Recovery of Toshiba Laptop using .SWM files

Machine: Toshiba Satellite L450D-11V

Problem: Faulty hard drive, new drive to be installed. Customer has no recovery discs and Windows COA label with product key is worn out so would like to find a way to reinstall Windows 7 without buying a new license.

Solution:

The recovery partition contained eight ‘.swm’ files which we managed to save to a USB hard drive.

The files were:

10739XSP.swm
10739XSP2.swm
10739XSP3.swm
10739XSP4.swm
10739XSP5.swm
10739XSP6.swm
10739XSP7.swm
10739XSP8.swm

Booted up with Windows 7 DVD disc, chose Repair and Command Prompt.

At this point, USB drive was D: and blank hard drive was C:

The executable file ‘ImageX’ (the tool for working with .wim and .swm files) was also on the USB drive. If you don’t have ImageX, Google it – it’s available for download.

Changed command prompt from C: to D:

Ran the following command to merge all .swm files into a single ‘.wim’ file:

imagex /ref 10739XSP*.swm /export 10739XSP.swm 2 boot.wim

This created a 6.5GB .WIM file which was the whole Windows 7 preinstalled partition.

Then ran the following command:

imagex /apply boot.wim 1 C:\

This applied the image to the partition C:\

At this point it would not boot so we ran StartUp Repair from the Windows 7 DVD

Then we ran the command:

bootrec.exe /fixmbr

At this point Windows 7 started and began setting up all the other preinstalled software that Toshiba includes.

Several reboots later and all is running perfectly!

We fix laptops everyday at our laptop repair shop in Kent. Hopefully this site has helped you!

Programs blocked when Vista starts

Fun with Task Scheduler!

So, we had a PC which has an unsigned EPSS.exe (Enterprise Pro Surveillance System CCTV DVR Client) file that is set to run when Vista boots up.

MSCONFIG keeps blocking the executable from running but we want it to run because we know it’s safe and it is needed to run on this PC. Clicking the ‘Allow this program to run’ option just allows it to run once.

MSCONFIG does not assume that it is safe to run it on every boot so we set off in search of a way to run it without restrictions and this is what we found out there…

Continue reading »

Removing NetIntelligence from Home Access Laptops

Home Access Grant

After replacing the hard drives in their Home Access laptops, a number of people have contacted us (probably because of our popular Acer Extensa 5235 post) about an issue with the parental control software that is installed on these machines.

From what we gather, some of (perhaps all) the Home Access machines were bundled with NetIntelligence parental control software.

Here is an excerpt from an enquiry we received: Continue reading »

Install ATI Display Drivers ONLY

Short post but maybe useful to some…

I was sick of installing Catalyst Control Center and all the other crap stuff that it seems you must install to update the drivers on your ATI graphics card so this is what I did.

Download the correct driver update from ATI/AMD’s website. Mine was 12-4_vista_win7_64_dd_ccc.exe

If you don’t already have it, download and install 7Zip from http://www.7-zip.org (this is is a bit like WinZip and Winrar etc but it’s free, open-source software without toolbars and other crap).

Use 7Zip to extract the contents of the file you downloaded from ATI (e.g. right-click on 12-4_vista_win7_64_dd_ccc.exe) and choose ’7Zip > Extract Files’

The drivers you want are in: OUTDIR\Packages\Drivers\Display

OS X Leopard – Losing WiFi Settings

OS X Leopard

We just had a PowerPC G4 Macbook Pro in with Leopard running on it. A bit long in the tooth (especially with 512MB RAM) but working fine nonetheless. Well fine except the WiFi settings seemed to be getting lost each time the machine slept or was rebooted. You’d have to click on the list of available wireless networks to connect to the access point and re-enter the WPA Key every single time.

After much poking about and updating everything we could, we decided to tackle another issue – DVD Player was launching every time the user logged in so we wanted to remove it from Login Items. Off we went to System Preferences > Accounts > “Your Account” > Login Items and deleted DVD Player from the list. We left iTunes Helper and MobileConnect in the list.

This simple act of removing DVD Player from the Login or Startup Items FIXED THE WIFI PROBLEM! Go figure.

Analyze Windows 7 System Resources

How To Quickly View And Analyze System Resources When Using Windows 7

While using Windows, it may become necessary to find out CPU usage, memory usage , disk as well as network usage especially when trying to troubleshoot performance issues.

Windows comes with a handy dashboard that shows all of the above information at a glance. Continue reading »

Windows 7 Taskbar Icons

2 Ways To Enable Or Disable System Icons on Windows 7 Taskbar

The default Windows 7 settings for taskbar includes all the system icons like clock, volume, network, power and action center as being active and displayed.

In order for any of these system icons to prevent from being displayed in Windows 7 taskbar: Continue reading »

Laptop Disassembly Tips

Precision Screwdriver Set

Here are a few tips that may help you strip down and reassemble laptops:

• Use a digital camera or camera phone to take a shot of each stage of the disassembly for reference when you are ready to reassemble it. Zoom in and take separate shots for areas where you have various plugs and connectors or wires running in a specifc way so you know exactly how they were before you took them apart. (unless you have a really good memory!)
• Use scrap sheets of A4 paper to map out screw positions. Sketch a point (or points) of reference like a battery compartment or RAM module cover on the paper so you know what way up it goes and stick each screw to the paper with clear tape so when you’re finished taking all the screws out of the bottom of the laptop they will all be stuck in their corresponding positions on the piece of paper. Depending on the laptop I may have 2 or 3 sheets of paper with screws on – bottom of unit, under the keyboard and motherboard screws. Doing this will be a great help if you have to leave the laptop disassembled for some time (e.g. to order parts etc) as you will have no doubt as to which screws go where. Some makes and models will use the same length screws for most of the base assembly but others have all different lengths which makes it all the more important to remember where they go back. A ‘too-long’ screw in the wrong place could cause major damage! Continue reading »

Theme Companion CSS Override Plugin

WordPress Plugins

We recently set up a WordPress site for the New House Basketball Club in Sittingbourne and we used a theme from iThemes as the basis for the design. Quite a bit of CSS had to be changed to get it exactly how we wanted it so we used the Theme Companion plugin for WordPress to override the bits of CSS that we wanted to alter.
Normally we’d use a Child Theme instead of this plugin, but for themes that don’t support Child Themes, Theme Companion can be quite useful.

On the basketball club site, we had to make alterations like increasing the height of the header and logo area and ‘push down’ the top horizontal menu to compensate for the new height. Here is a sample of what we used to acheive this in the Theme Companion editor: Continue reading »

rel=nofollow on selected Blogroll links

I’ve been looking out for something like this for a while now. WordPress by default has a number of (not very useful IMO) relationships or ‘rel’ checkboxes you can select for various link relationships but rel=”nofollow” is not one of them.

All the plugins I looked at put the “nofollow” attribute on ALL links – you can’t select which ones you want.

Turns out you can easily add this option with a few lines of code. Without further ado, here’s where I got the idea and code from for this blog: How To Add “nofollow” To Certain Blogroll Links In WordPress 3.x

Thanks Trainman1405 for the info!