Categories
Laptop Lenovo Lenovo USB Recovery Creator Windows

Lenovo USB Recovery Creator fails

One of our laptops had a Windows issue that needed a reinstall of the computer. I placed an online order on the Lenovo website for the recovery media and downloaded it. So far so good.

I now had the Lenovo USB Recovery Creator software, so I thought it was a matter of an hour or two before the laptop was going to be fine again. Big mistake.

I ran the USB Recovery Creator and signed in, selected my digital order and downloaded the media. This already took 2 or 3 attempts before it was successful.

The next step involved creating the actual usb stick. I inserted a working USB stick but the Lenovo USB Recovery Creator failed to partition it. And again. And again. And again. Tried it at least 15 times, no luck.

Eventually found the solution in a post somewhere on Reddit ( I don’t have the link anymore otherwise I would include it). The solution was creating a primary 32GB FAT32 partition on the stick using diskpart, and assigning it a drive letter. Don’t partition or don’t assign a drive letter: Lenovo USB Recovery Creator will fail guaranteed.

Here is the short instruction to create that partition:

Search for “Command Prompt” in the Start menu, right-click it, and select “Run as administrator”.
Type ‘diskpart’ and press Enter. The diskpart utility will open in the Command Prompt.
Type ‘list disk’ and press Enter. This will show a list of all connected disks, including your flash drive.
Identify your flash drive by its size in the list. Be careful to select the correct disk.
Type ‘select disk X’ (replace X with the number of your flash drive) and press Enter.
Type ‘clean’ and press Enter. This will erase all data and partitions on the selected disk.
Type ‘create partition primary size=32768’ and press Enter.
This command creates a 32GB partition (32,768 MB).
Type ‘select partition 1’ and press Enter to select the newly created partition.
Type ‘format fs=fat32 quick’ and press Enter. This will quickly format the partition to FAT32.
Type ‘assign’ and press Enter. This assigns a drive letter to the new partition, making it accessible in File Explorer.
Type ‘exit’ and press Enter to close Diskpart, then close Command Prompt.

Categories
Databases Linux MySQL Ubuntu

Mysql root user has no GRANT option on Ubuntu

If your mysql root user has no grant option on Ubuntu, here’s the procedure to fix this:

First you will have to start mysql without using the grant tables

sudo systemctl edit mysql

This will open an editor, add the following lines and save/quit the editor

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/mysqld --skip-grant-tables

Issue the following commands:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload 
sudo systemctl start mysql

You can now connect to mysql using just the following command (without password)

mysql

Now change the user settings as follows:

mysql> UPDATE mysql.user SET Grant_priv = 'Y', Super_priv = 'Y' WHERE User = 'root';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.02 sec)
Rows matched: 1  Changed: 0  Warnings: 0
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.18 sec)

Now issue the first commands again (uptil the systemctl start mysql command), but remove the lines you’ve added to the mysql config.

Categories
Linux

Installing OpenVas on Kali gives error about ospd-openvas.service failing

I am installing openvas on kali linux. when starting openvas with gvm-start I get an error Job for ospd-openvas.service failed because the control process exited with error code. What is causing this and how to fix this ?

The cause of this is a permission issue on the openvas logs. The fix is quite easy:

chmod 666 /var/log/gvm/openvas.log
gvm-start

The problem should be fixed.

Categories
Linux

How to remove all cover art from MP3s.

Open a terminal window and go to your MP3 folder. Run the following command (you might have to install eyeD3 first for our linux distribution.) :

eyeD3 *.mp3 --remove-all-images
Categories
Zentyal

Zentyal – How to restart services

open an SSH session to your server and use the following command:

sudo zs samba restart

Check if it is running:

sudo zs samba status

Replace ‘samba’ with the service you want to restart.

Categories
Windows Zentyal

Fixing domain trust issues

If you get the error message “The trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed”, here is how you can fix it.

Open a PowerShell as Administrator and enter the following commands:

Test-ComputerSecureChannel

This will show true or false. If it shows false, enter the following commands (replace domain.lan with your domain name, adminaccount with your administrator username, and domainserver with the name of your domainserver)

$credential = Get-Credential domain.lan\adminaccount
Reset-ComputerMachinePassword -server domainserver 
-credential $credential

This should fix the problem without having to leave and rejoin the domain.

Categories
Laptop

How to get into your laptops Bios

BrandKey
Lenovo (laptops, excl ThinkPads)F2 or FN+F2
Lenovo (desktops)F1
Lenovo (ThinkPads)Enter, followed by F1
DellF2 or F12
HPF1, F10 or DEL
ASRockF2 or DEL
ASUS F2
AcerF2 or DEL
GigabyteF2 or DEL
MSIDEL
SamsungF2
ToshibaF2

Categories
Windows

Windows changes my printer ports. Help!?

Windows 10 (and presumably Windows 11 as well) has the very annoying ‘feature’ of thinking it can manage your printer better than you can yourself.

If you printer stops working for some inexplicable reason, then the changes are great that Windows had decided to change your printer port to a WSD port, even if you installed it with an IP port.

To avoid this behaviour, delete the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Monitors\WSD Port

Categories
Linux Red Hat Ubuntu

Bash: remove trailing slash from a variable

Suppose you have a variable containing a directorypath:

#!/bin/bash
directorytouse="/home/myhome/whateverdirectory/"

If you try to test in your bash script if the directory exists, then it will fail because of the trailing slash:

if [ ! -d "${directorytouse} ] 
then
    echo -e "directory does not exist!"
fi

The easiest way to remove this / if it is present is to use shell parameter expansion:

if [ ! -d "${directorytouse%/}" ]
then
    echo -e "directory does not exist!"
fi

This will get rid of the trailing slash if there is one. If there is no trailing slash present, then nothing will happen.

Categories
Linux Red Hat Ubuntu

Help, my terminal shows graphical characters instead of normal text

If you have ever used cat or tail to accidentally show a binary file, you will have noticed your terminal show graphical garbage instead of readable text. As shown in the screenshot below:

You will find several suggested fixes on the internet for this, including:

  • type CTRL-C a few times to make sure you are on a new line and then enter ‘reset‘ and tap enter.
  • output the ASCII SI (shift in) character, decimal value 15. This can be entered with CTRL+O and should work if the reset command doesn’t work. Just enter ‘echo CTRL+V CTRL+O’ on the command line
  • enter the command ‘stty sane’, followed by ‘tput rs1’ on the command line.

The only one that worked for me is entering the following (blindly, since you can ‘t read what your are typing) on the terminal prompt:

echo -e "\033c"

A good practice is to define an alias in your startup script with the following command:

alias resetterminal='echo -e "\033c"'

Next time you have this problem, you can then type (blindly) ‘resetterminal’ to fix the problem.