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How to Change Product Key without Reinstalling Your Windows XP

ifun — 2008-03-09T20:36:12Z

Say your Windows XP installation (already activated) somehow failed Microsoft Genuine Advantange Test (e.g. your legit product key has already been used by somebody else with Windows XP keygen). You can change the product key used to install your Windows XP without reinstalling your system. The basic idea is to deactivate your system and restart the activation process.

STEP 1 - run regedit, locate \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CrrentVersion\WPAEvents, change at least one digit of the value of OOBETimer to deactivate your installation of Windows XP. Close regedit and restart your system.

STEP 2 - run "c:\windows\system32\oobe\msoobe /a" to activate your Windows XP. Select Telephone option, then change product key, input new key, and confirm the change, and close the activation window. If you have used a VOL key, your system will show already activated after reboot.

How to restore GRUB bootloader

ifun — 2008-01-10T09:18:16Z

Problem: GRUB may be used as a bootloader for a Linux installation. It can also be used for booting multiple operating systems (e.g. Ubuntu Linux, Windows XP, Windows Vista, even Mac OS X if you were able to install it on your PC!). It is normally installed on MBR. If GRUB somehow got corrupted, you will not be able to boot your Linux installation or any other operating systems that were loaded by GRUB. You may also need to restore your GRUB after reinstalled your Windows OSes.

Solutions: under such circumstances, you may restore the default MBR to boot individual Windows installations (see my previous post), or reinstall GRUB. Use the following steps to restore your GRUB:

1. Boot with any Linux live CD/DVD (e.g. Knoppix or Ubuntu Live CD/DVD)
2. Get a root shell (e.g. Applications / System Tools / Root Terminal)
3. Make a folder (e.g. mkdir /mnt/linux)
4. Identify the Linux root partition (i.e. fdisk -l) (e.g. my Ubuntu root partition is /dev/sda2)
5. Mount the Linux root partition (i.e. mount -t ext3 /dev/sda2 /mnt/linux) (replace /dev/sda2 with your Linux root partition determined at step 4)
6. Mount proc (i.e. mount -t proc none /mnt/linux/proc)
7. Mount udev (i.e. mount -o bind /dev /mnt/linux/dev)
8. Chroot to the mounted partition (i.e. chroot /mnt/linux)
9. Restore Grub (i.e. grub-install /dev/sda)
10. Exit the shell
11. Reboot

An alternative approach to STEP 9 (if grub-install does not work for you):

1. Get a root shell
2. run grub (i.e. type "grub" at the shell)
3. find /boot/grub/stage1 (it would return some thing like (hd0,2))
4. root (hd0,2)
5. setup (hd0) (this would install grub on MBR, alternatively setup (hd0,2))
6. quit

NOTE: You may need to remove the cached device map (i.e. /boot/grub/device.map) before attempting to restore GRUB.

Fix the booting problem: MBR

ifun — 2007-12-30T10:24:52Z

Problem: sometimes your PC may fail to boot up ...

Solution: many inexperienced PC users often panic in such a situation and resort to the only solution available to them: reinstall the operating system! The side effects of such a solution: spending quite some time to reinstall and configure all drivers and applications; risk losing important data.

A simple solution to most boot failures often involves fixing the Master Boot Record (MBR). The MBR resides on the first sector of a Hard Drive. At power up, the system (BIOS) consults the MBR to decide which partition (operating system) should be booted up, then the control is transferred to the partition containing the actual operating system being booted up. The default MBR contains a pointer to the active partition: only one partition can be marked active on each hard drive. Installation of many operating systems does not modify the default MBR but simply flag the partition active. Some operating systems (e.g. Linux Distros) may install the bootloader (e.g. LILO or GRUB) on the MBR. If something went wrong, you may not be able to boot the Linux or any other operating systems (e.g. Windows XP) being loaded by the Linux bootloader.

To restore the default MBR, boot the system using a boot disk (either floppy or windows installation disk), run the following command:

fdisk /mbr

You also need to flag the partition you want to boot active. This can be achieved with fdisk or some partition management programs (e.g. partition magic) - needs to be run from boot disk.

PS. Hiren's BootCD is a free ISO image that can be burned onto a CD. It contains many useful tools (including fdisk and partition magic) to help diagnose and fix PC problems.

Mac OS X: a few useful tips

ifun — 2007-11-29T09:10:22Z

1. Let Menu Bar show today's Date The Mac OS X Menu Bar shows time and the day of the week, but doesn’t show the date information. To show today's date on the Menu Bar, do the following:

System Preferences -> International -> Formats
Select Dates and click “Customize”; choose one of your preferred date format; highlight and copy the date part (use Command-C to copy); click “Cancel”
Select Times and click “Customize”; choose Medium; paste the example date just copied in front of the time; click “OK”

2. Stop Mac OS X from automounting all the drives Mac OS X normally automount all partitions it recognises at boot time. Sometimes you may not want this to happen (e.g. you have Windows XP, Tiger and Leopard installed, when you boot one OS, you don’t want the others to be automounted).

This can be resolved using the file /etc/fstab. This file may not exist, so you may need to create this file. First, find out the partition’s volume name when mounted, e.g. Windows XP is mounted as winxp (on your desktop, or /Volumes/winxp), Tiger as tiger, and Leopard as leopard.

When you are booted into Leopard, if you don’t want winxp and tiger to appear on your desktop (suppress automounting), issue the follow command:

sudo pico /etc/fstab

and add the following content:

LABEL=winxp none ntfs ro,noauto
LABEL=tiger none hfs rw,noauto

3. Set up PPTP VPN System Preferences -> Network; click “+” on the bottom left and choose VPN as “Interface”; provide server’s IP address/username/password (this information is provided by your company); optionally add a DNS server’s IP address used within your company (e.g. 192.168.254.1) (this would help resolve links on your company’s Intranet).

4. Use Adium for email notification Adium can be used as an email notification too for all your hotmail, yahoo, google mail accounts, even if you don’t use it to chat with your friends.

Start up Adium; Preferences -> Accounts; double click on an account (you can add all your accounts) -> Options -> check “check for new mail”.

Now you need to create new mail notification event: Preferences -> Accounts -> Events; double click “New Mail Notification” -> choose an action (e.g. “Bounce the dock icon” “Repeatedly”).

5. Extended attribute com.apple.quarantine Sometimes when you download an application (e.g. useful.app) from the Internet, Leopard may add an extended attribute com.apple.quarantine to the application package, and you may have difficulty to run the application.
Issue the follow command at a terminal:

ls –ld useful.app

You will see something like this “drwxr-xr-x@”. The trailing @ indicates some extended attribute on the package.

Issue the follow command at a terminal:

xattr useful.app

You will see “com.apple.quarantine”

You can remove the attribute by issuing the following command (if the file/package is owned by root/admin, add sudo to the command):

xattr –d com.apple.quarantine useful.app

The attribute is likely set for all contents within a package (e.g. .app, .kext). In this case, run the following command:

find useful.app –exec xattr –d com.apple.quarantine {} \;