We got a used (pre-owned?) server today at work so we could quickly deploy Team Foundation Server in our DMZ for collaboration with an outside firm. I was tasked with setting this beast up using a bunch of volume license stuff we bought and downloaded today (this has to be up by Monday, so I can't wait for disks to arrive in the mail). Well, I downloaded Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard from Microsoft's OpenValue website and burned it to CD-R with the "Microsoft Corporation.img" file in the boot options so it could boot normally. You know, the usual pain-in-the-butt for any non-OEM Server 2003 image you put together with fancy updates.

Well, right after the installation sequence would finish loading drivers but before it asks you to "press F8 if you sign your first born over to Microsoft" I kept getting a BSOD, and the error was UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME. Now, on the google, there are many, many articles on this issue. But it all revolves around a particular update that may happen on XP after a service pack installation. Generally, the solution is to use the Recovery Console because something got messed up in the boot record.

This wasn't my problem. Afterall, this was an empty hard drive (I just freshly wiped it using Active@ KillDisk from my handy-dandy Windows PE "rescue disk").

The problem was I was barking up the wrong tree. The hard drive was fine. The unmountable boot volume was the CD itself. I found this out because when I popped in a TechNet Windows Server evaluation disk, it went right to the Windows installation screen, past the UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME error.

Now, I'm not sure if the cause was a bad CD-R, bad burn, corrupt download, or if I just forgot to include a folder in the ISO, but whatever it was, it was the installation disk, not the hard drive.

I dug through an old dusty box in the back of the server room, past the cobwebs, and found a volume license Windows 2003 RTM CD from the year 2003 (not even SP1 yet) and was able to install the operating system on the server and upgrade to SP2 and R2 after the fact. Okay, it wasn't in a dusty box. It was actually well organized in a CD booklet of server disks. :-)

Hope this post helps somebody else barking up the wrong tree. Your drivers and hard disk might be fine. It might be your installation disk!

Mystery solved.

I just got a new computer at work. It runs Windows Vista (finally) and Office 2007. This is a completely fresh install from a corporate deployment image (no prepackaged adware). The deployment image did not have Office included since we run a mix of 2003 and 2007 here currently. So the Office installation is even more fresh.

Despite this, I ran into a really weird bug. Anytime I tried to open Excel files by using Explorer file association (ie, double clicking on the target file, instead of using File->Open menu within Excel), I would get the following error...

My first thought is permissions. I double checked. They were correct. Okay what's the problem? I opened the file from WITHIN Excel. It worked! Very strange.

I searched the google on the internets and found this post. Apparently, there's an advanced setting in Excel that can interfere with file association opening. Very odd. Click on the office "pearl" (the circle button in the upper-left corner of Excel), then click on "Excel Options." From there, click on "Advanced," scroll down to "General," and uncheck "Ignore other applications that use Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE)." (March 21, 2008 - Thanks to Shrivmather, in the comments below, for pointing out a mistake in the preceding paragraph. It has been corrected.)

I'm not sure I understand entirely why this setting prevents files from opening by association, throwing a "File Not Found" error. Maybe somebody can explain this to me? Well, the solution works, so mystery solved here...

I was a fan of the original 1980s series, Knight Rider. I tried very hard not to get my hopes up on the TV movie / backdoor pilot that aired last night, because I've been disappointed in the past. The 90s, afterall, brought us such wonders as Knight Rider 2000 (meh...), Knight Rider 2010 (huh?), and Team Knight Rider (AGH!). For Knight Rider fans, the 90s were teh suck. Like The Hoff singing level of suck. Yes, that bad. The 90s killed the Knight Rider, then buried it, then dug it up, then spat on it, then buried it again, then dynamited the bural ground, then spat on it again, then buried it one more time before dumping the contents of a porta-potty ontop of it.

But you know what? This new Knight Rider was actually pretty good! Sure, it did have its moments of being a big Ford commercial, but was the original Knight Rider any less of a commercial for Pontiac? It's all in good fun. It pays the bills too, afterall. And when Ford makes a Mustang that actually gets 167 mpg and drives itself, I'll be lining up to buy it!

Speaking of which, KITTstang was cool. I've read a lot of people bitching that KITT wasn't a classic or concept Camero or Firebird (or some other GM), but really, we've been down that road before. Remember that red thing in Knight Rider 2000? Okay, maybe it was a cool car in its day, but it doesn't have the "wolf in sheep's clothing" sorta thing going on. I don't know. It just wasn't as cool as the original Trans Am KITT. And before that red thing in the movie, he was some classic something. I don't really remember, I just remember he shot Scotty with some sort of stun gun. Anyway, the point is, GM doesn't have a Camaro/Firebird right now to sell, Ford wants to sell the Mustang, so get over it. KITT's a Mustang now.

Now, the series did have its flaws. (What fun would a blog post be without some know-it-all complaining about something?) I was not very excited about Michael Knight Junior (a.k.a. Mike Traceur) at first. His character grew on me by the end, though. They tried too hard to make him the dumb muscle / comic relief / smart hero all rolled into one waaaay too quick. It took MacGuyver-er-Jack O'Neil many seasons to get that going where it worked on Stargate SG-1, so they shouldn't have tried to force it so hard in this short movie. Bad writing. Very FORCED character development. By the end he was less "comic relief" and more just saracastic bantering with KITT, which fit better with the "Knight" loner / hero persona they should have been going for. Second half of the movie, his character worked. When Mike started kicking ass at the casino, it was the first time I could see him settling into the new Michael Knight persona. The writers blew the first hour of character development there. Also, if this becomes a series, his racing car sidekick mechanic buddy comic goofball needs to go. Quickly.

Second, was it just me or was Sarah Graiman a lesbian at the beginning of the movie and then pining for her true-lost-love Mike at the end? Or did losing Mike all those summers ago turn her off men? Actually, at the beginning, I was excited because I thought that meant they weren't going to do any tired predictable sexual tension between the two since she might not swing his way, but, alas no. Those two had to have a past and bring out the predictable cliches. Thanks, NBC. I guess Sarah is bisexual. I wonder how that will work out if this becomes a series? Seems kind of useless and tangential to what people want to see: Mike and KITT kicking ass. Make her go back to doing women exclusively and let Mike just be a loner on a mission with no ties. Please!

Third, nano robots? Why is that such a popular theme these days? They did that in the new Bionic Woman too. Old KITT was bullet proof without little robots! At first this whole nanotechnology stuff made me wince. Of course, it's probably more plausible than the advanced AI that KITT is, but the growing a double spoiler out of thin air just gave me flashbacks of Team Knight Rider's motorcycles. AGH! Stop! My brain! It hurts! Nano robots would have been fine if they weren't responsible for transforming KITT's body. I don't know why I think that. But I do. Gives me flashbacks of the Knight Rider rip-off series (from the same swamp of 90s suck), Viper (you know you watched it too -- pining for a black Trans Am to take out the Dodge Viper). Anyway, I'd rather see the spoiler/wing/air-intake/whatever-else come out of a compartment, mechanically, and the nano robots just responsible for like repairs and color changing and stuff. Suspension of Disbelief... Suspension of Disbelief...

But you know, despite all this complaining, I really enjoyed it. I really did! Overall, KITT was extremely cool. Sarah wasn't that annoying. Mike turned out to be a pretty cool "Michael Knight Junior" after the first half of the movie. And, yes, KITT kept taking him down a notch, in proper form. It was fun. It really kept you into it. It wasn't just nostalgia either, it was good on its own even if you never watched the old Knight Rider. And it treated the Knight Rider series the way it should have been treated back in the 90s. I hope this becomes a regular series. Afterall, we have only one more season of the new Battlestar Galactica coming up (one of the best shows on the teevee, ever). So if Glen A. Larson is going to keep one of his resurrected 80s ideas on the teevee, he needs to work quick! I doubt this will ever be as incredibly awesome as the new Battlestar, but it was a very good backdoor pilot movie (which is rare) and they could certainly do some really cool story arcs, given time.

Watch it! Rent it! Download it! Whatever! Let's get this thing turned into a series.

I ran into a very strange problem last night. Somehow a portion of the Windows Installer service got corrupted on my Vista laptop in a way I couldn't find any information on while searching the Google.

Whenever I tried to run any MSI file, I would get an error about how the installer service could not be contacted. In the event log, I saw a warning, event ID 1015, which said Failed to connect to server. Error: 0x80070005 at the exact same time.

Although I couldn't find much information on my specific error, the Google did bestow me with the knowledge that "80070005" usually indicates "Access Denied."

So I fired up SysInternal's ProcMon, the de facto standard tool for debugging permissions problems.

The trace revealed the following entry (click to zoom)...

As you can see, access is indeed denied for "Network Service" on the installer service's entry in HKCR\AppID.

But why? I honestly have no idea why it changed. I suspect some misbaving application I installed, but I don't know for certain.

I fired up RegEdit on my corrupted machine and on an innocent uncorrupted machine and navigated to the key...

Upon investigating the uncorrupted Vista box, I noticed that this particular registry entry should not be inheriting from its parent as it was on my corrupted machine. Ah ha! So I took ownership of the key on my corrupted machine, cleared the ACL and added the following entries...

All entries (including Administrators and System) should be given "read" except TrustedInstaller, which is set to Full Control. If you are having trouble adding the TrustedInstaller user account, remember that it is a new built-in principle, not a normal user. First, you must set the "location" to your local machine (if you are on a domain, that is), then type in NT SERVICE\TrustedInstaller. After you are finished with the changes, be sure to change the owner of the key BACK to TrustedInstaller (this is important).

That did it! MSIs were installing again!

Mystery solved.

I decided having multiple blogs (Music and Tech) was pretty confusing, so I introduced topics (a.k.a. "tags") to my blog. The two previous blogs were unified and then the topics were applied (among others) so that they are actually still sorted basically the same. You can see in the upper left hand corner the various topics you can filter by, in case you aren't interested in all the wonderful things I have to say. Any old links to previous music/tech blog entries should still work. Please let me know if they don't!

CDs are finally in the process of getting pressed. Late 2007, I think I said, right? So late that it's 2008 now, apparently. ;-) All singles will be for sale shortly after I get the CDs in retail outlets (like CD Baby).

Next step... I need to start writing new tracks and get back to work on RD Tabs and XS BAP.

I ran into a strange problem tonight.  I have a Cinulgar 8125 Windows Mobile (WM5) phone.  When I connected it via USB to my laptop (running Vista Ultimate), I couldn't get DNS to work on the phone.  I was able to connect to any site by IP address, but DNS resolution failed.  Of course, Exchange sync would fail too since it's accessed by DNS as well.

I was able do PC sync, copy files, install programs, and, again, passthrough internet worked, just not DNS resolution.

I searched on the google and I tried every possible thing I could find as far as settings are concerned, but nothing worked.  One thing I kept coming back to, but kept blowing off, was this KB I found at Microsoft's site, but that dealt mainly with ActiveSync and the symptoms said that passthrough internet completely failed (it did not mention that only DNS failure might also be caused by this).

Silly me, it turns out that WAS the cause!  Just an undocumented symptom.  Here's the KB. 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936858/en-us

The only possible interfering LSP I can think that might be installed on my computer would probably come from Microsoft Forefront because I don't have anything like parental controls or third party firewalls installed.

So I have no idea what actual LSP is causing the problem, but strange DNS failures like this CAN be caused by one.  So if you are suffering from the same problem, give this a try.

Mystery solved!

I hope MS can find a better solution to fix this problem in the future since disabling features (and possibly security if a particular LSP is enabled for security purposes) is never the ideal solution.

I have Cingular (now AT&T Wireless, again) as my cell phone provider.  I get the unlimited internet because I'm a geek and must have email wherever I go, for some reason.

Today I was attempting to download a large file to my phone (approximately 25 MB) and I kept getting the very uninformative "The page cannot be displayed" error every time.  Small files downloaded fine.  Anything over a few MB would crap out (after hanging for a few minutes).

Was it Pocket IE?  I mean I know it's not the best browser on the planet, but why would it restrict download size if your device has a couple gigs of storage available?  So I tried other browsers, such as Opera Mini.  Opera Mini defers to IE for downloads since it uses a proxy server to display content quickly.  The last thing they want to do is proxy a large file download.  I tried Minimo, but it wouldn't even install.  And I heard they aren't developing it anymore (thanks, Mozilla).  All the others cost money, which I don't want to spend to download only one single file.

Then I remembered that AT&T configures you to go through their own proxy server so they can feed you the completely useless MediaNET content by typing in normally non-existent top level domains (ends in .cingular, if i recall).  So I went into the connection properties, advanced, then onto proxy settings for the MediaNET connection.  I cleared "use a proxy for this connection" and voila!  I could download large files now!  And, strangely enough, the ping time seemed to be much better.  I figured the proxy server would be higher performance (since Edge is technically only marginally better than 56k modems) because they might be caching requests and reducing image sizes and everything else proxies can do, but I guess not.  I guess it was only for the completely useless Media.Net.  Without the proxy, my speed definitely is better than it was before.

P.S. If you like Media.NET, I apologize.  I find the service completely useless, as you can tell.  :-)

Cool article here on how to use a bunch of freeware to record internet radio for those wonderful shows you can't listen to live and don't offer a downloadable form.  Think of it as a "DVR" for your internet radio!

http://www.minezone.org/blog/2006/08/17/record-streaming-radio-using-free-software/

Few notes: 

- The tool "close" isn't really necessary because Windows' built-in taskkill.exe should signal a normal close unless you specify the /F flag which forcefullly terminates.

- If you have RD Tabs installed, you don't need "wait.exe" either.  The "sleep.exe" included in the RD Tabs installation for scripting purposes does the same thing, only it sleeps for miliseconds, not seconds, so note that in your calculations in the script.

- Mplayer playlists can be in a wide variety of formats.  If your favorite show isn't a "m3u" as in the example - no worries.  Just make sure the output file is the right format for the playlist because mplayer isn't smart enough to do automatic extensions it seems.  I'm recording an "ASX" (window media) stream for lunch-time enjoyment right now.

We still run Windows XP SP2 as our primary workstation OS at work.  It's mainly a cost decision as Vista's feature set is absolutely drooled over by everybody here.  Anyway, We just got a brand spanking new Optiplex with Vista pre-loaded.  Using the retrograde licensing provisions, we buy Vista systems, but install XP, to save on the upgrade cost later.

While attempting to install XP SP2 on this system I kept getting a BSoD right at the point where it says "Setup is starting Windows."  It would give the bad hard drive error (Stop code 0000007B).  It turns out that this happens because the SATA mode is set to AHCI instead of standard SATA (or even IDE) mode.  Fixing this on the Optiplex is easy.  You go into F2 BIOS setup, go down to SATA options and change the mode from AHCI to SATA.  That's it!

Of course you get better performance in AHCI.  To change to AHCI after Windows is installed, you first need to preload all the AHCI drivers from Dell's website, THEN change the mode to AHCI.  If you just change the mode ahead of time, you'll get that pesky BSoD again and risk corrupting the installation.

Now if you got a new Optiplex with an XP SP2 disk, it will probably have the correct AHCI driver included, but I didn't have one.

I'm sure this information is applicable to many other vendors, just replace the words "Dell" and "Optiplex" with your vendor's names.  :-)

My Dish Network VIP622 was dying slowly (kept rebooting multiple times per day) and occassionally would squeel and buzz and make very loud annoying noises while crashing (poor thing).  Luckily, Dish had finally started their external hard drive feature for the receiver where you can archive recordings to an external USB 2.0 hard drive.  I was worried at first that the recordings were married to the receiver and I'd lose everything if I replaced my receiver.  It just seems like the way DRM is going these days, that's the route they'd take.  (Sort of like how Sirius' "DVR" Stiletto 100 player doesn't contain the ability to notify you of when artists are on (the Stiletto 10 can) because the benevolent music biz decided that would encourage piracy.)

Anyway, Dish Network pleasantly surprised me again.  I plugged my replacement receiver in, plugged the hard drive in and it told me "This hard drive was used on another Dish DVR, would you like to convert its contents to work on this DVR?"  I hit yes and now I lost absolutely NO archived shows!

Thanks, Dish!

Now the question is with the wording there, can you convert it back?  How many times can you convert from one receiver to another?  Can you only convert between receivers you own?  I would guess the answers would be (in this order): yes, some limited amount, and yes.  They can't give away the farm here.  The movie and TV industries would blow a gasket whether or not "trading hard drives" ever could possibly become a piracy problem (that's even MORE complicated than trading VHS back in the day).  I mean it's not like you want to just go give away your $100 hard drive to people.  And the data on the drive is encrypted and who knows if even the mighty Norton Ghost (I refuse to call it Symantec Ghost) could image it successfully.  And lastly, when you copy a show to your receiver, it's removed from the hard drive, necessitating recording it again for the original owner, which makes piracy even more difficult (but is also not very intrusive to the legitimate user -- good balance).

Anybody got any answers?  I'm curious...