Category: Simple Stuff I Forget

Windows 8.1 Clean install : We couldn’t find any drives. To get a storage driver, click Load Driver.

“We couldn’t find any drives. To get a storage driver, click Load Driver.”  That’s the message I got trying to install Windows 8.1 on a slightly used drive for my heavily used desktop.  Simply cleaning it in Diskpart solved the problem.

EDIT: LET ME CLARIFY.  Doing the following is preparing your drive for a CLEAN OS INSTALL.  This means you’re losing any data currently on the drive (technically you’re not erasing the drive, you’re just marking all the data as “gone” or “overwriteable,” so if you don’t continue and install an OS you can most likely recover it, but let’s just not go there).  Don’t do this to a drive that has data you want to keep!

  • Open an elevated CMD window
  • Diskpart
  • List disk – find the disk you want to clean
  • Select disk XX – where XX is that disk number
  • Clean

that’s it.

TTRSS

I love me some TTRSS.  Ever since Google shuttered their RSS feed reader I’ve been using it.  It’s nice to not be beholden to another provider for RSS content management.  It’s also a well supported little free system. I definitely recommend it.  The support forums, however, can be pretty rough on the less savvy crowd.  Hell, there’s an entire sticky thread dedicated to a discussion about how the place is overrun with assholes.  If you go there you’ll get help, but make sure you’ve done your due diligence first.

When I upgraded to the latest version of TTRSS (v1.12) my views went all wonky.  The Mark As Read button was hidden from the top bar and things generally looked assy.  What I discovered is that Firefox (speaking of – FF 28 sure has been crashing a lot) had cached some style settings and mixed the old with the new, creating a mess.  hitting SHIFT+F5 while on the site cleared it all up lickety split.

Change the Windows Sticky Note Font

The Windows sticky note font is hideous.  Every rebuild I do (and I do many, as I use virtual machines) means me looking up how to change this font, because Microsoft hasn’t made it easy, or even possible, without drastic action.  It uses the font Segoe.  So you could go in and try to delete that font altogether (which could be an arduous process unto itself, as it’s protected).  It’s easier, however, to go into the registry and repoint that font title to another font (and this way you can choose the font you want for sticky notes.

  • Open the registry and head to HKEY LOCAL MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts
  • If you’re the nervous type, make a backup of this container of settings by right clicking the Fonts folder.
  • Find the item titled either Segoe Print (TrueType) or Segoe Script (TrueType) – it was the latter on my latest 7 64 bit build – and double click it.
  • Change the value to the .ttf of the font you’d prefer.  The example below changes it to the Consola font.  Remember, you’re pointing to the actual ttf file, not the friendly font name.
  • Repeat the process for Segoe Print Bold (TrueType) or Segoe Script Bold (TrueType).

fonts

That’s it.

Rebuilding Workstation Tips

New hard drives have arrived for my workstation and laptop.  They’re desperately overdue for a rebuild.  I love rebuilding and I hate it.  I love it because newly built machines run so smoothly, so cleanly, and have that new-machine smell.  It’s like virtual spring-cleaning.

I hate rebuilding because there’s so much stuff on my machines.  I’ve done a better job over the years of compartmentalizing (and even backing up) my data, but there’s still a lot of it – more than I’d like.  And the applications.  I use so many applications!  Every rebuild I think “I don’t need 3/4 of these apps.  I’m not putting them back on.”  But eventually, inevitably, as I work on this and that my installed app list grows, and I find myself installing a significant amount of the apps I insisted I wouldn’t.  Such is the curse of the breadth of things I work on, I suppose.  Just this morning a coworker from a completely different department commented that I’m the bitch for my department.  I work on whatever needs working on.  My boss generously calls me his “tool belt.”  Bitch is, honestly, more accurate.

Anyway, here are a few things that make my rebuild process less arduous.

  • I always build fresh onto new drives, holding onto the old ones.  Drives are cheap.  There’s nothing worse than blowing your drive away, rebuilding, and suddenly remembering something of Significant Importance™ that you forgot to back up.  Don’t sweat that.  Take the time to decrypt your current drives (you do encrypt them, don’t you) and set them aside. Build on a new drive, and keep your old ones around for a few weeks just to be sure.  Then you can wipe them and use them as scratch drives or external storage or replacement drives for that friend whose drive craps out or whatever.
  • Make a list of your installed applications.  It’s easy:
  1. Open a command prompt with elevated rights (Start > Run > type in CMD.  When the CMD icon appears, right click and Run as Administrator).
  2. Type in WMIC.
  3. Type in /output:c:\path\to\installed_list.txt product get name,version where path\to is, well, the path to wherever you want to write your installed_list.txt.
  4. Wait for it to finish. Enjoy list of apps.

I’ll add more to my list as my latest rebuilds commence.

Export Windows Services to a CSV

Another nice trick – exporting a list of Windows Services to a CSV.  Using Powershell:

Or get fancy and pull based on status:

 

Windows 2003 Terminal Services Restriction

File this under Simple Stuff I Forget.

  1. Open Terminal Services Configuration in Administrative Tools
  2. In the left pane select Connections.  In the right pane, right click on RDP-Tcp and choose Properties
  3. Under the Permissions tab add or remove as necessary

I recommend utilizing the Remote Desktop Users security group builtin for good administrative karma.