June 23, 2014

Starting My Journal...

For quite some time, I have been considering the merits of a blog.  Many people have blogs, why not me?  I tried to come up with an answer to that question and I actually found one.

I am a fan of audio books and love listening to stories as they are being told to me.  It doesn't matter if it is fiction or non-fiction.  There is something awe inspiring to think that the simple reorganization of 26 letters can produce an infinite number of worlds that can be accessed at a moments notice.

Lately, I have been into the world of non-fiction.  Right now in fact, I am working my way through The Great Bridge by David McCullough.  What is extremely apparent from all non-fiction books which detail our history is that in the past people took the time to sit down, compose letters to each other and more importantly kept detailed journals of their thoughts an opinions on life and current events.

With the Internet, its going to be easy to go back and find out what happened on June 22, 2014.  What is not going to be easy is to find out what happened to ME on June 22, 2014.

Someday, my daughters are going look back at my life and want to know what I was thinking.  Are they going to want to know about the mundane details of my everyday life?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  I know I would like to read that story from my father right now.

So, here we go.  Lets see how poorly I can structure my sentences, make horrible grammatical errors and just plain fumble over my fingers as I try to write down my thoughts.  I'm going to mix in some technical links to things that have helped me in the past (from an IT perspective) and just spew out what my brain dumps.

I know I won't stay on top of this.  Its in my nature.  I will do it for a while then priorities will take me away.  It is what it is.  Lets see if I can stick with it.

Wish me luck.

June 25, 2010

Task Sequence Install Lenovo Hotkey Utility

This is a frustrating thing I've been dealing with for a while.  After some keen googling, I found that Project84 came up with a solution on how to install the Lenovo Hotkey Utility via Task Sequence.  The issue at hand is that the "silent" or "unattended" install of Lenovo's Hotkey Utility, isn't truly silent.  


This fix resolves it in a jiffy!


http://blog.project84.net/2009/03/06/InstallingLenovoHotkeyUtilityInAnSCCMTaskSequence.aspx


Snip from Project84:
  1. Extract the Hotkey utility.
  2. Create a batch file InstallHotkey.cmd with a single line: %~dp0SETUP.EXE /S
  3. Create a standard SCCM package with the source pointing to your extracted hotkey files.
  4. Make sure that InstallHotkey.cmd is in the same dir as Setup.exe
  5. In you Task Sequence add a new "Run Command Line" task.
  6. Set the Package to the Hotkey Package you created in step 4.
  7. In the command line put InstallHotkey.cmd

May 18, 2010

SCCM OSD Task Sequence Fails with Error 0x80091007

Today I ran into an issue where a Lenovo W500 (4061-3FU) would fail with error 0x80091007.  Looking at the smsts.log files, found that there was an error indicating a hash mismatch between the WIM on the DP and the WIM downloaded to the local machine.  


Other computers, new in the box and previously imaged, were imaging successfully.  So, I suspected there was nothing wrong with the WIM itself.  Received suggestions to refresh DP's with a new copy of the WIM, but I was skeptical it would solve the issue.


After trying to manually install XP SP3 on the device, I received a MEMORY_ERROR bluescreen.  


Ran a hardware test on the memory using MemTest and found that the memory was defective.  


So, SCCM Hash mismatch was  due to defective RAM.


Link:


TechNet Forums OSD Task Sequence Fails with Error 0x80091007