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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Boot’ Category

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All about UEFI vs BIOS – who to follow

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/10/23

A link to an old post [WayBack] All about UEFI vs BIOS – David Berneda – Google+ reminded me to follow these people:

Source: [WayBack] All about UEFI vs BIOS

[WayBack] UEFI boot: how does that actually work, then? a long read ending with a long form of these recommendations:

  • If you can possibly manage it, have one OS per computer.
  • If you absolutely must have more than one OS per computer, at least have one OS per disk.
  • If you absolutely insist on having more than one OS per disk, understand everything written on this page, understand that you are making your life much more painful than it needs to be, lay in good stocks of painkillers and gin, and don’t go yelling at your OS vendor, whatever breaks.
  • If you’re using UEFI native booting, and you don’t tend to build your own kernels or kernel modules or use the NVIDIA or ATI proprietary drivers on Linux, you might want to leave Secure Boot on.
  • If you do build your own kernels or kernel modules or use NVIDIA/ATI proprietary drivers, you’re going to want to turn Secure Boot off.
  • Don’t do UEFI-native installs to MBR-formatted disks, or BIOS compatibility installs to GPT-formatted disks (an exception to the latter is if your disk is, IIRC, 2.2+TB in size…
  • Trust mjg59 in all things and above all other authorities, including me.

–jeroen

Posted in BIOS, Boot, Power User, UEFI, Windows | Leave a Comment »

HOW-TO: Enable Hyper V on Windows 8.x Pro, and create a VM on it – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/10/23

Below some steps and two videos about Hyper-V on Windows 8.x.

Though I prefer VMware myself (most of my infrastructure is VMware based, it works on Mac, Windows and bare-metal, and it has more user friendly host integration for Mac/Windows, especially with clipboard sharing and screen resolution), Hyper-V is not to be ruled out.

Hyper-V comes with Windows 7 professional and up, and supports the VHD/VHDX disk formats which are also used by Windows backup and Disk2Vhd.

So it is an excellent start to virtualize an existing physical PC and run it under a Windows host with relatively little effort.

New Disk2vhd V2.0 with vhdx support » TechNine.

Ensure that hardware virtualization support is turned on in the BIOS settings.  Save the BIOS settings and boot up the machine normally, At the Start Screen, swipe the right hand side of the screen and select the Search Charm. Type turn windows features on or off and select that item  Select and enable Hyper-V  If Hyper-V was not previously enabled, reboot the machine to apply the change.  NOTE: As a best practice, it’s a good idea to configure networking for the Hyper-V environment to support external network connections. Ensure that a virtual switch has been created and is functional.  Open the Virtual Switch Manager, found on the Actions panel in the Hyper-V Manager, by typing Hyper-V at the Start Screen.  Select “Virtual Switch Manager” in the Actions pane. Ensure that “External” is highlighted, and then click on the “Create Virtual Switch” button.  If more than one NIC in is present, ensure that the proper NIC is selected for use on the VM external network connections.

via

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Posted in BIOS, Boot, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Welcome to workaround.org – tips around open source and Linux stuff

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/09/12

At the time of discovering Welcome to workaround.org via More ISP Mail saveback – Joe C. Hecht – Google+:

ISPmail tutorials

The famous ISP-style mail server tutorials live here. Learn how to set up your own fully-functional mail server using Postfix, Dovecot IMAP/POP3 and MySQL backend on a Debian server just like your favorite mail or website hosting provider.

I have been maintaining the ISPmail tutorial since Debian Woody. However those older Debian versions are no longer supported. If you still like to read the old versions I have provided PDF versions of the tutorials for Squeeze, Lenny, Etch, Sarge andWoody.

Thoughts blog

My daily work leads to various discoveries and insights. Some were petty but others really brightened my day.

My projects

I am a system administrator and programmer. In my nerdy spare time I work on web applications, Python and Ruby programs, write articles or explore new software technologies. On workaround.org you can find news, solutions and hints on my findings and get help. Of course your feedback is welcome.
These are some projects I am currently working on:

IRC – Internet relay chat

  • IRC is a great medium for getting instant help (at least on the freenode IRC network). I have collected some tips about Getting help on IRC to help you get help instead of getting barbecued.
  • knoba’s factoids
    I run a bot called knoba (short for knowledge base) on the freenode IRC network. Two channels I visit frequently are #postfix and #squid. So I have fed the bot with lots of factoids that you can query using !foobar in the channel. These are the factoids understood in #squid and #postfix. Please don’t play with the bot publicly. Send it a “/msg knoba help" and learn how it works.

Linux tips

My daily work leads to various discoveries and insights. Some were petty but others really brightened my day.

Regarding the Squid web proxy

Squid is a powerful open-source web proxy. I was responsible for a large Squid installation at a former employer. Maybe the following articles help you save time in your daily work.

Padrino web framework

Padrino is an lean Ruby web framework. It is an interesting alternative to the heavier Ruby-on-Rails. I spent quite some time with it and created a couple of articles about it:

Zabbix monitoring

Zabbix is a mighty open-source monitoring software. If you need a serious system for your organisation and manage to condone its creepy web interface it is hands down the the most superior software I have ever seen. And I have been dealing with monitoring software since Nagios was called Netsaint.

These articles should help you in your daily work maintaining a monitoring system:

–jeroen

 

Posted in *nix, BIOS, Boot, Development, Linux, Open Source, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Make A Bootable Windows 10 USB Install Stick On Linux With WinUSB Fork ~ Web Upd8: Ubuntu / Linux blog

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/07/29

One day I’m going to need this: Make A Bootable Windows 10 USB Install Stick On Linux With WinUSB Fork ~ Web Upd8: Ubuntu / Linux blog

So I’m glad WinUSB (which hadn’t been maintained for a long time) got forked on github by slaka.

Since my day-to-day unix-like system is OS X, I’d love a good working solution there too which means I probably need to investigate a bit along these lines:

–jeroen

via: Make A Bootable Windows 10 USB Install Stick On Linux With WinUSB Fork WebUpd8 – Google+  / DoorToDoorGeek “Stephen McLaughlin” – Google+

 

 

Posted in *nix, Apple, BIOS, Boot, BSD, Linux, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, OS X 10.10 Yosemite, OS X 10.11 El Capitan, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Power User, Ubuntu, UEFI, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 9, Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »

ThinkPad X201: fixing the “black screen” (without mouse pointer) after upgrading to Windows 10

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/06/10

After this Windows 10 boot screen the display goes blank without a mouse cursor.

After this Windows 10 boot screen the display goes blank without a mouse cursor.

So you upgraded your X201 from Windows 7 to Windows 10 even though it’s not in the listed on the Lenovo supported models page.

Now it gets through the boot screen, flashes the CapsLock/NumLock LEDS, blanks the screen (no mouse cursor) and continues booting without any visual feedback apart from the HDD LED flashing until it is finished booting

Since Windows 10 by default does not enable the F8 option any more, you need some more severe measures.

BIOS update

The first was to get the BIOS up to date. At the time of writing that was 1.40-1.15 from BIOS Update Bootable CD for Windows 8 (32-bit, 64-bit), 7 (32-bit, 64-bit), Vista (32-bit, 64-bit), XP – ThinkPad – Lenovo Support (US):

Then I had to burn the ISO. Which was a bit picky because most of my infrastructure is VM based and none of the physical machines had a DVD or CD-drive any more. Luckily I found a LiteOn SLW 831SX which Windows detects as Slimtype DVDRW SLW-831S USB Device. ImgBurn worked with that (elevated to Administrative mode that is: it requires that both for burning and grabbing an ISO image).

Upgrading the BIOS went fine, but the symptoms stayed.

Removing/re-inserting battery

Removing the battery for a while, then reinserting was suggested at one of the sites.  It didn’t help.

Force into Repair Mode

Then I read this:

If the system can’t load the necessary configuration more than two times, the system will  direct the display to Windows RE(Recovery environment).

Source: Windows 10 – How to enter Safe Mode if I can’t boot the system successfully?

They also have: Windows 10 – If I can’t enter the system, how can I restore the Windows 10 laptop or PC to default settings?

This very easy to do:

Prepairing Automatic Repair

Prepairing Automatic Repair

  1. Keep the power button down to power off the machine
  2. Power up the machine
  3. Wait for the boot screen to appear, then
    1. Keep the power button down to power off the machine
  4. Power up the machine
  5. Wait for the boot screen to appear, then
    1. Keep the power button down to power off the machine
  6. Wait for the “Prepairing Automatic Repair” to finish
  7. Wait for the “Diagnosing your PC” to finish
  8. Wait for the “Automatic Repair” to appear, then
    1. Wiggle with the mouse to get a mouse cursor
  9. Press the “Advanced Options” button
  10. Choose “Troubleshoot”
  11. Choose “Advanced Options”
  12. Choose “Startup Settings”
  13. Choose “Restart”
  14. Wait for the reboot and “Startup Settings” to appear (note: no mouse cursor)
  15. Hit F5 for “Enable Safe Mode with Networking”
  16. Wait for it to reboot twice.

This didn’t work as well as I hoped as now I was at the failure point as well.

But now at least I had a starting point to trip Windows into booting any way I wanted. I now only had to find which function key would get me into a state where I could see what was going on.

And the good things: The “Diagnosing your PC” only required one ‘manual power down” to appear.

  • F9 – Disable automatic restart after failure
  • F8 – Disable early launch anti-malware protection
  • F7 – Disable driver signature enforcement
  • F6 – Enable Safe Mode with Command Prompt
  • F5 – Enable Safe Mode with Networking
  • F4 – Enable Safe Mode
  • F3 – Enable low-resolution video
  • F2 – Enable boot logging
  • F1 – Enable debugging

F3 finally got me to the VIDEO_DRIVER_INIT_FAILURE (BSOD STOP 0x000000B4) which indicated the machine was so hosed that I had to to a clean install.

–jeroen

Automatic Repair - wiggle with the mouse and you have a cursor too!

Automatic Repair – wiggle with the mouse and you have a cursor too!

–jeroen

Images via:

Posted in BIOS, Boot, Power User, ThinkPad, UEFI, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, X201 | Leave a Comment »

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