PC Software

RO RO RO Your Drive, Gently Up The Wall…

Posted on by dk

Read-Only

Whilst attempting to manage the drives in Windows’ Disk Management MMC (Microsoft Management Console) plug-in, I accidentally set a logical drive (a RAID1 array on which a volume hosts all Windows’ users’ “My Documents” virtual folder/alias) to “offline”.

I accidentally clicked the “OK” button on the pop-up warning, and could not find a way to cancel the action thereafter.

After the Disk Management MMC plug-in/app appeared to “hang”, I restarted the system normally (i.e. via the Windows UI).

Upon reboot, Disk Management showed the disk as “Read Only”.

 

Attempting The Fix(es)

Attempting all the various fixes found via Google searches were to no avail i.e.

  1. using diskpart via an Administrator command prompt to clear the readonly disk flag, or
  2. attempting to create/set a HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies\WriteProtect DWORD with value “0”).

Attempting to do step #1 simply threw up the error “Diskpart has encountered an error: The media is write protected.” after a long pause.

I tried:

  • “Advanced Troubleshooting” via WinRE – and because it didn’t load the RAID drivers, the RAID1 array disk could not be “selected” in diskpart
  • clearing the readonly flag repeatedly in “Windows Safe Mode with Command Prompt” using diskpart – and despite showing the disk attributes as “Read-only : No“, rebooting normally would still see the disk “stuck” (in RO mode)

 

The Fix

What eventually worked was

  • reboot into “Windows Safe Mode” (as per instructions here)
    • select “Command Prompt” at the “Select Options” page
  • in “Windows Safe Mode/Troubleshooting” Command Prompt:
    • clearing the readonly disk attribute – run:
      • diskpart
      • list volume
      • select volume #
      • attribute disk clear readonly (this may take a long while – be patient)
    • setting the disk “offline‘
      • offline
    • quit diskpart by entering “exit”
    • optionally, run chkdsk on all loaded volumes
  • booting normally, then using “Disk Management” MMC to set the disk back to “online”

 

I am assuming this may not work if the boot volume was set to “read only” (but in which case I am assuming first boot will fail already).

Upgrading to pfSense 2.7.0…

Posted on by dk

Tried upgrading to 2.7.0, and as per usual, (mini) disasters ensued…

Here are some tips I need to remind myself:

  • install the sudo package (since the default admin account is disabled) – you should be able to sudo tcsh after logging in using SSH2
  • ensure your configuration backup is current (and try changing the number of auto-backup-on-change to some high number, found under Diagnostics > Backup and Restore > Config History)
  • if using “old” RSA keys for SSH2 authentication, ensure to add the following to /etc/sshd:
  • try forcing a higher resolution text mode (unfortunately, that didn’t work for me):

    • /boot/loader.conf.local:

      kern.vty=sc

    • /boot/device.hints:

      hint.sc.0.flags="0x180"
hint.sc.0.vesa_mode="279"

Cookies! Time to (Third) Party!

Posted on by dk

So, I am (more or less) forced to use Chrome for work, although my default browser is still Firefox (with a nifty little extension called OnChrome that automatically redirects/re-opens all links for specific domains set to open in Chrome with a specific profile instead – a huge shout out to @Gervasio Marchand)…

But within several of the web-based programs my employer uses, it often embeds resources that point back to Google sites, documents, etc. – which then simply shows a 403 error instead of the intended resource…

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scrcpy 1.2.5 and jpeg-xl 0.7…

Posted on by dk

I use scrcpy on a Mac for work, it being much more reliable than Apple’s phone screen casting.

Unfortunately, a recent update somewhere broke scrcpy, throwing the following errors about libjxl.0.7.dylib, which I hunted down to be part of the JPEG-XL libraries. Unfortunately, a brew reinstall jpeg-xl did not fix anything, nor an update to ffmpeg via brew.

dyld[85687]: Library not loaded: /usr/local/opt/jpeg-xl/lib/libjxl.0.7.dylib
  Referenced from: <A5A72418-D065-3FAA-8CD4-AC945B980E8D> /usr/local/Cellar/ffmpeg/5.1.2_1/lib/libavformat.59.27.100.dylib
  Reason: tried: '/usr/local/opt/jpeg-xl/lib/libjxl.0.7.dylib' (no such file), '/System/Volumes/Preboot/Cryptexes/OS/usr/local/opt/jpeg-xl/lib/libjxl.0.7.dylib' (no such file), '/usr/local/opt/jpeg-xl/lib/libjxl.0.7.dylib' (no such file), '/usr/local/lib/libjxl.0.7.dylib' (no such file), '/usr/lib/libjxl.0.7.dylib' (no such file, not in dyld cache), '/usr/local/Cellar/jpeg-xl/0.8.1/lib/libjxl.0.7.dylib' (no such file), '/System/Volumes/Preboot/Cryptexes/OS/usr/local/Cellar/jpeg-xl/0.8.1/lib/libjxl.0.7.dylib' (no such file), '/usr/local/Cellar/jpeg-xl/0.8.1/lib/libjxl.0.7.dylib' (no such file), '/usr/local/lib/libjxl.0.7.dylib' (no such file), '/usr/lib/libjxl.0.7.dylib' (no such file, not in dyld cache)Library not loaded: /usr/local/opt/jpeg-xl/lib/libjxl.0.7.dylib
  Referenced from: <974A1E71-57EB-3EE9-90F2-ECA39A6415F6> /usr/local/Cellar/ffmpeg/5.1.2_1/lib/libavcodec.59.37.100.dylib
  Reason: tried: '/usr/local/opt/jpeg-xl/lib/libjxl.0.7.dylib' (no such file), '/System/Volumes/Preboot/Cryptexes/OS/usr/local/opt/jpeg-xl/lib/libjxl.0.7.dylib' (no such file), '/usr/local/opt/jpeg-xl/lib/libjxl.0.7.dylib' (no such file), '/usr/local/lib/libjxl.0.7.dylib' (no such file), '/usr/lib/libjxl.0.7.dylib' (no such file, not in dyld cache), '/usr/local/Cellar/jpeg-xl/0.8.1/lib/libjxl.0.7.dylib' (no such file), '/System/Volumes/Preboot/Cryptexes/OS/usr/local/Cellar/jpeg-xl/0.8.1/lib/libjxl.0.7.dylib' (no such file), '/usr/local/Cellar/jpeg-xl/0.8.1/lib/libjxl.0.7.dylib' (no such file), '/usr/local/lib/libjxl.0.7.dylib' (no such file), '/usr/lib/libjxl.0.7.dylib' (no such file, not in dyld cache)

In a rush to get things fixed, this is my “quick fix”…

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Ubuntu 22.04.1 Upgrading Pains…

Posted on by dk

So, I had left my little Ubuntu server alone and neglected, giving it the occasional glance, the occasional log in and do an apt-get update && apt-get autoremove…

Well, with my recent shenanigans surrounding a power cut (self-caused, mind you), I was also prompted to upgrade to Ubuntu LTS 22.04.1…

“.1“… Well! That should be more stable (than the .0 released back in April)! O00-kay! Time to give it a whack!

Turns out, things went south pretty fast and I needed half an evening to right everything…

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Playing SMB’s “Who Am I”?

Posted on by dk

So, for the nth time, I found myself wondering “what name did I use to map this network drive” in Windows Explorer…

A quick Google search dug this up, so, just to document it for my own (future) reference:

wmic netuse where LocalName="Z:" get UserName /value

Where “Z” is the mapped drive letter in question…

Missing The (Mount) Point…

Posted on by dk

So my Silverstone DS-380 casing’s power LED seems to have bought it… In an attempt to try fix it (or at least test it), I had to get to the motherboard and that meant I had to remove all the drives, drive cage, etc… Since piecing everything back together again was a pain, I left the 3.5″ spinning media drives out to boot the system several times during testing.

After giving up on the power LED, I re-plugged in everything + the drives… Only to find that, of some 11 different ZFS sub pools, 10 were missing…

My heart stopped and the universe whirled around me…

zpool status showed the drives were all present and accounted for…

Thankfully, zfs list showed all my ZFS sub pools/”partitions” were still there… So, what gives?

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Snagit’s Video Capture Snag…

Posted on by dk

Recently, I had to capture screen clips and decided to utilise Techsmith’s Snagit, which worked wonderfully in the past…

However, try as I might, it now hung on my PC whenever I stopped the capture (and it tried to save the clip), showing me a spinner that sat there forever (till its process was killed).

Scrounging around the ‘net provided little clue, but seemed that quite a few people had run up against it also. Then, after weeks of on-and-off searching, I finally ran across this little answer hidden in the corner of the ‘net…

Check the simple fix (if you had not already clicked through the linked solution from above)…

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Zoom 64-bit (x64) Offline Installer…

Posted on by dk

I absolutely abhor applications that infest your machine in the C:\Users\<blah>\AppData\<blahblah> folder, needlessly littering their “little pebbles of rabbit droppings” all over your hard drive (similar to Mac OS’s ._crap). I have administrator access and don’t want multiple copies of your program, thank you – much less mis-matched, outdated versions.

It’s hard enough to explain software interfaces to my elderly parents without having to also waste time explaining why their applications have different buttons due to different versions due to these “profile-local” installs, or why their C:\ boot drive, running on that small, purposely designated PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, was running out of disk space with multiple copies of the same files…

Spotify and Zoom are prime examples, particularly Spotify – at least Zoom provides an offline MSI installer (which then properly installs into C:\Program Files (x86)\)…

But… although there’s a desktop x64/64-bit installer (which infests individual profile’s personal directories), there’s no x64/64-bit version of said MSI installer… But is there?

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su-up!

Posted on by dk

So, I finally got sick of typing my root user password in my Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), *nix Docker containers and Linux servers…

The answer (for some flavours of *nux): just create an addendum to /etc/sudoers by creating any new file in the /etc/sudoers.d/ directory!

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