Diminished Linkfest

Here are a collection of links that probably deserve a lot more attention than I am giving them at the moment.

I’ve got a date at a Chinese buffet waiting for the annual “my-side'-of-the-family” post-thanksgiving meal. And UH plays Rice at 7PM for the Bayou Bucket game.

So be it:

• Delete TCP-IP printer port - Bink.nu – despite my skill in adding/removing printer devices from Windows, I was always plagued at work with the number of network printers I have to add/delete from my system as I travel between office sites.  I would delete the IP printer, but it would still should up as a “ghost” in my printer port list.  Finally got large enough to force me to figure out how to remove the.  Who knew I had to click on the whitespace to get the option to deal with the printer port items?   “Go under control panel to "Printers", right click in the middle of the white space on the right side of the window and choose "Server Properties".  Go to the "Ports" tab, select the port you want to delete, and choose "Delete port".” - johlos

• Create universal flash boot disk with fbinst. – BootLand Forums.  New tool to help with making flash devices bootable.  My method of bootsect and diskpart has worked great but this might be an option on certain types of other storage devices.

• VMLite XP Mode – free – neat application alternative to replicate Windows Virtual PC XP-Mode for systems that cannot support it (due to Windows 7 OS level).  I haven’t tried it yet but it looks promising.  Spotted over at Even More Linky Goodness... by Harlan Carvey.

• Haiku Project | Home of the Haiku Operating System – cute retro BeOS style Linux build (correction caught by TinyApps: “Haiku has been coded from the ground up as a BeOS clone, and does not contain
  any Linux code: http://www.haiku-os.org/about/faq#2.”)  My Linux LiveCD work pretty much centers around forensic LiveCD builds now, but I still love seeing these projects.  Related: Using build images with Virtual PC | Haiku Project.

Windows x64 Driver Signing Links

Back when I was trying to get the ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver (now updated to version 1.1.5 on 11.23.09) up and working on my Windows 7 x64 bit system, I ran into one of the headaches of x64 bit life.  Drivers need to be signed to install/load/work.  You can work around this several ways but often it involves either turning off UAC mode and/or dropping the system into “test” mode.

It can be a headache.

Here are related links I collected while getting ImDisk to work on my system (despite the wonderful help in the link); it still is a bit cranky.

• Driver Signing Issue PLEASE HELP - Windows 7 Forums.  References use of the “…testsigning switched on (type bcdedit /set testsigning on at Command Prompt and reboot to activate this) method.

• Microsoft: Windows 7 - "Test Mode" on Desktop. – Tek Tips forum reference the consequence of above which places a “Test Mode” watermark on the desktop area.  Bummer and kinda freaky if you didn’t expect it to be there.

• Driver Signature Enforcement Overrider 1.3b - NGOHQ.com. One of a few tools that might allow you to override x64 driver signature requirements.  I haven’t needed to try it yet.

• How To Remove Watermark From Windows 7 Builds [Both X86 & X64]. – another method to then remove the “Test Mode” watermark from the desktop if you wish.

• How To: Load Unsigned Drivers on Windows 7 | Apartment Therapy Unplugged. – More techniques and background to be aware of.

• Newsletter #76:  Solving Windows "driver is not signed" problems. – Mark Minasi takes the time to explain and detail advanced methods to cope with these issues.  Probably a definitive guide to doing so.  Read this only after you have covered the ones above.  For hard-core geeks, sysadmins, and everyone (who probably already falls into one of those two groups) who is running x64 Windows flavors to begin with.

Cheers!

--Claus V.