No doubt millions of people will have the problem with the Grisoft Antivirus (AVG) that had a false positive on the windows user32.dll file.
I had some PCs coming in too. Luckily not too many because ever since AVG 8 came out, I 've been replacing it with Avast.
Nevertheless, some of my 'customers' still had an AVG and now had BSOD's.
Here 's a way you can fix it with TRK.
If you 're lucky, the computer you 're working on has lots of $Uninstall directories from patches and such where you will find older copies from user32.dll. Even better is where you have a folder called c:\windows\system32\dllcache where you will find even more DLLs.
Whatever version of user32.dll you find on the affected computer, always look for the newest and in general, biggest one.
Here 's how I got it fixed:
-An easy way to find your way around is to boot with TRK connected to your LAN.
-run 'fileserver -g' for ease of use when you 're on your own trusted home network. It will report you on which address you can find your PC back.
-browse with a (working) Windows PC to the ip address of the affected PC. F.i. do Start => Run => \\192.168.0.60
-go to the share where the windows system is located, f.i. \\192.168.0.60\hda1
-browse to the windows folder
-right click on it and search (different in Vista, but you 'lll know what I mean).
-search for 'user32.dll' and make sure it shows you the file size and date in the search results.
-look for the newest, generally biggest version of user32.dll
-copy it back to \windows\system32
-reboot the PC

-If this doesn 't fix it yet, it might be possible other files are missing or bad versions are in place. In my case, I had this with gdi32.dll.
-To figure out on what your PC is still crashing, hit F8 before it starts booting Windows and select the option where it says not to auto-reboot after a critical failure -With gdi32.dll, it said it was missing an entry point at some address. This generally is caused because some older version is in place.
-Do the same as with user32.dll: search for the newest, biggest version of this file and put it back.
-Reboot and rerun procedure on other possible files until successfull.

It 's always a good thing too to run the command 'ntfsfix /dev/hda1' (after or before fileserver is running): this will invoke a chkdsk at Windows boot time.

After success, AVG will normally update itself with a decent av signature database, but I recommend to uninstall it and put avast on it since AVG 7.5 will be out of support soon and AVG 8 is as slow and heavy as Windows Vista itself.

Also recommended: clean up the PC by removing all $Uninstall$ folders, clear dllcache folder, clear %temp% (commandline: cd %temp%, cd .., rd /s /q temp),clear temporary internet files (rd /s /q "temporary internet files"), empty recycle bin, uninstall any unneccessary apps and for those who really want to digg in deep: get Hijackthis from trendmicro and remove any stupid programs from startup like Adobe quicklaunch f.i. Also browser helper objects that don 't ring a bell with me always get removed by me.
Never a bad idea is to install SP3 (just be carefull with some wireless cards, activate restore point if unsure).
hope this helps

Thank you to all the American citizens who have voted for Barack Obama. He will have a hard time cleaning up the mess of the 8 year Republican debacle, but at least he gives hope to the world.

My two cents to the people of the U.S.A.: give this man time, don 't expect things to change in 3 months. He 'll need at least his whole term of presidency and probably even more to fix what's broken.

And even after that I 'd say: people, ALWAYS vote for the Democrats. If you think back to recent history, what presidents have been regarded as being humane and realistic: Roosevelt, Kennedy, Carter, Clinton and now Obama. And they 're all Democrats.

Need I say more?

But anyway: thank you again so much!

Yet another version of TRK 3.3, now at build 321.
This is a release candidate for the final TRK 3.3.  After that, work should start for TRK 4.0 and probably a long period of radio silenc
New stuff in this version:
-kernel 2.6.26. Hope this kernel is more stable on different hardware. I also eliminated a serious disk performance flaw: it seems that since some kernel around 2.6.23, the generic and slow IDE driver had become the default, resulting on really slow I/O performance on normally fast sata controllers. This "bug" has been present since build 310 and is now fixed. Generic IDE is only available as a modules anymore and so the "good" driver for your controller is now detected. Examples for this were machines with certain ICH8 controllers (and there 's lots of them).
-latest NTFS Tools and Library (2.0.0). Watch out with Windows Vista and earlier version of TRK. It could ruin your NTFS when f.e. trying to resize your volume. I will know, I messed up my own Vista. Luckily tesdisk got my partitions back, but I had to go through a lot of trouble afterwards to get my Vista back online.
-relocntfs: a patched version of ntfsreloc which does great things with the NTFS bootsector.
-mclone: haaa, now this is the finest new feature on TRK. Forget about the old clonexp in TRK, mclone or mass clone is a utility that allows you to clone an unlimited number of computers over multicast at the maximum speed of your hardware.
The main features are:
-make exact copies of any operating system
-optimized for Windows XP and Vista imaging using ntfsclone. Other filesystems are copied with dd
-fast and scalable
-save to image and restore from image (to multicast) with optional 3 compression algorythms (gzip, bzip2 and 7-zip)
-restore original bootsector/ntfs c/h/s values. An old bug in many BIOS' sometimes gave wrong values for Cylinders/Heads/Sectors count. Although CHS is an old method for assigning disk geometry (LBA should be used), Windows XP and family still use it to assign addressing of their bootcode. Recent Linux kernels discard wrong C/H/S values and set it to the LBA values. This resulted on sometimes unbootable cloned Windows machines (the blinking cursor nightmare). Recently a patched version of relocntfs appeared (now called ntfsreloc) which is able to "force" original C/H/S values in your NTFS. Mclone does it automatically for you. Major feature over other cloning tools.
-run up to 50 different sessions separately over your LAN
-optional speed limitation. Just so your LAN doesn't get saturated.
-option to specify disks/partitions instead of just everything automatically
-option to skip bootsector
-option to skip C/H/S check

If you 're an IT guy and you need to install many workstations, or you just like to take an exact backup copy of your computer, then give mclone a try.

For once, I wish I were a U.S. citizen. So I could at least give one vote for a better future.
And that future lies NOT  in the hands of John McCain
To all U.S. Americans who read this post: please, please, please: GO AND VOTE OBAMA.
With great unbelief I recently learned from polls that John McCain would have about as much votes as Obama. How is that possible? John McCain is an extension of George Bush. I thought/hoped that after 8 years of Dark Ages with the George Bush jr. administration (12 if you count his dad with that) the people of the U.S.A. would know better now.
I have a son who is now 8 months old. I'm ashamed and frightened of the world I'm putting him in.
I'm not going to elaborate why it is wrong to vote Republican and why you should vote Democrate, my knowledge of American politics is too limited for that.
I'm just asking you this: if you have not decided who to vote for and you want to do something for the Trinity Rescue Kit, please: VOTE OBAMA. I'd rather have you vote for him than a donation for TRK. Really. The world of tomorrow is more important than some money.
So if you plan on doing so, please, send me a mail to harakiri - at - trinityhome . org and make us all feel better by promising your vote for Barack Obama

Live long and prosper

Tom and Jeroom

Good news for me: my search for a job has ended and guess what.
I found the Linux job I 've been looking for all these years! As of the 1st of August I 'm starting for the company GFDI/CPC as a Linux system engineer. It will be a very technical job, so finally a real challenge for me.
Thanks to everyone that responded to my previous post!

Harakiri

Since more than 2 years I 've been working as an external IT consultant for a company in the DIY industry.
Budget problems and global company politics are now putting an end to this mission. The employer I work for is currently looking for another assignment, but as summer holidays are arriving this might become a challenging endeavour.
Therefore, I 'm about to open all registers into finding the appropriate job opportunity.
And where else better than on the website where my skills are best displayed in the form of Trinity Rescue Kit and other projects?
So, if you happen to be an employer or you know your company is hiring a network/system administrator and it 's in the neighbourhood between Brussels and Antwerp, Belgium, please take a look at my CV.
You can download it in pdf or word (zipped) format.
My contract with the customer ends on the 15th of July, so I can be available as of that date.

Last year, in an impulsive mood (I regularly have them), I bought myself a DVD/HDD recorder from the brand Stein.
It costed me 219€, has a 250Gb harddrive, is able to record both to DVD as to harddrive and has analog 5.1 connectivity. Reason enough for me to buy it.
... I thought ...
I connected it and I was surprised by the ease of installation: channel installation was very straightforward and easy to configure. It was only afterwards that it began to bother me how complicated it was to program a scheduled recording. You had to traverse about 5 menus and press tens of buttons before getting it done. But that was something I could live with once I had the knack of it. What really bothered me was the image quality of the TV tuner: colors were very crappy (red was pink) and images had some sort of mist over them. At first I thought it might have due to my cheap TV, but when I replaced my TV a few weeks ago, I noticed it had nothing to do with it (DVD playback was fine anyway).
So I started searching for firmware. Only problem was: Stein has no official site. In fact, there was so little I could find about Stein that I doubted I would ever find a newer firmware for it. And so I turned to forums. And more forums. There I discovered that this machine is most likely a clone of other brands. Other brands that may have newer, better firmware. And so I came across the Yamada 9300Hx, which apparently is compatible AND has more recent firmware.
Only problem was: nobody ever risked or reported flashing his Stein with this firmware.
So there 's gotta be a first time for everything and I decided to go for it. My recorder was otherwise pretty useless to me. If it went wrong, my plan B was to try and return it to the store and make up a story that it "just stopped working one day".
Luckily, I didn't have to revert to plan B. I turned to the FAQ from Yamada/Umax . Apparently the Stein has got the Philips TV tuner (but verify yourself based on the picture shown in that FAQ).
I downloaded the Philips version of the firmware there, burned that to CD and inserted it into my recorder. Upon accessing that CD, I immediately got the option to upgrade the firmware.
And there I went: I flashed it, it rebooted and came up! All my channels were reset, so it started with a setup wizard which scanned my channels. And my IR remote still worked! It found back and reprogrammed my channels.
And what do you know: my image was way better than before, colors were just great now (even a little oversaturated ) and it had offered a new feature: editing your recordings. However, this function only worked after a reformat of the harddisk. In my case there wasn't anything I wanted to keep on it, but maybe you will have to make a backup to DVD first. After reformatting I was able to edit what I recorded. Other functions/menus remained pretty much the same.
But I am happy now, especially for the improved image quality ;-)
I 'm still hoping that one day some firmware will allow file access over the IEEE1394 interface, because it lacks USB.

As of now, Trinity Rescue Kit has official commercial support. Trinity has agreed in a partnership with the consultancy company Open Computing to give live and offline commercial support.
For years, people have been asking me whether they could be helped by phone or online chat. Since I have my daytime job and already a lot of work as it is, I could not provide this.
Well, now you can contact Open Computing who will help you with any Linux problem you might have. Also Windows is supported to a certain degree: sometimes after TRK has done the necessary repairs on your dead or inaccessible Windows, it might be appropriate to perform some after-maintenance, like removing malware and cleaning up the registry.
The latest version of TRK is equipped with a script called trinisup that allows remote management of a computer running TRK. It should work with almost any internet connection, including those behind a natted firewall. For aftersupport on Windows, the Trinity Remote Support Pack or TRSP is included. TRSP is a collection of tools (putty and vnc) and scripts for Windows that allow a remote control session of your Windows desktop, pretty much in the same manner as the TRK trinisup script. Read more about the mechanics behind this method here..
Pricing for commercial assistance is very reasonable. I couldn't do it for less myself! Follow this link to the website of Open Computing and read more about it.
Of course, Trinity Rescue Kit itself and the help forum still remain completely free!

Together with this announcement, a new beta version Trinity Rescue Kit 3.3 is available.
At build 318, several bugfixes have been attacked and a few features added. Biggest bugfix is in winpass, which is the most significant feature of TRK ever since TRK 1.1.
-Well, winpass has been for 80% rewritten, using better, more flexible code. Especially, the biggest bug was the case-sensitivity, which is inherent for Unix systems and has been completely circumvented. This time winpass should never announce anymore that it can 't find any windows installations (unless your disks are unknown or corrupted).
I 've also added a feature that it makes a backup of your original registry hive, allowing you to reset a password, do your thing in windows and put back the old password without ever having to know it; 'winpass -r' restores your password file (SAM).
Another bugfix again in winpass was the problem with usernames that had spaces in them. I ‘ve worked around this problem now. All you have to do is specify the –u flag at the commandline and the username between double quotes. E.g. winpass –u “Test User”
-Another new feature is not Linux based and is stupidly simple but effective: when you insert the TRK CD while running Windows and autorun is active (which is Microsoft's default in any version of Windows since 95), you will be prompted that TRK is not usable from Windows but also that it is unsafe to have autorun active because of the high rate of virus infections being exchanged with USB keys (for which autorun is also active). Clicking "Yes" on the warning message will deactivate autorun completely, lowering the chance of a virus infection by at least 10% (which is the statistic percentage of virus infection sources today).
-Added upd-sender/udp-receiver, utilities to perform multicast sessions across your network like imaging. Scripts are not yet implemented for this, but contributions are welcome.
-Kernel is now multi-cpu capable. It might be that some older systems are now unable to boot TRK anymore, but I expect these to be really old ones. For those I recommend to use TRK 3.2 (or earlier)
-TRK is now volume label independent: you can put any volume label you like on your CD/USB stick. You just have to pass the volume label in your syslinux.cfg/isolinux.cfg by adding vollabel=YOURLABEL to the command line. Interesting for people making multiboot CDs.
-Trinity Remote Support packages added to the medium. Can be used for remote support from a running Windows machine, in case problems cannot be completely fixed from TRK.
-Other updates/bugfixes:
*latest kernel 2.6.25
*Intel E1000 driver v7.6.15.5 (8.01 appears not to work)
*ntfs-3g 1.2412
*coreutils 6.9 (all included utils now available on TRK)
*testdisk + photorec 6.9
*syslinux 3.62: some newer PCs like the HP DC7800 hung on startup when booting from USB. This new syslinux bootloader fixes that problem
*ddrescue 1.8
*dd_rescue 1.1.4
*chkrootkit 0.48
*hdparm 8.6
*memtest86+ 2.01
*prime95 v.2414 (type mprime): a utility that does number crunching and is a real stress test for your CPU’s floating point capabilities.
*f-prot fixed: bugs in proxy parameters and failed to run once it was already installed
*clamav-0.93-2
*lspci and lsusb did not point to their pci/usb database so no info about manufacturer was given. Fixed it.
*UTF-8 was missing some files, gave warnings with ntfs-3g, fixed

For all the sysadmins dealing with remote users: ever got tired of not being able to remote control a workstation because it 's behind a firewall or a NAT-router (like most home connections)?
Well, here 's the solution: Trinity Remote Support Pack for Windows is a set of commonly available and free utilities (UltraVNC and putty), glued together with some pretty simple scripts in a self extracting package that allow an administrator to connect to any PC with (almost) any type of Internet connection. Whether the user is behind a firewall, NAT-router or has its Windows firewall activated, TRSP for Windows gets through.
How does it work? Read the details and download instructions here. In short, the user downloads TRSP, executes it and gets connected to a server on the Internet. Once connected, the administrator connects to that machine with his vncviewer on the port the user specified when he fired up TRSP. And there you go: a remote VNC session set up with the computer behind the firewall. All this with passwords and everything of course.

Trinityhome = free software
The TRSP software in itself is free and for a connection to a server (machine-in-the-middle), you can use the (limited) trinityhome.org resources. There 's a free demo account which lets you remote control a machine for no more than 2 minutes. After that the session kills itself.
If you want a full-blown account with more security for your users, you can get one at a small fee. Just contact support,  we can set you up an account for as little as 3€/month with a 10€ setup fee (limited to a "fair-use-policy"). If this service works out, we will get ourselves a machine with bigger bandwidth.

Make your own TRSP
There 's also an SDK included: you can modify the scripts so that a client will connect to one of your own machines. That of course makes it completely free for you. There 's some explanation on how to do it, it 's all pretty straight forward stuff. Anyone who calls himself a decent Windows sysadmin can do it.

Check it out!

P.S: a similar service will appear in the upcoming version of TRK too.

.. a new version of Trinity Rescue Kit 3.3 (still beta)
For all new visitors to this site: if you want to use TRK to reset winpass, it might not work with version 3.3 build 310. A newer version of winpass is ready and will be shipped with a new release of  TRK 3.3.
In the mean I recommend to try the stable TRK 3.2 first. It might not support your hardware, but if it does, use that one for password resets.
Expected release date should be around the 3rd week of april 2008.