Shawn Cicoria - CedarLogic

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October 2007 - Posts

Getting a winload.exe Missing or Corrupt after Cloning new drive...

Well, after upgrading the hard drive on my notebook to the Hitachi 200 Gig 7,200 drive, first thing is see is the message that Winload.exe is missing or Corrupt.

Turns out it's a simple fix and you can try two ways to fix.  I was using Apricorn's Easy upgrade for SATA drives to make the clone.  Great software good price and the USB external caddy now holds my old 2.5" SATA drive. One thing is they specifically state that it doesn't work with Vista - that's for the cloning software running "under" Vista.  It still works to clone or image you just need the commands below to fix what turns out to be a minor issue - no data loss, just a bit of Vista Bootmanager confusion with their new boot process (no more boot.ini remember!!!)

Steps To Do

Once you have the new cloned drive in, using your Vista installation CD, boot from it then go through the prompts to "repair" you system and when there, choose "Command prompt".

At the command prompt, simply type the following (found in KB article 927391).

Bootrec /RebuildBcd <enter> - then, it should find your c:\windows installation and just select "Y".  At that point you should be "bootable" and the message goes away.

Others have been reporting that the above isn't always working and have found an alternate way - which I also found up on the Hitachi site under their "Notebook PC Upgrade Kit Installation FAQs".  The following is from that page - however, they're not specific "when" you do this.  You can do it AFTER by booting from the Vista Installation CD, getting through to the Command Prompt and running the following commands.

bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device boot
bcdedit /set {default} device boot
bcdedit /set {default} osdevice boot

Later on, I also found this link that has a bit more discussion on dual booting, multi-booting, and cloning with Vista...

Dual/Multi Booting With Vista

Intel 3945ABG, Vista, and Driver Quality Issues - Dell has the latest & best...

I've been running Vista on a Toshiba M5 for quite some time.  Since the RTM, the drivers for the 3945ABG driver from Intel have been garbage.  Tried each one as they came out from Intel's site here:

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Filter_Results.aspx?strOSs=All&strTypes=All&ProductID=2259&OSFullName=All%20Operating%20Systems&lang=eng

So, back in late August, I was checking Dell's support site on a different machine and noticed that the drivers that Dell was publishing for the Intel 3945ABG were a later version.  Intel's site didn't have them - nor does Toshiba.

So, since then, I've been running with the drivers (which are built by Intel) from the Dell site for the 3945ABG from this link:

Installer package for driver version 11.1.1.22

Haven't had a problem since.  There used to be issues that would intermittently drop the connection forcing a manual reset with the HW switch on the outside of the M5.  Even one error which showed up in the event log that was only addressed by a reboot.  It was so bad I pulled out an older PC Card WIFI adapter to use until I was able to reboot.

I don't get Toshiba or Intel - I've found this error posted across many forums, Technet. Microsoft, Ars Technical, Vista Forums.  This is the state of affairs when it comes to quality and support and why these guys are failing.

Posted: 10-18-2007 6:18 AM by cicorias | with no comments
Filed under:
Get Your own Personal Assistant...

Times are busy.  If you need a little help on those little tasks that seem to interrupt and consume way more time than they should, check out www.AskSunday.com  

Sunday gives busy people the resources of a 24/7 personal assistant, available via telephone and Internet, at a fraction of the cost of other options.

SUNDAY LLC || (212) 660-9960

Posted: 10-17-2007 3:14 AM by cicorias | with no comments
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Restoring Missing Toolbox Items in Visual Studio 2005 - just another Annoyance

On one of my machines, when attempting to build out a small SSIS solution none of the toolbox items were showing.  Turns out there's a quick way to recreate/reset them.

Just delete the "toolbox*.*" files from the "%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0" directory.

Next time you open VS.NET 2005, it rebuilds from the defaults - you loose any customizations.

UPDATE: October 11, 2007 - you need to "see" these hidden files - I just did an "attrib -h tool*" in the directory, then killed with a "del tool*" from a command processor window.

Posted: 10-10-2007 6:40 PM by cicorias | with no comments
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Installing ADAM on Vista

Ryan Dunn points out on his blog how to install ADAM on Vista.  Basically, the installer chokes.

His approach is to install on a different machine (not Vista), then copy the files over, registry change, run the admininsall.exe, then import the LDIF schema's you want.

One thing you can also do is use 7-Zip to extract the "ADAM" directory from the installer, then just start from step 2 on Ryan's list - saves a bit of time if you don't have another VM handy.

Here's Ryan's list repeated.

  1. << Extract using 7-Zip >>
  2. Copy the %WINDIR%\ADAM folder that is created to your Vista machine to the same location.
  3. Create a new registry key called HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ADAM_Shared
  4. Under this key, create a new Multi-String value called "SharedFolders"
  5. Now, run adaminstall.exe from your %WINDIR%\ADAM directory and follow the wizard.  Do not import any LDIF files.
  6. Finally, run ldifde.exe for each import you wanted to have in step #5.  The correct command line arguments to use are listed at the top of each .ldf file.

Thanks to Ryan for the clarity on the installation steps.