Imaging & Partioning

Today, I am building five Windows computers for some theatre expansion that we are doing. We require five laptops for our theatres to be built with a very minimal Windows XP installation. I built one computer with Windows XP and the software we required. I used Clonezilla to image the computer on the network.

Once the image was done I was going to put the image onto another computer. However, the source disk was 120Gb and the destination was 100Gb. Clonezilla does not allow you to put a large image onto a smaller disk.

I found some information on the Clonezilla forum that talked about gparted and how it can change the size of a partition. So I downloaded gparted and on my original computer shrunk the partition of the Windows XP install to under 100Gb.

gparted was a really easy application to use. All I had to do was burn the ISO file I downloaded to the internet onto a CDR. Boot the original computer off the CDR. The computer booted into Linux with one prompt, which was to use an X server. In Linux there was a gparted application link on the desktop which I opened.

Inside of gparted, I had to click move/resize and using a graphical representation of the hard drive, I made the size of the partition 20Gb. I submitted the job, and after a couple of minutes my Windows installation was repartitioned.

It was very easy, and I very worth it to use gparted instead of any paid software solution I could find.

Thank Goodness for Paperclips

Today I got a cd stuck in a new Macbook Pro hard drive, and I tried everything to get it out of the drive. Using the Mac keys to eject the drive during boot, pressing a paperclip against the cd eject button. Nothing worked.

I took my paperclip and bent the end into a small hook and made myself a handle on the other side. I pushed the paper clip into above the cd disk, and was able to hook it (scratching the top of the disk) and pull it out.

Panda Cloud Antivirus

We are using Panda Cloud Antivirus on our computers. At least some of them, because I am still transitioning from our old AV products to Panda Cloud Antivirus. Today I moved one user onto Cloud Antivirus, and it immediately picked up three viruses on his computer that his old AV did not find. This is actually the second computer that had a hidden virus that Panda Cloud found.

Shifts of Thought

The Meeting House had a small shift of thought this week. We are making the move to a more openness to using Macs in our environment. For our weekend service, we are slowly moving our video pcs from Windows to Macs. There will be two sites that run Macs for the video presentation at the sites starting in October. In the office, it seems like the policy for our youth team will be to give them all Macs as well. I think for them we are only aiming at 13″ Macbooks to equip them with ProPresenter for their video and audio slides. Whenever there are big events in youth, I think they use their personal Macs instead of their work computers to run everything on the projector. Lastly, there is some interest by some in the pastoral team to use Macs, but we will have to see if we make that switch. We want to make sure we are switching for good and valid reasons.

How to Delete a Facebook account

I was once a Facebook user. I used it to connect with friends, family, and co-workers mainly. I was always concerned about my privacy and the fact that once I put a picture on Facebook it was no longer my property but the property of Facebook. When I got married I took deactivated my Facebook profile. I would rather create my own website and blog that my friends could visit instead of using Facebook.

Even though my account was deactivated when I logged into Facebook a year later I found all my data was still there. I think that is creepy. I wanted to delete my account but never looked for the information I needed.

Recently, ITBusiness.ca posted an article on How to Delete an Account on Facebook. I followed the link they provided, http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account to delete my account.

Here is a article from the BBC on how Facebook ‘breaches Canadian Law’.

Now I feel a lot more confident that my writings and pictures will not be the property of Facebook etc. due to some vague privacy or usage agreement.

Lost Mac Address Book Contacts

Today, a user lost all their contacts in her Mac Address Book. It seems when she synced her iPhone to her Mac all her contacts were copied from her new iPhone 3GS to her Address book and they were not synced.

To restore her contacts, I found the following the following forum thread on the Apple support site:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9597517

Here is the suggestion on how to restore her contacts.

“Address Book is one of the apps that’s “fully integrated” with Time Machine. All you have to do is start Address Book, then Enter Time Machine.

Once in the TM “Star Wars” interface, just navigate in the “cascade” of Address Book windows until you find the entry or entries you want. If you want to restore certain items, select them and click Restore. Or, if you want to restore everything in that version of your Address Book, click Restore All. “

Windows Vista to Windows 7 Upgrade

Today I performed a Windows Vista to Windows 7 upgrade. I decided to wipe the Windows Vista installation prior to installing Windows 7. Before I wiped Windows Vista, I used Windows Easy Transfer to copy the user settings and files from Vista to an usb hard drive. Upgrading from Windows Vista to Windows 7 is great, and very easy (but it requires Windows Vista SP1).

I had to get a copy of Windows Easy Transfer for my Vista. On another computer I had with Windows 7 I ran Windows Easy Transfer, and selected “to transfer items from an external hard drive” then “this is my new computer”. When prompted if my files were already saved on a disk I said no, then I need to install Windows Easy Transfer to my old computer. The program was copied onto an external hard drive for use on my old computer.

I connected my external hard drive on my Vista installation. I was required to upgrade to Windows Vista SP1, and I did. After the upgrade I ran Windows Easy Transfer and copied all the user files and settings to my external hard drive. After that, I installed Windows 7 from scratch, deleting all partitions on the hard drive and installing the new operating system.

Once the Windows 7 install was complete I logged into the install with the userid I wanted to use, and attached the external USB drive. I ran Windows Easy Transfer on the computer, and after 30 minutes 14Gb was transferred along with all the settings from Vista. Windows Easy Transfer is a great tool, and makes PC upgrades to Windows 7 very easy!

Windows XP to Windows 7 Upgrade

Today a user visited my desk and requested I upgrade her from XP to Windows 7.  She received a new Lenovo R500 laptop two weeks ago that she said performed very slowly, and crashed a lot.  I have no problems installing Windows 7, so I decided to upgrade her to Windows 7 instead of troubleshoot Windows XP.  She has a lot of programs on her laptop so I decided to upgrade instead of doing a fresh install, and I recently reviewed a tutorial, Migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7, which showed me how to install Windows 7 on top of Windows XP and migrate a user’s old data, using the User State Migration Tool, from the old Windows directory to the new install.

The first step was to install Windows 7 on the same partition as the Windows XP.  During the installation I left all the partitions as is,  I selected a Clean Install, and all the old XP data was moved to a folder called “Windows.old” during the installation of Windows7.

To get the User State Migration Tool I downloaded the Windows AIK for Windows 7 Beta.  I installed AIK into Windows 7 and that installed all the files of the USMT into the Programs File.  After that I created a batch file using commands that run the USMT.  I copied from Technet.  The batch file is required to move all the user settings from the Windows.old directory of Windows XP to Windows 7.

Here is the commands that were in the batch file:


@ECHO OFF

cd C:\program files\AIK\tools\USMT

scanstate.exe c:\store /v:13 /o /c /hardlink /nocompress /efs:hardlink /i:MigApp.xml /i:MigDocs.xml /offlineWinDir:c:\windows.old\windows

loadstate.exe c:\store /v:13 /c /lac /lae /i:migapp.xml /i:migdocs.xml /sf /hardlink /nocompress

:EOF

After I ran the batch file, all the user settings from Windows XP were copied into my Windows 7 User directory. It took about half an hour. After, I logged into the user’s account, and all her settings were there except settings for her VPN.  I checked her Excel, Outlook, and Word.  In Excel and Word her list of last files opened were still there, and in Outlook it kept all her settings even email addresses that were typed into her TO: and CC: fields.

USMT was easy to use.  The hardest thing was finding the commands for the batch file.  Overall, the user was very happy with her Windows 7 installation.

Koobface Virus

One of our pastors had his Facebook hacked, and it sent out a message with a link to an webpage to all his facebook friends.  When people visited the link they got the Koobface virus.  Two staff members were infected with the virus on their computers.  They were currently “protected” by PC Tools Anti-virus and Windows Defender.

I had to clean their computers with Norman Malware Remover.  Both computers were cleaned successfully with Norman.  Norman Malware cleaner is my #1 tool for removing malware off of infected computers.  I usually scan with Panda Online Scanner and Norman Malware Cleaner when we are infected.

More virus issues on June 2nd…

On the pastor’s pc, whose Facebook was hacked, the computer was running AVG 8 Free.  The computer was infected with Koobface.  It was also infected with W32/AskBar.N & E, and W32/Smalldoor.DVIP.  I used Panda ActiveScan 2.0 and Norman Malware cleaner to clean the computer successfully.

Panda Cloud Antivirus in Use

A staff person brought their home computer into the office because he has some viruses on it.  Typically, my default actions to clean viruses is to go to Panda AV and use their online scanner at the same time as going to Norman Antivirus to use their malware cleaner.  Usually, I am able to clean any viruses off a computer.

On this computer I decided to install Cloud Antivirus instead of running Panda’s online scanner at the beginning.  When I turned on the computer there was some fake AV software called “Antivirus Pro”, and the computer was really slow.  Cloud Antivirus was able to find the Adware.Vundo/Variant-MSFake trojan and remove it.  Also it removed some cookies as well, and identified Kazaa as some possibly unwanted software.

In relation I found this YouTube video about a test of Cloud Antivirus, which showed that Cloud Antivirus was only able to catch 4 of 10 zero-day viruses.