Thursday, June 10, 2010

Tyan S5397 OS Install from USB CDROM

I never expected this one...

My SATA CDROM died (SATA connector broke off!), so when it was time to do a fresh install of W7 I decided to use an external DVDROM on USB...

Easy to make it boot - but when it gets to the point of selecting the disk to install on, there isn't one!
I tried various ways to configure the SATA/PATA drives in the BIOS, but nothing worked. And adding the drivers from floppy wasn't any more successful.

Thinking back to how the system was configured last time I installed an  OS, I realized that I used the Internal SATA CDROM - and sure enough, once I installed that, everything seems to work fine...

Thursday, May 27, 2010

Adaptec 2940 AU PCI SCSI-2 host adapter and Windows Vista

SCSI's been around for awhile - it used to be that the Adapted 1540 was the standard host adapter, but then the ISA bus went away... Now we can find PCMCIA, expresscard and even USB SCSI host adapters... but if you have PCI on your system, and a 2940 host adapter that worked fine in XP, why change now that you're on Windows Vista?

If you boot Vista with the 2940 installed, you will find that it will not install a driver - the adapter will show up in the Device Manager under "Other devices" with the exclamation point triangle...

There is, however, a driver that will work already in Vista... To load it proceed as follows:

Open the "SCSI Controller Properties"
In the "General" tab click on "Update Driver..."
Then "Browse my computer for driver software"
Then "Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer"
Scroll down and select "Storage Controllers"
Click on "Next"
Select "Adapter" as the manufacturer and "Adaptec AIC-7870 PCI SCSI Controller (Emulated)"
Click on "Next"
Click on "Yes" in the "Update Driver Warning" dialog.

After a few seconds you should get the "Windows has successfully updated your driver software" dialog.
Click on "Close"

Now you have a driver - and access to your old SCSI-2 disks (and Polaroid Film Scanner)..

It would be nice if this also worked for Windows 7... But the driver isn't there..

Once of these days I may try to move the djsvs.sys file(s) from Vista to W7...

Monday, March 22, 2010

HP16500C Logic Analyzer X-client connection

Once I had ftp up and running I decided to move the display from the analyzer to my PC. So, I needed a suitable X-windows server to run on my PC. I tried many, with little success. I finally settled on Xming (free version for sourceforge)... The first problem was that I got "Xlib: connection to ..... refused by server" errors on the 16500C... I figured it had something to do with authentication - and found that using Xlaunch I could check the box that says "No Access Control"... Now it would connect but the 16500C would crash with:

"SOFTWARE ERROR - Please record these numbers 0008 00001D5E 000C"

Requiring me to turn off the 16500C to reboot.

I did get a display on the PC, but the text was in the wrong place and missing...

Google (and the HP manual) told me I needed to install the special fonts provided on the 16500C (and ftp-able to my PC) to the X-server...

Of course the fonts provided have to be formatted properly for modern X-servers - something you can do on a Linux machine, or by installing Cygwin... (I went with Cygwin), once they are configured correctly (as lg165.pcf.gz and sm165.pcf.gz) you have to create a directory for them, and a fonts.dir file (something XmingNotes on fonts will tell you how to do...).

Save yourself this work and download the necessary files from:

http://cid-0038d26020c74e81.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/16500C?authkey=!UO0VD8g9Tw%24

Put them in a directory of your choice (I chose C:\fonts\16500C).

 
 You will also have to edit the file font-dirs in C:\Program Files\Xming to look something like:

# font-dirs

# comma-separated list of directories to add to the default font path

# defaults are built-ins, misc, TTF, Type1, 75dpi, 100dpi

# also allows entries on individual lines
C:\fonts\HP16500C

C:\Program Files\Xming\fonts\dejavu,C:\Program Files\Xming\fonts\cyrillic

C:\WINDOWS\Fonts


 Note that you have to run Notepad.exe (or your other favorite text editor) as Administrator to do this in Windows 7 (or Vista).

Now re-start Xming (remember to disable authentication), and see you 16500C screen on your PC!

HP16500C Logic Analyzer ftp connections

So these days you can get a logic analyzer pretty cheap (on eBay) - especially if you keep looking and wait for something listed at auction - I paid $232 (incl. tax and shipping) for mine with 3x16555D LA modules and one 16522A vector generator, but no pods.

There are various versions on the HP16500 series (A/B/C) but no reason to not go for the top of the line - 16500C - it has an HDD, PS2 ports for keyboard and mouse, and Twisted Pair (CAT5) ethernet interface.

The network interface allows connection to the analyzer using ftp or NFS, and a connection to your PC X-server to use as a display.  Of course setting any of these up is non-trivial, so here is how I Fixed It...

First - ftp - there are many ftp clients that will connect - but some are more difficult to get to work than others. I wanted to back up the HDD and replace it with a more reliable CompactFlash card, so I needed to transfer the entire file structure. The FileZilla client was my choice, and connecting to control@192.168.0.165 (the IP address I had assigned to the analyzer) gave me a directory listing of the HDD. I set up a folder on the PC called 16500C and dragged the four folders (slot_c, slot_e, status and system) to the 16500C folder on the PC.

Didn't work very well - timeouts and aborted transfer in the queue galore. Google hinted that the 16500C only supports one connection at a time - and with the directory listing open there were no more connections available to do the transfer, hence the timeouts...

Simple fix - disconnect (using the red X in the button bar) from the currently visible server, the queued transfers will complete nicely (except for the one user config file that had a bad block on the HDD).

Once you find a CompactFlash that works restoring the files you want is just as easy - drag, drop and disconnect!

Finding a suitable CompactFlash may not be easy so far I know that 1GB SanDisk Ultra fails, and so do 1GB, 4GB and 8GB Lexar cards and 4GB Kingston. I have a 32MB Smart Modular card working, and looking at some 256MB cards from STEC. Please comment on what you get to work if you do this!

Windows 7 and network shares on W2K (Windows 2000)

So, I have an old Windows 2000 machine, it works, and I don't want to replace it.
The data it manages I share on the network through a normal shared folder.

No problems until Windows 7... Suddenly I can't access the share - invalid username/password is the error. It worked this morning but now it doesn't and nothing has changed...

Google informs me that the authentication used by Windows 7 now requires NTLMV2 and proceeds to tell me how to configure W7 to accept NTLM - except I have "Home Premium" on this machine and can't edit security policies (I thought I just couldn't use remote desktop connection to the machine, but we learn something new every day)...

There is, however, a registry key that can be changed or created:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CURRENTCONTROLSET\CONTROL\LSA]
"LMCOMPATIBILITYLEVEL"=DWORD:00000001

Create (as I did) this key and give it a value of 1

Or, if it is already there, change the value to 1

The values defined for this key are:

Level 0 - Send LM response and NTLM response; never use NTLMv2
Level 1 - Use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated
Level 2 - Send NTLM response only
Level 3 - Send NTLMv2 response only
Level 4 - DC refuses LM responses
Level 5 - DC refuses LM and NTLM responses (accepts only NTLMv2)

Thanks to http://www.governmentsecurity.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=6526

for this info