Category: Windows

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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
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
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
Windows

Activate the Master Control Panel (AKA God Mode)

What is this? MCP adds an icon to your desktop that gives you near instant access to nearly every Windows setting available.

Activating this is really simple: just create a new folder on your desktop (right-click and select New -> Folder), and name it “GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}”

This will create a new folder with the following icon:

Double-clicking this icon will open a list of settings.