Category Archives: Windows

How to manually rebuild your Windows BCD Store

I recently had a mishap where on a system that I had just upgraded from Windows 10 to Windows 11 the Windows BCD Store (Boot Configuration Data Store) was suddenly messed up, presumably by a patch update I had taken earlier:

Blue screen showing “Wiederherstellung: Der PC muss repariert werden.” (German for: “Recovery: The PC must be repaired.”), hinting to a problem with the Windows BCD Store.

Many people will recommend in that situation to boot to a Windows Recovery Environment (RE) and execute the following:

>bootrec /rebuildbcd

But what if the scan for all Windows installation turns out not to identify yours?! Like in the below photo?

Photo of a Windows RE session, failing to automatically rebuild the Windows BCD Store

Are you SOL then?

Don’t despair.

The solution is actually quite simple. Other than the above which is supposed to be fully automatic, it involves some manual tasks, but it should be quite easy if you are at least a bit tech-savvy.

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Mein Internet funktioniert nicht, was tun?!

Diesen Hilfeschrei hat bestimmt jeder schon oft gehört. Aber nur die wenigsten wissen, wie man heraus finden kann, wo genau das Problem liegt.

Ich versuche in diesem Blogpost einmal, eine auch für Laien verständliche bzw. leicht anwendbare Anleitung zu liefern, wie man bei Internetstörungen zu Hause dem Problem auf die Spur kommen kann…

Zunächst einmal ein paar (wenige) Grundlagen. Ohne diese geht es einfach nicht.

Egal, was Sie im Internet tun, alles passiert auf Basis sogenannter “IP-Pakete“. Jeglicher Datenverkehr wird “zerhackt” und in Form von kleinen “Häppchen”, eben dieser IP-Pakete übertragen. Alle Geräte, die am Internet teilnehmen, haben eine bestimmte Rolle. Ihr Handy, Laptop oder PC ist in der Regel ein sogenannter “Client“, also ein “Kunde”, die Dienste, die Sie in Anspruch nehmen, werden durch sogenannte “Server” (“Bediener”) erbracht. Wie findet nun Ihr Client den passenden Server? Das funktioniert über ein System namens “DNS“. Es übersetzt für den Menschen lesbare Adressen, wie z. B. “amazon.de“, in IP-Adressen, die Ihr Endgerät für die tatsächliche Kommunikation mit dem gewünschten Dienst benutzt.

Wie werden aber die IP-Pakete zwischen Ihrem Endgerät (Handy, Laptop, Tablet, PC) und den Servern im Internet übertragen? Zunächst muss Ihr Endgerät mit Ihrem eigenen lokalen Netzwerk (auch “LAN” genannt) bei sich zu Hause verbunden sein. Dies kann über WLAN (auch “WiFi” genannt) oder Netzwerkkabel (auch “Ethernet”-Kabel genannt) passieren. Von dort geht es über Ihren Router zu Ihrem Internetprovider, und dann von dort ins Internet. Welche physikalische Verbindungstechnik (Teilnehmeranschlussleitung) Sie zur Anbindung an Ihren Provider verwenden ist grundsätzlich egal: DSL, TV-Kabel, Glasfaser oder sogar Mobilfunk (z. B. über einen Vodafone GigaCube).

Continue reading Mein Internet funktioniert nicht, was tun?!

Stop Windows from waking up from Sleep for Updates

Since I have Windows 10 on my PC, I have a very annoying behavior, namely that Windows wakes up from sleep in the middle of the night to perform a reboot to install updates.

There is many “hacks” on the Internet how to disable this, but the only “proper” way seems to be by defining a Group Policy:

  • Run Group Policy Editor: gpedit.msc
  • Open branch Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Windows Update\
  • Set node Enabling Windows Update Power Management to automatically wake up the system to install scheduled updates to Disabled

This should stop your PC from resuming from sleep to install updates.

Please let me know if this helped.

Bitlocker: How to require Startup PIN

A lot of people use Bitlocker for full-disk encryption of their hard drives. For extra security you might want to be prompted for a PIN when you unlock your hard drive, because allowing attackers to boot your system without authentication might open up extra attack vectors. Setting a PIN can be easily accomplised if you know how… 🙂

The below instructions are exact for Windows 10, but they are very similar in Windows 7, too.

Launch the Local Group Policy Editor by typing gpedit.msc into your Windows search, then when it has been found right-click on it and select Run as administrator from the pop-up menu. Then maneuver to the following path in the left “folder” pane:

Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Bitlocker Drive Encryption > Operating System Drives.

This is what it looks like if you did it correctly:

Bitlocker_Group_PolicyThen double-click on the setting Require additional authentication at startup, and you see the following dialog:

Bitlocker_PINNow change option Configure TPM startup PIN to read:

Require startup PIN with TPM

Then reboot. Now you can right-click on your system drive and select Set Bitlocker PIN or Change Bitlocker PIN (I forgot to take a screenshot of this last step, so I’m not 100% how exactly this looked like, but it should be obvious) from the pop-up menu.

You’re done. Wasn’t that easy?

Please leave a message if this was helpful.

Attention changing BIOS Settings with Bitlocker

The Problem

If your laptop has been set up to use Bitlocker, by your company or yourself, you should be very cautious when playing with your BIOS settings.

Bitlocker considers BIOS settings changes a potential security breach, as somebody could e. g. change boot order to boot from an external media to try to fiddle with the boot mechanism set up on your hard drive or SSD. This is why when you change something in the BIOS or just boot from an external drive, such as a thumb stick, Bitlocker will prompt you for your recovery code.

The Solution

To prevent this you just have to disable the so-called “protector” for your boot drive. Only then should you change BIOS settings or boot from a drive other than your normal boot drive.

You do so using the manage-bde tool which is part of Windows:

manage-bde –protectors –disable <Drive>

Don’t forget to re-enable the protector after you’re done:

manage-bde –protectors –enable <Drive>

If this helped, I’d appreciate a comment from you here on my blog.

How to add another language to Microsoft Office 2010…

I usually prefer to use English versions of all operating systems and applications I use — simply because the German translations are usually horrible, plus very often updates for English versions become available much earlier (if at all!) than for localized versions.

Now I just bought myself Office 2010 and found that it lacked proofing tools for German — call me naive but I expected that these “common” tools were available in all or at least major languages. Duh! 🙁

So what I did is to download the German office installation package from Microsoft and started SETUP.EXE. To my surprise adding German as a proofing language was simpler than I even thought. After a while Setup properly showed me

  • all the components I had already installed,
  • the language English I had installed, plus
  • German as an optional (UI!) language to install, and
  • in the packages section another German proofing tools package appeared that I could then install.

Maybe the above is obvious to all or most of you, but I thought it’s not exactly that so I’d create a post about it to help people who are in the same situation as I was.

Enjoy!

How Apple’s Bonjour service may break your net config…

Suddenly my brand-new, only a couple of days old Windows 7 installation had an odd problem: After a system boot or restart, networking would be broken in a way that hosts in the Internet could not be reached.

I investigated the problem and noticed that my Ethernet adapter had two default gateways assigned, while the first was 0.0.0.0:

C:\Users\rabe>ipconfig /all
[...]
Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:
[...]
   Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 0.0.0.0
                                       192.168.2.1

I googled for this problem and found some hint that pointed toward’s Apple’s Bonjour service. Supposedly it sometimes starts up before networking is fully up, and in consequence assigns the invalid default gateway. The advice given there to solve the problem was to completely disable this service.

While I currently don’t need this service, I didn’t want to use this “brutal” approach, so what I did was switch the service to start up as Automatic (Delayed Start) as opposed to Automatic (which causes the service to start as early as possible).

And this indeed did the trick — I don’t have these annoying networking problems anymore. 🙂

Update: To correct the name in the “Services” application which will often be Id_String2.6844F930_1628_4223_B5CC_5BB94B879762 you can use a command sequence as follows (your path to mDNSResponder.exe may vary):

"C:\Program Files\Bonjour\mDNSResponder.exe" -remove
"C:\Program Files\Bonjour\mDNSResponder.exe" -install

Cisco VPN install nightmare on Vista

Here’s another Cisco VPN client nightmare for you:

The old 4.9.x.x Cisco VPN client does’t run under Vista anymore. So I downloaded the most current version our organization has available, 5.0.05.290. I started the installer and pretty quickly received an error message that simply said: “Internal Error 2738″.

I thought maybe the install file was corrupt, so I redownloaded it — same error.

Now I read the readme file (which I normally don’t do ;-)) It said you need a Microsoft hotfix in order to be able to install the VPN client. So I downloaded that one as well and retried the installation after rebooting the machine — same error message agin.

Damn!

So I googled for this problem and quickly came across this website — which indeed fixed the problem for me.

Thanks, Microsoft, for making such a lousy job of not registering said DLL. And thanks, Cisco, for not pointing your customers to this problem.

Gaaaawd, how I hate monopolies…

Vista picture “Web Publishing” regression

I just tried to upload some hundreds of vacation photos from Windows Vista to our gallery which I’m hosting on my own root server. It turned out that this would be a not-so-simple task… 🙁

Previously, using Windows XP, this would be as simple as

  1. invoking the “Web Publishing Wizard” from the “Folder Tasks” pane,
  2. clicking “Publish this folder to the web”,
  3. optionally selecting a target size for resizing (a copy of!) the photos before you upload them, and finally
  4. clicking “Finish” to start the upload.

Not so anymore with Vista!

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