Thursday, June 28, 2012

Win7 Domain Client accessing WinXP share

For some reason Microsoft makes it a royal piain in the ass for a Win7 domain client to attach to a
WinXP share...  I had a Win7 Enterprise client on a domain attaching to a shared WinXP Pro SP3 client on that same domain.. nothing worked.  I tried the following...

On XP shared client, disabled simple file sharing.
On Win7 attaching client, set Administrative Tools... Local Security Policy... Security Options...  Network Security LAN Manager Authentication Level to "use LM & LMNT as well as negotiate LMNTv2".  Also set Network Discovery to ON and allowed lower level encryption support.

When that all still didnt work... I did the following...

On the XP shared client, I created a new network share...
I then created a local account called shareaccess with local Administrator group priviledge and added that user to the shares access list, having with full permissions.
On the Win7 attaching client, I created a Generic Credential pointing to the IP address of the XP machine, using the shareaccess account and password I just created.

Worked like a charm.

Saturday, June 9, 2012

DELL laptop force BIOS update

Recently I needed to troubleshoot a battery charging issue with an Inspiron 1700 series dual core laptop... as the battery was no longer recognized by the laptop.  Is suspect the message "battery not recognized" also means the one of the cells is bad in the battery, moreso than it being a suspect or knockoff battery. 

Anyway, one of the troubleshooting steps was to upgrade the laptop BIOS, but thats a catch22 as the
BIOS update requires a 10% charged battery and AC power concurrent during upgrade.

There is a verified process that I found... create a DOS bootable image on USB or other bootable media, making sure of a clean boot (NO drivers or shared memory managers running),  and once booted into it... run the BIOS update with the /forceit switch.  This bypassed the power check for me.