Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Recovering partition after initializing by mistake

I recently re installed windows, i have 2 drives, i have removed the second drive to keep the data safe.
After the installation i have connected my hard drive. I didn't find the drive appearing in file explorer. When i opened Computer Management-> Disk Management, i received message saying that the drive is not initialized, so i followed the steps to initialize it, thinking that this will restore the drive and the data, then i found that the drive now has the state of un-allocated and the next available options is to create volumes, then i realized that i may have destroyed my data.
Looking online i found some forums talking about something similar and that MiniTool Partition wizard have recovery wizard that can recover the drive
http://www.sevenforums.com/hardware-devices/288692-disk-1-unknown-not-initialized-unallocated.html

I gave it a try, downloaded the free tool from http://www.partitionwizard.com/download.html, then selected the drive, started the recovery wizard, did the quick scan, and voila, the partition was recovered. That was really great tool that saved my data.

Sunday, January 18, 2015

Remote desktop connection: Authentication error has occurred (Code: 0x80004005)

Usually i connect to my other machine without any problems, one time suddenly i was receiving this error:

Authentication error has occurred (Code: 0x80004005)

And here is my experience with it, searching for it found this post saying that it could because of third party software or antivirus. Then i remembered that sometimes when i had fiddler open on my machine, i get authentication errors from outlook and some other clients that are unable to connect with the server on secure connections, i figured out that this could be the reason, that i have fiddler open in my machine and it is blocking the authentication.

So i needed to shut down fiddler on my remote machine, i remember that PsTools allows executing commands on remote machine, Then i found this article on steps to run PsKill to kill process on remote machine.

All i needed to do is:
- Download PsTools, then extract it
- Start command prompt in elevated mode (run as administrator)
- Go to PsTools extracted folder on run the command

pskill.exe \\MachineName -u username -p password Fiddler

Should take some time and come back with

Process Fiddler killed on MachineName

Trying to remote connect to my machine after that, worked as usual.