What happened was that Ubuntu install changed the master boot record (MBR) of my internal drive and set it up to load the remaining of Grub (it is split in 2 because otherwise it wouldn’t fit on the MBR) from the USB storage.

To fix this I could use the Windows tools (fixmbr) but that requires me to boot using the recovery console and login as system administrator. Although using fixmbr would restore the Windows boot loader it would erase grub and make the USB storage  not bootable.

What worked for me was MbrFix from sysint (www.sysint.no). REMARK: following the instructions below might make your computer unusable and eventually make you lose data.

First I got the list of partitions on my internal disk:

C:\>MbrFix.exe /drive 0 listpartitions
# Boot Size (MB) Type
1 Yes     76316    7  NTFS or HPFS
2             0    0  None
3             0    0  None
4             0    0  None

Next I saved my internal disk mbr to a file:

C:\>MbrFix.exe /drive 0 savembr Backup_MBR_0.bin

Next I listed my partitions on my USB disk drive:

C:\>MbrFix.exe /drive 1 listpartitions
# Boot Size (MB) Type
1          6440  131  Linux native (usually ext2fs)
2          1223  130  Prime
3             0    0  None
4             0    0  None

Now I want to put grub on my USB disk:

C:\>MbrFix.exe /drive 1 restorembr Backup_MBR_0.bin
You are about to Restore MBR,
are you sure (Y/N)? Y

Now let’s see how the partition looks like:

C:\>MbrFix.exe /drive 1 listpartitions
# Boot Size (MB) Type
1 Yes     76316    7  NTFS or HPFS
2             0    0  None
3             0    0  None
4             0    0  None

Ups! what happened there? My Linux partitions are gone… Let me try and fix this…

C:\>MbrFix.exe /drive 1 /partition 1 setpartitiontype 131
You are about to Set partition type,
are you sure (Y/N)? Y
Partition 1, type before: 7 NTFS or HPFS
Partition 1, type after: 131 Linux native (usually ext2fs)

C:\>MbrFix.exe /drive 1 /partition 2 setpartitiontype 130
You are about to Set partition type,
are you sure (Y/N)? Y
Partition 2, type before: 0 None
Partition 2, type after: 130 Prime

C:\>MbrFix.exe /drive 1 listpartitions
# Boot Size (MB) Type
1 Yes     76316  131  Linux native (usually ext2fs)
2             0  130  Prime
3             0    0  None
4             0    0  None

Looks like by setting the partition types back to their original values solved the problem.. yes it did.. ufff…

Now let’s restore the original Windows boot loader on the internal disk:

C:\Documents and Settings\machados\My Documents\Downloads>MbrFix.exe /drive 0 fixmbr
You are about to Fix MBR,
are you sure (Y/N)? Y

Now I could boot the system without the USB disk connected to my laptop.

I could also boot my Linux system by connected the USB disk and selecting “boot from usb storage” from my bios boot menu.

Step 1:

Download Flex SDK 3.4 to your computer.

Step 2:

Extract to c:\flex_sdk_3.4

Step 3:

Browse to C:\flex_sdk_3.4\runtimes\player\10\win and run:

Install Flash Player 10 ActiveX.exe

Install Flash Player 10 Plugin.exe

Step 4:

Browse to C:\flex_sdk_3.4\samples\explorer

Step 5:

Run build.bat

This will take a while because it will recursively compile all mxml files.

Step 6:

Run explorer.html

Experiment with the samples provided.

Step 7:

Let’s create an hello world application. Using an editor of your choice create a text file and save it as “helloworld.mxml” – the directory doesn’t really matter but let’s say c:\helloworld\.

Step 8:

Copy the following xml text into the helloworld.mxml file.

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx=”http://www.adobe.com /2006/mxml”>
<mx:HBox>
<mx:Label text=”Hello World from Flex!”/>
</mx:HBox>
</mx:Application>

Step 9:

Compile your mxml file into an swf file using the following command at the command prompt:

C:\flex_sdk_3.4\bin\mxmlc.exe helloworld.mxml

Step 10:

Run your swf file. The Flash player should open and execute your file. Your “Hello World from Flex” message will show up.

References:

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/

http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/flex/

I thought this would be a driver issue of the laptop so I was ready to find a new driver for this network card.

So I opened Control Panel and System Properties. Then I clicked the Hardware tab and opened Device Manager.

At Device Manager I expanded Network Adapters tab and selected the ethernet controller of my laptop. I right clicked it and opened the properties window. My initial purpose was to find the driver version but I started looking at the settings.

So I selected the Advanced tab and eventually Speed & Duplex. Wait.. why is it set to 100 Mb Full? Hummm…. let me change that to Auto. Bingo… After applying the change I got a 1.0Gbs connection…

What is this for? By checking that the checksum of the downloaded file matches the checksum provided on the source web site you’ll have a guarantee that the file was not modified (hacked) – unless the web site checksum was too..

So on windows how do you verify this?

There’s a tool (fciv.exe) provided by Microsoft(r) that can compute sha1 and md5 checksums. You can download it at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/841290.

After downloading it, you can extract it to c:\windows\ to make the command widely available.

Next you can verify the checksum of a downloaded file, say for example the gnupg installation package for windows. On the web site the sha1 checksum was published. Let’s verify it:

C:\external\Software\gnupg>fciv gnupg-w32cli-1.4.9.exe -sha1
//
// File Checksum Integrity Verifier version 2.05.
//
c2efad983dfe50e6d8007257bad2c76604be389a gnupg-w32cli-1.4.9.exe

Great, it matches it so the file has it’s integrity intact.

To make things easier we can create the commands sha1sum and md5sum which are normally the standard command names to check sha1 and md5.

Let’s create 2 batch files, for sha1 let’s put the following contents and save it as c:\windows\sha1sum.bat:

@echo off
fciv %1 -sha1

and for md5 let’s put the following contents and save it as c:\windows\md5sum.bat:

@echo off
fciv %1

Now we can compute the checksums by calling these commands:

C:\external\Software\gnupg>sha1sum gnupg-w32cli-1.4.9.exe
//
// File Checksum Integrity Verifier version 2.05.
//
c2efad983dfe50e6d8007257bad2c76604be389a gnupg-w32cli-1.4.9.exe

C:\external\Software\gnupg>md5sum gnupg-w32cli-1.4.9.exe
//
// File Checksum Integrity Verifier version 2.05.
//
d90854104edcb72149472a99a9392d4e gnupg-w32cli-1.4.9.exe

Use the command shutdown (open an command prompt: Start > Run > cmd):

shutdown -s -f -t 3600

The command above shuts down your computer in 1 hour closing any running application.

Look at windows help for the complete synopsis of the command.

This problem has two solutions:

1. Backup the data, format the drive to FAT32 and restore the data back into the drive – the only solution if you want auto-radios and hi-fi equipment to read your drive contents.
2. Make NTFS permissions less restrictive.

The first one is the easier one if you have enough space to backup your data.

The second one is a bit more tricky to implement but I’ve found a web page that has very clean instructions on how to do it. So follow the link if you want this solution:

http://ask.metafilter.com/38252/Can-not-delete-files-on-portable-drive

To ensure that I have these instructions all the time, I copy/pasted here:

What I suspect is happening is this:

1. Your external drive is formatted with the NTFS file system, which supports access restrictions.

2. The permissions on the files in question have become set to “Read and Excecute” for Users or Everyone (probably Everyone), and to Full Control for one specific user. These settings are typical for files created inside the My Documents folder of Computer Administrator users who haven’t elected to make their files private.

3. The folders you’re working with have Create Files and Create Folders permissions for Everyone on themselves and their subfolders, and Full Control permissions for the dummy user CREATOR OWNER on subfolders and files. Which means that anybody can create files or folders, but only the user who created them can change or delete them. This is a fairly typical setting for the root folder of newly formatted drives.

You can check the permissions on any file by right-clicking the file, selecting Properties, then clicking on the Security tab. If you don’t have a Security tab on file or folder property sheets, you need to do one of two things depending on whether you’re running XP Home or Professional.

For XP Professional: open a Windows Explorer window, then select Tools->Folder Options->View; scroll down to the bottom and turn off Simple File Sharing.

For XP Home: run the “Security for folders and files” patch from this website.

Things you should know about NTFS permissions to make sense of what’s going on:

1. When you copy a file into a folder on an NTFS volume (using copy/paste or right-click-drag/drop/Copy File(s) Here), the file will inherit permissions from the folder you copy it into.

2. When you move a file from one folder to another (using cut/paste or drag/drop), the file will keep its existing permissions.

3. As well as a bunch of permissions, every NTFS file and folder has an owner, which can be a user or a security group. The owner has full control over the file or folder regardless of any permissions that are set on it.

4. There are some users and security groups built in to Windows (Everyone, Administrator, Administrators etc) that have predefined Security ID’s which are the same on all machines. Other users and groups have SID’s derived from that of the machine they’re defined on. So if you give user Joe permission to access a file on machine A, that doesn’t necessarily mean you can plug the drive into machine B, log on as Joe and get access to the same file.

5. Members of the Administrators security group have the right to take ownership of any file or folder, either for themselves or for the Administrators group as a whole.

For an external drive that is going to be used on several different computers, I recommend you set the NTFS permissions very loose, and rely on your physical possession of the drive for the security of its files:

1. Connect the drive to any Windows XP machine on which you have a Computer Administrator logon.

2. Log on as an administrator.

3. Double-click My Computer.

4. Right-click the drive and select Properties. If the property sheet doesn’t have a Security tab, enable them as described above and then come back to this step.

5. Click the Security tab.

6. Click the Advanced button. This should bring up the Advanced Security Settings dialog for the drive, which will have some more tabs on it.

7. Click the Owner tab.

8. Click the line for the Administrators group, check “Replace owner on subcontainers and objects”, and click OK. If you’re asked about replacing existing permissions with ones giving you Full Control, click Yes.

9. The Advanced Security Properties box should eventually disappear, leaving you looking at Security tab on the original Properties sheet again. For each entry in the “Group or user names” list in turn, click on that entry and click Remove.

10. Click Add. This will bring up the “Select Users, Computer or Groups” dialog.

11. Under “Enter the object names to select”, type Everyone and click OK. You should see that Everyone has been added to the list of users and groups.

11. Click Everyone, and check Full Control.

12. Click Apply.

13. Click Advanced again to get the Advanced Security Settings dialog box back.

14. Check “Replace permission entries on all child objects with entries shown here that apply to child objects” and click OK.

15. Click OK.

You should now be able to read and write all the files in that folder and all its subfolders regardless of which computer you’re using or who you’re logged on as.
posted by flabdablet at 9:09 PM on May 15, 2006 [1 favorite]

If you want to make the permissions a little more conventional, you can repeat steps 10 and both elevens (oops) to add Full Control permissions for Administrators and SYSTEM. But since Everyone is, well, everyone, this isn’t strictly necessary.
posted by flabdablet at 9:13 PM on May 15, 2006

I oppened up a document and inserted an image. Now the fastest way I could get the image off the file was to right-click on it and select copy and then openning up Microsoft Paint at Start > Programs > Acessories > Paint and copying the image into it using CTRL+V or paste option of edit menu.

Then I could save it as an image file. Problem solved.

Enjoy!

You want for example to easily select all document files and move them to a document dedicated folder. Traversing all hierarchy and moving files manually is time consuming.

You can efficiently do this by using the search functionality on Windows Explorer.

Using Windows Explorer go to the parent folder of the directory structure you want to clean up. Click Search on your toolbar.

The Search Companion column will show up at your left: “What do you want to search for?”.

You can try and play with the search options but for this example let’s say you select All files and folders.

You want to search for documents so let’s enter .doc at the box All or part of the file name and confirm that the Look in drop down box has our parent folder. It’s confirmed so let’s hit the Search button.

All your document files will show up as result of your search. Now you can manipulate them as you usually do on Windows Explorer disregarding they are on different folders.

So we can hit CTRL+A to select them all and then drag them to a target folder making sure SHIFT is pressed while dragging (to move the files instead of copying them) – or using CTRL+C at the selected list and then CTRL+V at the target folder – or using right-click cut at the selected list and right-click paste at the target folder. Use the method you are most used to.

And this should be enough to move all documents stored across folders to one target folder, easily.

You can use the same technique to delete files with certain patterns for example. Just remember that the same operation you can do on files at the same folder you can do to any group of files across your file system in one go.

Have fun!

After right-clicking your disk device and selecting Change Drive Letter and Paths you can click Add… and then browse to an empty folder that will be your mount point.

So you can for example create a C:\Documents folder on your system disk and mount an external hard drive on it. Or you might create a C:\Program Files 2 directory and mount a different disk.

Then if you use your external disk on any other computer you can mount into the same mount point and refer to your files the same way.

That’s it =)

Have Fun!

Unfortunately Windows doesn’t consistently assign the same drive letter to the same device and this makes things complicated. Fortunately Windows will only mess around your device letters if you start up your computer after connecting devices that you don’t usually connect. For example I normally connect my usb 3g modem, an usb hub with a keyboard and mouse connected into it and an external disk drive – and I connect them to the same usb ports every time. This makes Windows use the same device letter consistently. But if I connect an ebook reader with a memory card on it that will add 2 storage devices to the system and make Windows change the drive letter configuration.

The temporary solution I found was:

1. Open Control Panel
2. Open Administrative Tools (Windows XP Professional)
3. Open Computer Management
4. Select Disk Management under Storage
5. An applet will open. Right-click on the drive you want to modify the drive letter.
6. Select Change Drive Letter and Paths
7. Select the drive letter and click Change.
8. Select the drive letter you want to change to from the drop down list.

That’s it! you made it =)

Have fun!