Anyway, the reason for this post is to document so that it may be easier for others to find a solution. I was reading one of those waffly forum type sites where people who can’t spell give other strange people useless advise on things they obviously know nothing about, when one sharper person replied with “I switched off hardware acceleration and it worked for me”. That was one I hadn’t tried, and when I did it worked! Why did it taker me many months to find this, why isn’t it prominent somewhere on the Mozilla web sites somewhere – or is it and I am just looking in the wrong places?

Anyway, go to Tools/Options in the toolbar, and untick “Use hardware acceleration where available”, and restart firefox. No more jerky mouse, and I can let firefox update itself happily rather than continually refusing it, and all my machines can have the same version. No more (or somewhat less) nagging.

Firefox is getting a bit like adobe, in that you spend more time downloading and installing updates than actually using the product, especially if you have a network of several machines to maintain.

In this case, a regular customer for computer and sign work rang to say her HP All-in-one had a virus. I fired it up and instantly got the False Faulty HDD messages, very clever, even I was taken in by the quality of the dialog box – using the S.M.A.R.T. name – I really did wonder if it was a real message. I quickly booted into Ubuntu and ran a disk utility SMART Test on it, and it was perfect.

This infection is reasonably easy to get rid of, just a couple of executables in the Program Data directory, and away it goes. Obviously this was not the only problem, it never is!

All menu items had disappeared, and all files had disappeared off the system. This is to make a user think there really is a problem with the disk, and pay for the special software to fix it. It turns out that all files and folders had been marked “hidden”, and that all menus had been cut and placed into another folder. There is a small utility call “unhide” which restores most of this stuff. At this stage the system was looking almost normal.

The owner had let Norton expire about 10 months ago, and when I tried install Microsoft Security Essentials as a replacement, it wouln’t install. This sometimes happen when the OS is not up to date, so I tried to windows updates, and found that no windows updates had been successful since may 2011!

So after running various other antivirus suites and getting rid of a few issues with each, I finally installed Avast, and let it do a scan. Avast used to be one of my favourites, but recently it has got a bit naggy, so I haven’t been installing it or recommending it so much. But in this case, it kept telling me about a root-kit virus in partition 4. At this point alarm bells really started ringing, as an HP All-in-one out of the box should only have 3 partitions, System, OS and Recovery.

Not wanting to do too much permanent damage, I decided to do full backups, and after backing up the whole of the OS file system using Ubuntu (much easier than Windows) I decided to clone the whole disk also. The clone fell over trying to process partition 4! Those alarm bells were getting louder!

I booted into Gparted, and looked at the partitions, and found that a very small partition of just a few megabytes had been created in the few spare megabytes which are found at the end of every disk. It was named “.”, it was hidden, and it was the boot partition! I deleted it, made the System partition boot, and tried to recreate the MBR by using a Windows disk. The windows disk blue screened repeatedly!

So, I cloned the three remaining partitions, completely formatted the hard drive, and restored the partitions. After a bit of fiddling, including a Windows start up repair using a Windows 7 install disk, I got it all up and running again.

So all was good, not a single virus could be seen, BUT updates would still not download and install! I did a bit of research, and read a page by a very down to earth guy who said it doesn’t matter how you get rid of a root-kit virus, its just not worth doing it, there’s too much damage already done, and a windows repair or upgrade is not going to fix the problems either. In the past I would have taken this as a challenge, but in this case, where the owner is totally responsible for the state of the computer, and bearing in mind that 15 hours had already elapsed, I bit the bullet, formatted the disk, and re-installed Windows 7 from a set of disks the customer gave me. Not the restore disks, but it does seem to have picked up most of the required drivers automatically.

Saved data is restored to the computer, Office re-installed (but probably not the correct version) and all windows updates and service packs downloaded and installed. Just email (may need an office upgrade, I have a feeling they were using Outlook!) and a few bits and pieces to go. I’ll leave most of the personisation and other junk to the owner.

I could have saved myself a whole bunch of pain if I had just done that at the start!

I ran a few antivirus jobs on the HD before doing anything, and deleted a few viruses.

The initial problems seems to be some virus (not sure which one of the viruses detected by MSE) had changed all the folders on the drive to hidden folders, but set up infected shortcuts to the folders. The change is invisible to the users, but each time a folder is clicked on, the infected file is run.

As all the shortcuts were removed by MSE, none of the files and folders were visible to the users. So what to do? My first idea was to create a shortcut to each folder, which gets around the problem quite easily, but is not really a good solution, adding a layer of complexity that wasn’t there before the initial problem. So I researched how to remove the system hidden folder attributes.

Simple really, in the CMD box, use the command attrib “file path” -s -h. File path only needs to be in quotes if there are embedded spaces in the name. Fortunately only 10 or so folders had been changed, and none of the folders within them. Change the minus signs to plus signs if you want to make a folder or file a hidden system file.

Now I just need to disinfect 2 PCs, possibly a media centre, and another external hard drive!

It looks right, and matches all the specs, and several suppliers will swear that it is the correct ram for the computer, but multiple entries on the web point to the same problem. Do a search on “satellite a100 memory upgrade wont boot” and you will see what I mean. None of them will make much sense, but using what they say, and with some experimentation of my own, this is the situation.

The official spec for the computer says it uses DDR2 PC4200 ram, up to 2 gigabytes in two 1 gigabyte pieces.

The ram supplied to me was DDR2 PC5300 1GB x 2.

The computer currently has in it 1 piece of DDR2 PC4200 of 256MB, and 1 piece of DDR2 PC5300 of 512MB. Surprisingly it works!

It seems that to operate at all, the computer requires at least one of the memory sticks to be DDR2 PC4200. This is easily proved as follows

1. take the DDR2 PC5300 stick out, leaving just the DDR2 PC4200 stick and it boots fine.
2. take the DDR2 PC4200 stick out, leaving just the DDR2 PC5300 stick and it won’t boot.
3. leave the DDR2 PC4200 stick in and put in one of the supplied sticks, and will boot OK, showing 1.18 GB of ram.
4. leave the DDR2 PC5300 stick in and put in one of the supplied sticks, and it won’t boot.
4. put in both sticks of the new ram, and it won’t boot.

This is a really peculiar problem, which neither Toshiba or ram suppliers seem to know about or acknowledge.  Toshiba will probably say stick to what the spec says, which is fair enough. Some (most?) ram suppliers seem to recommend the PC5300 ram.

Other than sticking with PC4200 ram, there doesn’t appear to be  a solution. Fortunately, PC4200 ram is still available at a reasonable price, so if it is considered worthwhile, the memory can be upgraded.

First issue is actually cloning a hard drive with bad sectors. My cloning tool of choice is Cloneziilla, which is free and reasonably straightforward to use. However in beginners mode, it too will fail on a disk with bad sectors. The solution here is to use Clonezilla in expert mode, which is not as daunting as it sounds. Just read the options carefully, and it quickly becomes apparent that ticking the appropriate option (-rescue I think)  will ignore bad sectors. Cloning will now take place, but if there are many bad sectors (as with a physically damaged disc) this could take a long time.

The second problem occurs with the cloned partition, which will have ‘cloned bad sectors’, not really bad, but the HDD is pretty convinced they are. Unless you want an identically sized partition, you will need to resize the partition, and I do this by booting into a live disc copy of Ubuntu. In ubuntu the tool to edit partitions is called Partition Editor, or Gparted depending on which flavour of Ubuntu you are using. This tool allows simple resizing of partions, EXCEPT when the partition has bad sectors, including cloned bad sectors.

Gparted uses NTFSRESIZE to resize NTFS partitions, and while native NTFSRESIZE has the ability to ignore bad sectors, this is not included in Gparted, so Gparted always fail to resize partitions with bad sectors. I searched for weeks to find a solution to this one, and here it is. THis is a really dangerous fix, so don’t mess about with your only copy of a disk, clone it first and work on the clone. As I was cloning the partittion, I was already in that position. THe description in the page is a little technical, and everything can be done by using the Ubuntu gui front end. I do this in the Ubuntu live disc boot, so none of this is permanent, so I have to do it each time. Here is the list of actions I take.

In a terminal window (Accessories/terminal) type Sudo Nautilus

In nautilus drill down into /usr/sbin, and rename NTFSRESIZE to NTFSRESIZE.orig by rightclicking on it and choosing rename.

In nautilus rightclick between file icons and choose create document, and name the new file NTFSRESIZE

Right click on the new file, click on Properties, and then select Permissions, and tick the make executable option

Open the empty file, and add the lines

#!/bin/bash

exec ntfsresize.orig –bad-sectors “$@”

and save the file.

Now restart Gparted, and select the offending partition, and resize it. Gparted will throw up an error or warning about bad sectors, but will complete the task. All we have done here is basically added the –bad-sectors parameter to any call of NTFSRESIZE, which is now just a script that calls the original NTFSRESIZE with the parameter added. It is a very clever workaround, and I am very grateful to the original poster. This post is just spreading the word, and if you happen upon this post, please use and enjoy if this is what you are looking for.

I too wasn’t up for the cost of a new notebook IDE drive, which are getting quite silly compared to SATA drives. However, in my box of bits I had a 16GB compact flash card which I previously used in an old computer and used as a web server. I decided the time had come to build my self a laptop with a solid state drive!

First stop, a company called Nice Gear in Timaru, who sold me an adapter to allow me to install the CF card into the IDE drive bay of the laptop, cost including postage – $20! The card was installed just a few minutes after the adaptor arrived, and worked beautifully.

So what operating system to use? The card had Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on it, which had been upgraded to full webserver spec. It ran, but was a bit old, and a bit slow. It had also been modified to run on an SSD. This involves minimizing the amount of unnecessary and repetitive disk writing, by disabling the log files, and not updating files and directories each time they are viewed, and by not having a swap file. This sort of thing is not possible in Windows, so wanting to preserve my CF card for a few years longer, decided to stick with Linux, in particular Ubuntu, which I have experience of.

So my first try was an upgrade from 8.04 to 11.04. This worked after a fashion, but stopped after I made a few changes to it. So I tried a clean install of 9.04, which worked very well, so well that I though an upgrade to 11.04 would definitely be on the cards, as 11.04 is probably more efficient than 9.04. The upgrade worked OK, but with a couple of errors, which translated through into another locked up system after an hour or so of fiddling!

So finally, I did a clean install of Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) on the CF card, which took up less than 3GB of my available 16GB. Ir ran a bit slow at first, but seemed to settle down, and now runs reasonably well. First job was to tailor the OS for running on a Solid State Drive (SSD). A search on the web will turn up lots of resources for this, the one I used was provided by the “How to Geeks” – thanks lads. I also needed some information on stopping the EXT4 file system journaling, which speeds up the system and saves writes to the disk. This blog gives the details on the first page, and the other pages cover  the stuff in the HowToGeeks page

I have spent a happy day loading on various software and hardware, including getting my Telecom T-Stick and Vodem to work. This is a lot simpler than it was last time I wrote about it. Both systems are now fully integrated into the Ubuntu system, and it can all be done from the “Edit Connection” button in the connections  menu. I also set up evolution mail to access my various email accounts, and transferred my outlook.pst over from my desktop, to give me a basis for work on the machine in the future.

So total investment $20, plus about $150 of CF card being used again, and a few hours of my time (OK, 12 or so if you include the three tries at the operating system) setting it up. Not the fastest machine in the house, but so long as you stick to one task at a time, is reasonably lively. I am not sure how long the laptop is going to last. Without a hard drive, it is running a lot cooler (and quieter!) so may last a bit longer – it had serious overheating problems with the faulty hard drive in. However, some damage will have been done.

The next question is do I splash out on some more ram? 512MB is not enough, 1024MB would probably be plenty for an Ubuntu machine, cost to upgrade about $50 to $70. Without the extra ram I am quite wary of putting on LAMP (Linux Apache, MySQL and PHP) which I need to do web development on it, so I may need to bite the bullet on that one.

Next job? Well by this time next week I hope to have bought a copy of Windows 98 SE for a dollar or two off TradeMe. This I will put onto my 10 year old retired desk top. The reason for this apparently backward step is so that I can use the force feedback steering wheel I have knocking around. It will only work on a machine with Windows 98 or less on it. The driving game I want to  use on it, Colin McRae rally 3 won’t run on anything less than Windows 98 SE! Hence the very specific operating system requirement. If it works as well as I hope it will, I will “acquire” a sports seat from somewhere, and build a framework for it, the pedals and steering wheel, and the computer monitor(s), to make a driving game console. I also have a GP game too, so there will be some variety! Stay tuned – this one may need photos!

So, I started looking at the antenna again. The Freeview website said that our address had a high probability of getting reception with a high mounted aerial.The aerial was on the ridge line of our roof, but not the higher ridge line. We also had a VHF aerial diplexed in, and an amplifier behind the TV set. A last ditch plan was hatched!

Firstly, move the aerial from the lower ridge line to the higher ridge line, just 1 metre away, and just 600mm higher. Doesn’t sound a lot, but we have a steel roof, and a satellite dish close by, so we had to get some benefit from moving it. The aerial is a phased array antenna, which has a very broad pick up pattern, which we need as we don’t quite have line of site on the Baxter’s Knob mast, which is just a couple of km away, but about 30metres of hill between us and it.

It’s also a relatively low power transmitter, so we definitely need an amplifier. So I bought a Hill’s masthead amplifier, which I actually installed just underneath the mast, but in the loft, where I can get to it without putting my life at risk again and again! The amplifier also has a much higher gain than the set side amp, so the signal should be even better and with the bonus that all the other  possible TV locations have an amplified signal too.

As I use a splitter between the TV and the antenna, I had to get up to that, in a different loft space, and change it so the power from the set side amplifier power supply could actually go through to the antenna.

So all set up and tested for power reaching the antenna, I switched on the Freeview box and watched a bit of the usually weak TV One. Perfect, and has been for several hours. The acid test will come when we get a windy day. Just to see how good it was I let the Freeview box tune itself again, and while it was tuning I saw that the signal on one channel (51H – TVNZ) was up around 96% for strength and quality, and on the other channel around 80% on both. So it looks good!

So good, I tried the computer TV card next, where we have been getting pretty miserable TVNZ reception since the last lot of antenna work I did. So far, reception is perfect there also!

So a good result at last – a great looking antenna on the roof (I also removed the UHF antenna while I was up there), a powerful amplifier on the main cable, no horrible amplifier behind the TV, and what looks like very acceptable performance.

So do your worst TV companies, I am now totally ready for when you turn off the analogue TV signal, and I am not paying $20 per week for SKY! Now I just need to get a non CDMA phone, and I am ready for the 21st century.

The freeview box is rather good for the price ($147) having an ethernet connection which allows connection to some Yahoo weather pages, and to some NZ maps, and also includes an email client. It also allows connection of a USB hard drive, which turns it into a reasonably well specced PVR (personal video recorder?), with one touch scheduling of recording from the EPG (electronic program guide), watching as it records etc. It even works with a USB key, but is a bit jerky on playback.

Mini update – still a little bit of drop out on TVNZ stations on windy evenings, but it could be lived with. Will probably raise the antenna a little further and put a mast top amplifier up, just to finish off the installation, and see how that goes.

I was looking through the Ubuntu web sit when I read that version 11.04 will actually update an existing installation from the live CD. This showed promise, so I took the live CD I made of 11.04 downstairs to my 10.10 system, and went through the upgrade process on that machine, which worked great. I then used the built in utility to generate an installable USB version of the 11.04 disk, which I took back up to my FITPC2i (which doesn’t have a bootable CD player). I booted from the 11.04 USB key, and when prompted, told it to upgrade the 9.04 installation. This worked almost perfectly, it hicoughed on the re-application of existing packages, which there probably wasn’t any of with it being a brand new installation. When I booted into the new system, I didn’t have the correct hardware to run the new Unity interface, so I had to run the classic interface. As my first task would have been to switch back to the classic, this was just bonus! A swift bit of work changing the boot order in grub2, and putting in a better colour scheme and making the windows buttons appear on the right, and I had a fully working Ubuntu 11.04 running on my FITPC2i.

Grub2 was a bit of  a problem, I couldn’t get it to boot into Windows by default until I read somewhere that you can specify the default in the /etc/default/grub file as a string field rather than as a number. I got the string from the /boot/grub/grub.cfg file (the title of the OS to boot into).