tools

Restoring Base Image of my Dell Latitude E6400 from my WHS and NIC driver pangs

kellyb — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:49:50 GMT

My company issued me a new Dell Latitude E6400. It’s a fine machine, and I like it very much. Yesterday our system tech hands me the machine brand spanking new with our base company image on it (Windows 7 Enterprise – 64 bit). My plan was take the image on this machine and copy it to the solid state hard drive that I have in my personal laptop. I don’t need this Lenovo T61, but it’s got a blazing fast SSD in it and I want to use that – not this old school SATA thing that came w/ my dell. So my plan was this:

Get the machine completely up to date in terms of Windows Updates
Install all of the common stuff that I require on all machine. Basically, all of this stuff, minus the developer tools – this is what I call a “base image” for myself
Back up this “base image” to my Windows Home Server – this should give me a restore-able snapshot in time that essentially hardware agnostic.
Remove the solid state hard drive from my T61 and install it as my main hard drive on my E6400
Restore the base image onto this solid state drive and… presto – new machine running on my solid state hard drive and using my “base image”
Install all of my other software, take another backup at that point, and then happily go on about my life

For those of you who are not familiar with Windows Home Server, the above scenario is not magic. This is a pretty common thing – I’ve done this many times before.

The problem I had today was I could not for the life of me getting the WHS Restore Disk to recognize my network adapter. I’ve never had this issue before with other machines I’ve restored. I simply booted up w/ the restore disk, it found the hardware it needed (essentially the NIC and your hard drive(s)) and it just worked. This time, when I reached the “Detect Hardware” screen, the WHS Restore software couldn’t find my network adapter. Without connectivity, there’s no way to restore from the WHS. Luckily, the Restore software gives you the option to insert a USB Flash Drive or Floppy at the Detect Hardware screen. It will let you provide drivers if you have them. That’s nice, but you have to find the right drives that will work w/ the Restore software. I spent several hours last night working on this with no success. This morning I found the solution. But first, the things I tried that didn’t work:

I put the original hard drive (issued from my company) back in, and cherry picked the drives from C:\Windows, copied them to a USB Flash Drive, rebooted into the Restore software, and let it scan the flash drive. Result: Still couldn’t find the NIC
With WHS you can “open” an image. In other words, when I backed up my Dell in bullet 3 above, WHS will let me open this open and copy files from it. This is a pretty wicked feature. It essentially creates a mapped drive on the PC you’re using to talk to the WHS, and lets you copy from it. In my case, it looked like this:

So, following the advice in this forum, I tried copying the drivers from this image (because I know those drivers worked w/ this hardware before I got into all this restore stuff). I did the same copy-to-flash-drive-then-reboot-then-scan-for-drivers dance, the result: Still couldn’t find the NIC

I gave up for the night. After a good night’s sleep and mentally shifted back to the basics. I know the NIC works when running under Window 7 64bit Enterprise. What’s different now? Well, it’s not Window 7 64bit Enterprise that’s trying access the NIC, is it? This is the WHS Restore software. Ok, what is that? It’s obviously some tiny little version of Windows. Then it dawns on me, I’m barking up the wrong tree. This probably has nothing to do with 64 bit. I highly doubt this tiny little version of Windows is 64 bit. It’s most likely a little version of Windows XP if I had to guess. The Restore disk doesn’t have default drivers for my hardware. That’s a shame, but it happens from time to time. And, I’ve been trying to feed this this thing 64 bit drivers, which it doesn’t like. This forum I referenced early eluded to this a bit by advising to copy both System32 (32 bit drivers) and SysWOW64 (64 bit drivers). For whatever reason, it didn’t like those drives (32 bit or 64 bit). I’m guessing it didn’t like them because these are the Windows 7 versions of the drivers.

Here’s what I did to fix this. According to Dell, my NIC is a Intel 825xx Gigabit Platform LAN Network Device. I googled around for drivers, and the normal shady sites came up. Then I realized that Dell.com had versions of these drivers for both Win 7 and Win XP/Vista and 32 and 64 bit versions of each. This supported my theory and made good common sense. So, I did the following:

Downloaded version 9.52.25.2, A02 of the Intel drive from dell

Extracted this install and copied the entire contents to my USB Flash Drive

Downloaded version 9.6.31.0, A02 of the Intel driver the from dell – this is from 2007, but it should be XP friendly (at this point pretty confident that’s what I need to be shooting for to make the WHS Restore software happy)

Similarly, I extracted this install and copied the entire contents to my USB Flash Drive

Afterwards, my Flash drive looked like this:

I rebooted into the WHS Restore software, let is scan my Flash Drive, and it found one of these drivers! After loading these drivers it was on my network and it could find my home server. I’m not sure which driver it ended up loading, but it found one it like and I was able to continue with the restore wizard. Within 13 minutes, my base image was restored to my solid state hard drive and my company laptop was ready for business. The problem is solved, but now I’m late for work… gotta get in the shower!

I hope this helps somebody else out there

Using Fiddler - No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it

kellyb — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 14:58:32 GMT

Fiddler is a great tool for inspecting HTTP traffic. If you’re building a web services based application or AJAX intensive web application, you’ll need to check this out. Fiddler has been around for a long time and there’s a lot of good content out on the net about how to use this. There are several gotchas with this tool – like how it behaves with local addresses (i.e. localhost, 127.0.0.1, etc.). Be sure to read up on all of that if you’re new to Fiddler.

One lesson I learned today while playing with the latest CTP of ADO.NET Data Services, is disable IPv6 in the Fiddler options. Having this enabled seems to result in “Connection to localhost failed. Exception Text: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it” errors for local addresses. Like so:

Disable IPv6 in the Fiddler options seems to solve this.

Looks good now:

Hope this helps someone else out there

Software List

kellyb — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:48:08 GMT

I’ve been maintaining the list of software on my Windows 7 Paving – New Base Image Software List from some time ago. The original intent of that post was to itemize all of the applications that worked w/ the beta of Windows 7. I was using that post heavily for building out new machines. Windows 7 is now in the wild now and there are very few applications left that aren’t compatible. I’m going create a new post that simply itemizes the software I run and why. I’ll keep this current are my world changes

Software	Thoughts
Windows 7 Ultimate	The best Microsoft OS I’ve ever used. Enable the following features Internet Information Services (IIS) Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ)
Windows Sync	I used to be running Mesh, but it was too I/O heavy and I really don’t need anything more than synching – so I moved to Windows Sync.
Password Agent	It’s my long-time favorite password manager and I couldn’t live without it. I use Windows Sync to keep my .pwa file synched to all my machines. Works like a charm.
Virtual Clone Drive	I’m finally leaving Daemon Tools – it said it supports Windows 7, but it didn’t for me. This package as steadily gotten shadier and shadier (constantly trying to install crap-ware, etc.). I’m happily using the free version of Virtual Clone Drive.
TextPad 5	I’ve been using this as my primary text editor for over 10 years. I’ve tried to use Notepad++, Notepad2, SciTE, UltraEdit, etc. but I like this one the best TextPad Tweaks: Change the global font to Consolas 13 pt. Change the “Selected” color to lime green
Launchy	I used SlickRun for years, but I moved this years ago for my quick launch needs. It’s great
Chrome	I love Chrome, but until they have an extensibility model and catalog like Firefox, Firefox will remain my primary browser. Regardless, I like having it around
Firefox	My primary browser for all the obvious reasons Mandatory Extensions: IETab AdBlock Bit.ly Del.icio.us Firebug Shareholic User Agent Switch
Media Players and Plugins	Silverlight Adobe Flash Foxit PDF Reader - I stay away from Adobe Reader… it’s a pig Windows Media Player Plugin for Firefox
Core Development Tools	Visual Studio 2008 Team Developer + SP1 Remap the following keys: F1 – AttachToProcess F7 – Rebuild Selected Project Ctrl+F7 – Rebuild Solution ASP.NET MVC .NET Memory Profiler ReSharper TortoiseSVN VisualSVN SQL Server 2008 Developer Gallio TestDriven.NET Microsoft Silverlight 3 Tools for VS 2008 SP1 Silverlight Toolkit - Release: July 2009 Expression Blend 3
Misc Development Tools	ClipPath Reflector Snippet Compiler Sysinternals Suite BeyondCompare
Paint.NET	I don’t use this much these days with Windows 7 because of it’s nifty new Paint program that handles PNG’s and does precise cropping. I like to have this installed regardless.
WordWeb Pro	I love having this handy at all times on all my machines. I can lookup any word while using any program with a quick key combo
Windows Live Writer	The best blogging client there is on Windows Install this plugin as well: Insert Code for Windows Live Writer
Office Ultimate 2007	Save As PDF for Office 2007 Live Meeting 2007 Add-In for Outlook
Virtual Box	This is the best VM software I’ve found for personal use. It’s free… it’s fast… and it’s stable.
iTunes	I wish I didn’t have to, but it’s kind of a must with my iPhone, peer pressure, etc.
Windows Home Server Console	I run a Windows Home Server at home (life saver) and this is the client software that goes with it.
Trillian Pro	I finally gave this a try and I dig it. It vastly simplify my IM life.
Skype	Stellar VoIP client
Evernote	I never thought I would ever abandon my paper notebook, but I did. This isn’t the best note taking app out there (that would be OneNote), but they have a great web app version of this, an iPhone app, and a Windows client… and they’re all linked together and synch automatically. That’s hard to beat. The iPhone app is what killed the paper notebook. I just don’t need it anymore
7zip	Fastest zip app there is out there
VirtualBox	This kicks the crap out of Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 SP1. You can run VirtualBox on Windows 7 flawlessly, and you cannot with VPC! It’s just as good as VMWare Workstation, but free.

FileHelpers

kellyb — Mon, 04 May 2009 10:36:51 GMT

I saw a link to this FileHelpers Library today while reading my blog list. This is very interesting – from their site:

The FileHelpers are a free and easy to use .NET library to import/export data from fixed length or delimited records in files, strings or streams.
The idea is pretty simple:

You can strong type your flat file (fixed or delimited) simply describing a class that maps to each record and later read/write your file as an strong typed .NET array

The Library also has support for import/export data from differents storages like Excel, Access, SqlServer, etc.

I’m going to use this one day – I almost certain of that.

Escaping Virtual Box Full Screen Mode on Windows

kellyb — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 01:20:52 GMT

This morning, I had Virtual Box in full screen mode on my Windows desktop, and I forgot the keystroke to get out. The typical key combos didn’t work. Strangely, I couldn’t find anything on Google or Virtual Box’s user guide that told me how to get out of full screen. Of course, it tells you how to get out when you go to full screen mode, but if you don’t pay attention (or forget), good luck finding it after the fact. Luckily, I have Virtual Box on my laptop as well, so I had a backup.

So anyone out there looking for it, that stumbled across this post… here ya go: Host + F (Host = Right-Ctrl)

Loving Virtual Box

kellyb — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:32:04 GMT

Over the years, I’ve switched between VMware Workstation, VMware Server, Microsoft Virtual PC, and Microsoft Virtual Server for my Virtual Machine hosting platforms. A friend of mine recently suggested checking out VirtualBox from Sun. I was somewhat hunting for a new platform because I no longer own a VMware Workstation license, and the free version of VMware Server has went completely web based which I found very difficult to use. I’ve tried to like Virtual PC, but Microsoft has seemed to abandon this product and fully investing in their Hyper-V technology. I’ve heard great things about Hyper-V, but it’s not laptop friendly (i.e. it disables Windows hibernation, and requires 64bit Windows Server 2008 OS). Microsoft Virtual Server is a solid product, but it too is web based, which I just don’t like for personal use.

VirtualBox is free, fast, solid, and feature rich. It supports everything you’d expect, as well as USB. It’s not web based which I love, and they seem to roll out new builds nightly. I’m very happy with this product, and it looks pretty nice too. I’d be happy to pay 50-100 bucks for this, but 0 is fine too.

2009 – Base Personal Image

kellyb — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 02:07:07 GMT

Some time ago I wrote a post called Base Personal Image. I wanted to write an update to that, but decided it would be nice to have it in it’s original date for historical purposes. So, I’m writing a new post and stamping it with the year.

Here’s the topology of my setup

The staple of my setup are Windows Live Mesh (this replaced Folder Share for me – now called Windows Live Synch). This is what ties everything together for me.

Core

Windows Vista SP1 with IIS
.NET Framework 1.1, 2.0, 3.5
AVG Free Anti-Virus
7-Zip – the fastest there is
FireFox 3.0
Foxit Reader - stay away from Acrobat... it's a dog
Windows Search 4.0
Google Talk
Office 2007 Ultimate
- Save as PDF add-in for Office
Windows Live Messenger
TeraCopy – RoboCopy-like features from the Windows Shell
Windows Home Server Console – available for download from your Windows Home Server

Power Using

Cropper
Paint.NET
Launchy - this replaced SlickRun for me when Launchy released a plugin model along with a "Runner" plugin (which does just about everything SlickRun does).
Windows 2003 Resource Kit Tools (Robocopy)
TextPad
Notepad2
Sysinternals SuiteDisk
ClipPath
Daemon Tools
Password Agent
WordWeb
Texter - I need to post on this one. This is a niche utility that I don't use all that often, but very nice in certain common situations. It has its quirks though.

Backup and Recovery

Mozy – I use to have Mozy running on all of my machines, but since investing in a Windows Home Server – I only use Mozy at my office
Keep Vault – I use this to backup my entire Windows Home Server
Windows Live Mesh – Mesh runs on all of my machines. I use it to synch a few other things, but I primarily use it to keep my Password Agent password file in synch across all of my machines. This also backs up all of my files to the cloud and makes them web accessible.
Backup Magic – For simple Backup operations

Media and Entertainment

Development

Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite
Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite
ReSharper – Invaluable refactoring tool for Visual Studio
MbUnit
TestDriven.NET
CodeSmith - I barely use this one anymore, but it still makes the list
SQL Server 2008 Developer Edition
.NET Reflector
SnippetCompiler
TortoiseSVN
Subversion
VisualSVN
.NET Memory Profiler – It does everything you could ever want in the world of .NET memory profiling, for a small price tag… and the documentation kicks the shit out of Ants and dotTrace

Family Tech Support

When my family calls with a PC problem, I use CrossLoop (free and usually works) or Copilot (for the rare occasions when CrossLoop won’t connect)

Universal Drivers, Codecs, etc.

TechSmith Screen Capture Codec - commonly used on web screencasts

Right-Click Goodies

kellyb — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 02:20:00 GMT

Here are two of my favorite right-click goodies I use on all of my machines.

Setup

You first need to register cscript.exe as your default scripting host with Windows. To register it with Windows, run this from a command prompt: cscript //H:cscript

Build .csproj Files by Right-Click

Save these into an ANSI text file with a .reg extension and double click them for Windows to import these into your registry

Visual Studio 2008

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.csproj.9.0\shell]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.csproj.9.0\shell\Build Debug]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.csproj.9.0\shell\Build Debug\command]
@="cmd.exe /k \"C:\\WINDOWS\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework\\v3.5\\MSBuild.exe %1 /t:build /p:Configuration=Debug\""

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.csproj.9.0\shell\Build Release]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.csproj.9.0\shell\Build Release\command]
@="cmd.exe /k \"C:\\WINDOWS\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework\\v3.5\\MSBuild.exe %1 /t:build /p:Configuration=Release\""

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.csproj.9.0\shell\Rebuild Debug]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.csproj.9.0\shell\Rebuild Debug\command]
@="cmd.exe /k \"C:\\WINDOWS\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework\\v3.5\\MSBuild.exe %1 /t:rebuild /p:Configuration=Debug\""

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.csproj.9.0\shell\Rebuild Release]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.csproj.9.0\shell\Rebuild Release\command]
@="cmd.exe /k \"C:\\WINDOWS\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework\\v3.5\\MSBuild.exe %1 /t:rebuild /p:Configuration=Release\""

Visual Studio 2005

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.csproj.8.0\shell]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.csproj.8.0\shell\Build Debug]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.csproj.8.0\shell\Build Debug\command]
@="cmd.exe /k \"C:\\WINDOWS\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework\\v2.0.50727\\MSBuild.exe %1 /t:build /p:Configuration=Debug\""

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.csproj.8.0\shell\Build Release]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.csproj.8.0\shell\Build Release\command]
@="cmd.exe /k \"C:\\WINDOWS\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework\\v2.0.50727\\MSBuild.exe %1 /t:build /p:Configuration=Release\""

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.csproj.8.0\shell\Rebuild Debug]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.csproj.8.0\shell\Rebuild Debug\command]
@="cmd.exe /k \"C:\\WINDOWS\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework\\v2.0.50727\\MSBuild.exe %1 /t:rebuild /p:Configuration=Debug\""

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.csproj.8.0\shell\Rebuild Release]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.csproj.8.0\shell\Rebuild Release\command]
@="cmd.exe /k \"C:\\WINDOWS\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework\\v2.0.50727\\MSBuild.exe %1 /t:rebuild /p:Configuration=Release\""

Build .sln File by Right-Click

Same as the .csproj goodies about, but for solution files.

Visual Studio 2008

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.Solution.9.0\Shell]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.Solution.9.0\Shell\Build with MSBuild]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.Solution.9.0\Shell\Build with MSBuild\command]
@="cmd.exe /k \"C:\\WINDOWS\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework\\v3.5\\MSBuild.exe %1\""

Visual Studio 2005

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.Solution.8.0\Shell]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.Solution.8.0\Shell\Build with MSBuild]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.Solution.8.0\Shell\Build with MSBuild\command]
@="cmd.exe /k \"C:\\WINDOWS\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework\\v2.0.50727\\MSBuild.exe %1\""

Right-Click Delete SVN Folders

This one from Jon Galloway give you a shell command to recursively delete .svn and _svn folders in the selected folder – go get it here.

Customizing the Windows XP File Open Dialog with Direct Folders

kellyb — Fri, 09 May 2008 04:00:00 GMT

Ya know the class Windows XP open file dialog? This thing...

That left hand nav bar looks so interesting, but it's not. Well, it might be interesting for people who frequently open files from the Desktop without double-clicking them from there. I rarely, if ever, do that. However, I would love to be able to create my own entries in that left hand nav area. There's a short list of about 5 locations that I FREQUENTLY open files from that need to be located deep in some folder structure of my own creation.

I wrote about TeraCopy and Direct Folders from Code Sector a few days ago, and today I was able to explore Direct Folders a bit more and I stumbled upon quite a gem. Direct Folders lets you customize the open file dialog in exactly this manner.

This...

Produces this...

I couldn't be more thrilled about this freature. Why Microsoft doesn't delivery native features like this with Windows, I don't know.

TeraCopy and DirectFolders

kellyb — Tue, 06 May 2008 04:00:00 GMT

I love utility software. I love software vendors like Moon Software, that produce targeted utility software like Password Agent and Backup Magic. I was reading Jon Galloway's blog the other day and found his write up about TeraCopy from Code Sector. TeraCopy has some nice features beyond what Windows gives you, such as restartable copies, but it also make Vista tolerable when copying files. It's a must have for Vista users or anyone that like RoboCopy.

While snooping around Code Sector's site, I found DirectFolders. I'm downloading it now, so I can't speak to it personally, but it like a very handy Windows Shell extensions that gives you a lot of nice quick-find capabilities for commonly used directories on your file system. Here's a short screencast that shows off what it does. This looks enormously useful.

These two utilities look like they might make my short list of utility software along with SlickRun and ClipPath.