scadblog

I’ve heard some pretty strange noises coming out of dead or dying hard drives, but nothing has ever been musical.  Maxtor drives appear to have a diagnostic error code sound that is emmited from a tiny internal speaker.  There is no official acknowledgement of this musical sound in the documentation or on Maxtor’s support site.  The best and only source for information has been this forum discussion thread.  People have had some success with either tapping the drive or disassembling it to get the read heads unstuck.

A machine with version 6.0 of Acrobat Reader needed an upgrade.  I’ve been moving towards scripting and automation when it comes to maintaining my Windows installs.  This one went off without a hitch and even took care of removing and replacing the older version as part of the installation process (a nice surprise considering earlier Acrobat Reader versions required an uninstall first).

1.  Copied the following directory from an existing install to a temporary location on the target machine.

c:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Setup Files\RdrBig707\ENU

2.  Ran setup.exe /w /s /v”/qb” on the remote machine via a WMI script.

3.  Used another WMI script to create the following registry key as not to bug the user with the EULA confirmation.

reg.exe add “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Adobe\Acrobat Reader\7.0\AdobeViewer” /v EULA /d 0×00000001 /t REG_DWORD /f

4.  Deleted the Adobe desktop icon from the All Users Desktop folder.

I was beating my head against a wall trying to figure out why my WMI scripts couldn’t contact remote machines.  With the firewall up an exception for WMI remote administration must be made in the Group Policy.  The setting is “Windows Firewall: Allow remote administration exception” under Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Network > Network Connections > Windows Firewall.  It needs to be enabled in the Standard and Domain configurations depending on where you intend to logon from.

You need not have access to a user’s Windows account in order to change the Access Control Entries (permissions and ownership) on the files and registry entries that make up their profile. I’ve enumerated steps to restore a user’s local profile to a given machine but these ideas could conceivably be extended to either assuming control over a given profile (subinacl has a ‘replace’ option) or to some degree managing domain accounts on either local or remote machines.

1. Create the user on the new machine.
2. Log in as the new user.
3. Delete the automatically generated profile.
3. Copy the old profile in its place.
3. Replace permission entries on all child objects for the old profile to reflect the new user/SID.
4. Run SubInACL.exe to change ownership on the same files.

subinacl /subdirectories “c:\documents and settings\username\*” /setowner=username

5. Load the user’s registry hive into regedit and change permission entries on all child objects for the user’s keys.
6. Run SubInACL.exe to change ownership on the user’s registry keys.

subinacl /subkeyreg loadedhivepathname /setowner=username