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Archive for November, 2012

Droid 3 EMMC data recovery with bad touch screen

by on Nov.19, 2012, under Techie

Busy trying to fix or at least recover the data off the emmc of my friends Droid 3 lead me down the road of using RSD to run an OTA flash on the device…more about that shortly. So here is the quick and skinny for anyone else in the same boat as he was/is:

  • Touch is completely dead (no function in bootloaders like SS3/Safestrap 3 or ClockworkMod) and will not respond.
  • Last time it was connected to PC you had it set for anything except a mode that allowed the EMMC to be mounted in your My Computer (in this case Charge Only).
  • Your screen unlock option is swipe (vs a code that you could use the keyboard for, this is a Droid 3 after-all so use your keyboard!)
  • This is a Droid 3 on VWZ, if your using some other carrier look around on XDA and Google and you might find something for your OTA.

First reboot into Safe Mode (Hold OK button on physical Keyboard as you power the unit on, until you are fully booted into Safe Mode – Lower Left Corner) and plug it into a PC to see the EMMC will mount. For me this didn’t work most likely because of the swipe to unlock method being used and since the screen was truly dead it didn’t respond in here ether. This is just to double-check that your screen is really dead.

Second:

  1. Run “Flash Verizon DROID 3 OTA 5.6.890 to phone_psouza4” that I found on XDA and follow the instructions that come with it (basically boot into Boot Mode Selection Menu* and select AP Fastboot while having “Flash Verizon DROID 3 OTA 5.6.890 to phone_psouza4” running actively,
  2. and plug the phone into USB at which point it should start the OTA Recovery process.
  3. After it’s all done (phone will reboot a few times, wait until the app on the PC tells you it’s done) you’ll be at the default “new phone” setup screen.
  4. You should then Power Off your phone,
  5. disconnect the USB from the PC,
  6. boot into Safe Mode (Holding OK button on keyboard while powering on)
  7. and plug in the USB at which time I was able to get the EMMC to mount and pull all the data off the phone (well all that shows from within the EMMC when it mounts to Windows).

NOTES:
*To boot into Boot Mode Selection Menu have the phone turned off, then slide open the keyboard and hold down the M key while you power the unit on. A black screen should appear and you can use the DOWN Volume button to navigate and the UP Volume to Select.

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IE9 runs and loads slow on windows 7

by on Nov.07, 2012, under Techie

Had an odd issue today I had to fix on a laptop with Internet Explorer 9 running under Windows 7 64-bit. The browser to load slowly and hang at times and then when it would be running web pages would load very slowly. After a lot of trial and error I found an article on Microsoft website where people were talking about how they had to remove KB2699988 to fix the problem. I ended up removing KB2699988 (isn’t trying to re-install now?), disabling “Enable Protected Mode” (under Security tab of Internet Options) and for this laptop I also had to turn on “Use software rendering instead of GPU rendering” as found under the Advanced tab of Internet Options.

Mostly posting this here so I remember how to fix it in the future and maybe someone else will fix this useful.

P.S. I wouldn’t advise removing KB2699988 unless you have too.

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A few cross-posts from GoneCrazy about FreeNAS and PCMCIA issues on Windows XP

by on Nov.02, 2012, under Techie

GoneCrazy’s Tumblr has provided a few good articles I think would be good to keep on record.

PCMCIA Doesn’t work correctly under Windows XP on Newer Laptops:

  • Browser to the Registry Key “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Pcmcia\Parameters” via regedit
  • Add a “REG_DWORD” named “IrqRouteToPciController” and assign a value of “8“.
  • Reboot

FreeNAS: How to use ZFS on an old 32-bit CPU with low memory:

CURRENTLY LINK OFFLINE SO WILL POST HOW-TO ONCE THE SITE IS BACK ONLINE AND WORKING FOR ME

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