-error debugging, without getting anywhere?

At this point I am convinced it’s some hardware flaw. After all, this old Dell has lived a rich, long life; it’s time something gave in. Could be graphics mode, could be the interrupt table, power lines, fishy drivers, the need for a display or keyboard, another swollen capacitor… Frankly, I don’t care anymore. It’s been fun, but you gotta know when to draw the line.

So I’m again left without a file server. But not for long: one thing led to another and I ended up buying the core components of a new PC — motherboard, processor, cooler and memory. The new configuration was meant to be a testbed for a video surveillance system; video capture card is very picky about the hardware it runs on and must be tested first. The test was postponed, so I am now the proud owner of a top-knotch motherboard and low-power processor with a monster passive cooler. It’s so much more powerful than the old system, more versatile, and dead quiet — joy to my ears. Old hardware? That’ll be my file server, after the winter holidays.

Now, the question is, should I go back to square one and try out all those distributions, or just throw in Windows and enjoy the afternoon with the lads at the pub?

I have a small network set up at home, and a bunch of files I’d like to share easily without the need to keep my computer on all the time. Clearly, a file server is my solution, but there are 1001 ways to make one.

The obvious choice is to get a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. Lots of these are popping all over the market. Some are as simple as a hard drive in an external box with an Ethernet connectors, others can create redundancy over several hard drives and even run applications on their own.

Pros: they’re quiet and don’t eat up a lot of electricity.

Cons: oh boy, what a long list. The cheap ones require all computers to install some software, have limits in number of concurrent accesses and use the unreliable FAT instead of NTFS or some other file system. The more expensive ones have a severe problem with performance; RAID is incredibly slow, defining access restrictions is quirky at best, and I could go on for days.

If you want to go in detail about what’s available on the market, SmallNetBuilder.com site has an entire section dedicated to NAS.

So, about a year ago I rescued an old computer from a second hand shop. It’s a pretty decent Dell desktop, with enough juice to run a dedicated file server software, and then some. I maxed out the memory installed on it and added a fat hard drive with plenty of space. Then, I began looking around for software options. I crossed out Windows in a second, as it’s a resource hog and requires constant maintenance. I could install some decent Linux, but I dreaded customizing it for the role I had in mind. And finally, there are some specialized Linux/BSD distributions for file servers that caught my eye, all oriented towards simplicity of use and complete remote management through a friendly browser interface.

First to look at was OpenFiler, considering the reviews. All seemed nice, except it would play really well in a network with Active Directory or LDAP for managing accounts, and I really didn’t feel like tinkering with it to make it run one.

Next was FreeNAS, a BSD spin-off, which survived on this box for a few weeks. It’s weird at configuring drives and shares, and the account authentication is still problematic. Plus, I’m reading lots of posts about people losing data in the event of an upgrade. Not fun.

Now I’m downloading the recently released new version of ClarkConnect. It’s more than what I need, but I can “opt-out” on extra features. But even before I install it, the information available on it warn me that the particular Dell hardware I have may not be supported and may not work. Tut tut.

Worst case scenario, I’ll just get Ubuntu Linux (possibly Server) installed and running for what I need. At least with that one I know that I’ll have open possibilities and loads of help. But, for the sake of keeping resources low, I’ll end up fiddling with this as much as if I kept running Windows, if not more.

Looks like I’m going in circles. What solution would/did make you happy?

The first e-mail I have sent was sometimes in 1994, so I’ve been very much alive and active online for a whopping 13 years. I’ve got a fleet of e-mail addresses, a long list of forum accounts, and many logins for various online services. 9 years ago I was launching my own tentative of a site, on Tripod. Remember Tripod, Hotbot, Lycos, Netscape and all those buzzwords back then? Gosh I’m old.

One would think it had to happen sooner. Having an account hacked into, I mean. Nope. I think I defy statistics. This must be some sort of a record, to be so prolific online and only have the first intrusion today. And it wasn’t even something important — it was my 10 year old eBay account, which only saw around a dozen transactions over the years. How pathetic is that? Not even my Yahoo! account.

So here I am, talking with eBay customer support about unlocking my account, and unsure whether I should worry or laugh. I have no idea how it happened, since those principles that kept me safe so far have not been crossed. I’m thinking of an exploit on eBay’s site used to spam sellers with ads through the “Ask seller a question” option. This would make more sense than breaking my random consonnants and digits password, always changed less than a month ago. I mean, you’d probably screw up the login even if I spelled out the password to you, twice.

For the peace of mind, I just took a tour on my major accounts and gave them fresh, random passwords. The eBay account lock-out has been addressed within 3 hours. Now I think I’ll celebrate this glitch in a perfect score, the reminder that even with the best protective measures in place, mistakes do happen. It’s only natural, and it had to happen. Issue contained, damage insignificant, moving on.

Have you been hacked? How did you deal with it?