laptop - Installing Windows XP on Samsung SENS 145 plus notebook (no CD drive)

Hi I was trying to install Windows XP on a Samsung SENS 145 plus Notebook. It does not have a cd drive and I already managed to format it and semi install Windows XP, so now it does not even boot up either. This is what I did:

Since it supports USB booting, I first made a bootable USB of Windows XP (Korean version; SP2 I think, may be SP3) using Novicorp WinToFlash. It managed to boot up at first and I was able to format the C drive and get Windows install to start up. It took forever to copy all the files from the USB and after the first reboot, before installation started, I cancelled the reboot from Windows install, went to BIOS and changed the boot device priority from USB to internal hard drive. But now on bootup it showed me a list with two options for booting Windows XP (much like in the case of a multi OS system) so I assumed that I had formatted drive D by mistake and installed XP there, instead of on C drive. Anyway, I chose one of them and it continued my Windows installation. I got the blue installation screen that shows ads about Windows XP on the right frame and estimated remaining time on the left. However, after completing the process, after the first reboot, instead of showing the Windows XP logo, it says \system32\hall.dll is missing (or corrupted I'm not sure, I needed to install the Korean version of Windows and I could not exactly read the error message, however it was one that I have already seen in an English version installation, and I am sure it says either missing or corrupted).

The problem is, now it shows the same error again when I try to reboot it from the USB drive as well. I tried to boot a portable version of Linux I made in another USB, but the computer does not boot up from that USB, and it shows hal.dll error when I try to boot it using the Windows XP installation USB I made, as well as when I try to boot it from the hard drive, where I suppose Win XP is now semi-installed. So now I can't get the computer to start up at all, except going to the BIOS.

What else can I try to solve this?

Also, would it be possible to install XP on this computer by connecting it to another one running Windows 7 ultimate, through the Ethernet card? That is, network just the two computers together, then install Windows XP on the notebook from the desktop running Windows 7? Please help, I'm running out of ideas on this one. If Korean version of Windows XP is the problem then I am willing to install English version as well. (but I need to make sure if that is the real cause of the problem)

How to un freeze drive in Linux?

I run

sudo hdparm -I /dev/sda

results:

Security:

Master password revision code = [redacted just in case it's sensitive data]

supported

not enabled

not locked

frozen

not expired: security count

supported: enhanced erase

My objective is to perform an enhanced secure erase (how? I'll find that out after I know how to unfreeze my drive) and also to detect and remove a Device Configuration Overlay. Relevant thread: Error when running 'hdparm --dco-identify' in Linux

I am trying to figure out why --dco-identify is failing and I suspect it may be as a result of the drive being "frozen". I recall this being a problem a year back when I was trying to securely erase an SSD. I gave up but suspected that connecting it via USB or hotswapping it might fix it.

Why? Refer to:
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1982585

So in the context of this post, I am trying to unfreeze my drive. How can I do this while it's connected via SATA?

---

Update:
I tried this with an external HDD and ran

sudo hdparm -I /dev/sda

The drive is not frozen. Fascinating.

I ran:

sudo hdparm --dco-identify /dev/sdc

The command executed successfully!!

So that's confirmed but still does not answer my question about whether this can be achieved with an internal drive

Are there any disadvantages of having a "free fall sensor" on a hard disk drive?

This is a general question that came out of a specific comparison between the Western Digital Scorpio WD3200BEKT and Western Digital Scorpio WD3200BJKT (which is the same as the former but with a free fall sensor.) Note: I'm not asking for a review or appraisal of these specific drives, as the general question does apply on other brands as well. Though your input would help my decision.

To break down the general question in order to answer it, I would be looking for comments on things like:

• if it's necessary to have differing physical dimensions between free fall sensor drives and those without, e.g. does it make it any thicker, and therefore reduce the systems where it can be installed - particularly smaller laptops?




• does it actually make the system less reliable - because of false alarms whereby the drive thought the laptop was falling but it wasn't?

I suppose that the fact that a manufacturer produces both drives with and without free fall sensors says something about possible disadvantages. Or it could be standard marketing techniques where by making drives with and without results in larger sales volume than just those with the feature alone.

Answer

Are there any disadvantages of having a “free fall sensor” on a hard disk drive?

Nope.

if it's necessary to have differing physical dimensions between free fall sensor drives and those without, e.g. does it make it any thicker, and therefore reduce the systems where it can be installed - particularly smaller laptops?

No. As you can see, even a typical 2.5" laptop drive has enough space for the tiny component.

does it actually make the system less reliable - because of false alarms whereby the drive thought the laptop was falling but it wasn't?

Not generally, no. The sensor is specifically calibrated to detect free fall (like the laptop being dropped), not just minor bumps.

If a laptop is dropped, it will experience a a moment of weightlessness and then a sudden and relatively massive increase in shock (g-forces). For hard-drives in which a head is floating on a microscopic cushion of air above a disk spinning at thousands of revolutions per minute (Scott Mueller analogized it as a jumbo-jet flying a few feet off the ground), this can be/is usually quite harmful and results in a catastrophic head crash.

Hard-drives (usually laptop drives) with free-fall sensors are designed such that when it detects that the drive is falling (usually the whole system), then it tries to park the head(s) quickly so that when it hits, the heads are on a non-data section of the platters. This by no means guarantees that the drive will survive; it can still kill it if the shock is severe enough, but at least the platters will still have their data intact (unless the shock is somehow astronomical enough to actually jolt the magnetic bits around).

If the laptop is merely bumped, then the sensor should not trigger since it is calibrated not to. Instead, what may happen if the bump was hard enough and the drive happened to be active at the moment is that it will encounter a read or write error and log it in the SMART table: G-sense Error Rate: The count of errors resulting from externally induced shock & vibration.

Usually however, it will just try the read/write again and unless you see other, more critical SMART values rise, then nothing particularly bad happened.

I suppose that the fact that a manufacturer produces both drives with and without free fall sensors says something about possible disadvantages.

Or it is just a way to sell a more expensive model.

iptables - Bots hitting xmlrpc.php and causing high load on the server

Recently we are having a lot of hits to wordpress xmlrpc.php which in end causes high load on the servers.

We tried rewriting all xmlrpc.php to 127.0.0.1 but didn't help much. Since apache was still handling the connections.
In the end we blocked this kind of connections using

iptables -I INPUT 1 -p tcp --dport 80 -m string --string "xmlrpc.php" --algo bm -j DROP

Unfortunately, all of this is causing problems with plugins that are using xmlrpc.php like jetpack etc.

Anyone had experience with this kind of problem and has some suggestions how to handle this ?

Edit:
Is it possible to add additional rule which would allow access from the wordpress IP range ? How would that rule look like since the blocking rule is using string ?

Windows 10: sfc and dism cannot repair corruption

There are several posts along this line, but the fixes that answered other questions did not solve my problem.

• Windows 10 Pro
  
  
  
  • Upgrade from W7 Pro, but then did a "Reset" as I was having some problems with a screen saver, and wanted to get a cleaner install, without doing a reformat.
  
  


• I ran sfc /scannow and the response was that corruption was found, but could not be repaired (see relevant portion of CBS.log below)
  
  
  
  • The corrupt file was stated to be malgunbd.ttf
  
  



• I then tried various DISM commands

  
  

  dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth

  
  

  dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth /source:wim:d:\sources\install.wim:1 /LimitAccess

as well as trying other sources. These all returned the message:

Error: 0x800f081f

The source files could not be found.

along with the reference to look at a Microsoft article about specifying the source.

The source above is a recently downloaded ISO from MS. I also tried a .cab file downloaded by one of the posters here, but it did not seem to contain the relevant font files.

I tried replacing malgunbd.ttf with the same font file from another W10 computer on which sfc /scannow runs without error. That did no good (and makes me wonder of the database that sfc uses to determine whether system files are valid is, itself, corrupted).

I understand that with W10, a repair/reinstall can be done that will just replace the system files, leaving previously installed programs, settings, and data undisturbed. But it seems overkill if the problem is just a single font file.

Here are the relevant portions of cbs.log and dism.log

- CBS.log

2015-09-23 21:00:12, Info                  CSI    000050ad [SR] Cannot repair member file [l:24{12}]"malgunbd.ttf" of Microsoft-Windows-Font-TrueType-MalgunGothicBold, Version = 10.0.10240.16384, pA = amd64, nonSxS, PublicKeyToken = {l:8 b:31bf3856ad364e35} in the store, hash mismatch
2015-09-23 21:00:12, Info                  CSI    000050b0 [SR] Cannot repair member file [l:24{12}]"malgunbd.ttf" of Microsoft-Windows-Font-TrueType-MalgunGothicBold, Version = 10.0.10240.16384, pA = amd64, nonSxS, PublicKeyToken = {l:8 b:31bf3856ad364e35} in the store, hash mismatch
2015-09-23 21:00:12, Info                  CSI    000050b1 [SR] This component was referenced by [l:252{126}]"Microsoft-OneCore-Fonts-DesktopFonts-windows-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~10.0.10240.16384.aa769378d5daebe8af8c9f1c3efdd70e"
2015-09-23 21:00:12, Info                  CSI    000050b2 [SR] This component was referenced by [l:346{173}]"Microsoft-Windows-Client-Features-Package-AutoMerged-windows~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~10.0.10240.16384.Microsoft-Windows-Client-Features-Package-AutoMerged-windows-Deployment"
2015-09-23 21:00:12, Info                  CSI    000050b5 [SR] Could not reproject corrupted file [ml:42{21},l:40{20}]"\??\C:\WINDOWS\fonts"\[l:24{12}]"malgunbd.ttf"; source file in store is also corrupted
2015-09-23 21:00:12, Info                  CSI    000050b8 [SR] Repair complete
2015-09-23 21:00:12, Info                  CSI    000050b9 [SR] Committing transaction
2015-09-23 21:00:12, Info                  CSI    000050be [SR] Verify and Repair Transaction completed. All files and registry keys listed in this transaction  have been successfully repaired

Due to the length of the relevant portions of the dism.log file, I have just posted a link. The file comprises the last two runs of DISM, as in the commands above. The first run was with no source specified; the second was with the install.wim file specified.

Thanks for any help.

EDIT
Being concerned that my file path specification might be incorrect, and in view of magicandre's answer, I executed the following command, with the following result:

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> dism /get-imageinfo /Imagefile:d:\sources\install.wim
Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool
Version: 10.0.10240.16384
Details for image : d:\sources\install.wim
Index : 1
Name : Windows 10 Pro
Description : Windows 10 Pro
Size : 13,736,528,128 bytes
The operation completed successfully.

And then the actual attempt to cleanup the image:

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth /source:wim:d:\sources\install.wim:1 /LimitAccess
Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool
Version: 10.0.10240.16384
Image Version: 10.0.10240.16384
[==========================100.0%==========================]
Error: 0x800f081f
The source files could not be found.
Use the "Source" option to specify the location of the files that are required to restore the feature. For more information on specifying a source location, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=243077.
The DISM log file can be found at C:\WINDOWS\Logs\DISM\dism.log

Answer

I was finally able to repair my Windows installation such that SFC returned a normal result.

Using a freshly downloaded USB image of W10, I did an inplace upgrade as suggested in magicandre1981's comments.

After that, there was a different file that was corrupt and could not be repaired.

Again, DISM did not initially repair this. However, I was able to determine that the file in question was located in the C:\windows\winsxs and also the C:\windows\system32 folders.

Since the previous installation did not flag that file as corrupt, I figured I could use the previous installations copy of that file as a good file.

Before running DISM again, I executed the following from an elevated command prompt and then re-booted the machine, as per instructions in an article at thewindowsclub.com which is not presently accessible. I'm not sure if the reboot is necessary, as that is not mentioned in another article.

net stop wuauserv
cd %systemroot%\SoftwareDistribution
ren Download Download.old
net start wuauserv
net stop bits
net start bits
net stop cryptsvc
cd %systemroot%\system32
ren catroot2 catroot2old
net start cryptsvc

By running DISM, and using c:\windows.old\windows\winsxs as the Source, I was able to repair the store. And then running SFC resulted in the original file being repaired.

Why this is happening, I have no idea. On a different machine, (and different internet connection/ISP) the upgraded (from W7) W10 installation also showed a corrupt file when running SFC. On that machine, DISM was able to repair it using the default Windows Update as a source.

Windows 10 1607 LTSB cannot install security updates

I'm running Windows 10 1607 (build 14393.0) Long-term Service Branch and I want to install the latest updates on it (I'm only interested in security updates). When manually searching for updates using Settings > Update and Security > Windows Update nothing shows up. It says that there are no updates present and that there are no updates installed.

When I try to install the latest security update from the Windows Update Catalog (KB4343887, cumulative update x64) and manually install it, it says that this update is not applicable to your computer (which it clearly is). Microsoft support says that it has four main reasons for this error to appear:

1. The update is superseded (which it isn't, since it is the newest update)


2. The update is already installed (which it also isn't, since there are no updates installed on the computer


3. The wrong update for the architecture (the computer is 64 bit, just like the update I chose)


4. Missing prerequisite update (at first I thought that this was a possibility, but I chose the cumulative update, which contains all the previous updates)

When testing this with KB4103723 (may 2018) it didn't show this error. However, at the end of the wizard, it just said that it failed, nothing more.

Note: I know the support for Windows 10 1607 has partly halted and will be completely abandoned in October of 2018, but this is the LTSB version, which will be supported for a total of 10 years.

If anyone has had the same problem, please let me know if and how you fixed it.

website - wget not converting links

I am trying to mirror a fairly large site (20,000+ pages) prior to a major overhaul. Basically, I need a backup before cutting over to the new one in case we forgot something we need (we'll have about 1,000 pages at launch). The site is run on a CMS that I cannot easily extract usable data from, so I'm trying to make the copy with wget.

My problem is that wget does not appear to be actually converting links, despite the presence of --convert-links or -k in the command. I've tried a couple of different combinations of flags, but I haven't been able to get the output I need. Most recent failed attempt was:

nohup wget --mirror -k -l10 -PafscSnapshot --html-extension -R *calendar* -o wget.log http://www.example.org &

I've also included the --backup-converted, and --convert-links instead of -k (not that it have mattered). I've done it with and without -P and -l, again no that they should matter.

Results in files that still have links like:

http://www.example.org/ht/d/sp/i/17770