How to create a bootable USB drive

You would think that you would be able to Google the title of this post and easily find a link that would make this possible. I’ve spent a lot of time the last few days doing that exact same thing and not finding much in the way of things that actually work. I wanted a bootable usb drive so I could throw ghost and ghostwalk on it and whatever image we wanted to use. It would save me from having to burn a new CD every time I wanted to use a different image, this way I just delete and copy/paste.

What you will need:

• Boot disk files – you can Google boot disk and get what you need. If you still have a floppy drive in your computer and happen to have a disk laying around you can pop it in, go to my computer -> right-click on the floppy -> format -> and check the box that says create an MS-DOS startup disk.
• HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool – The weird thing is that I couldn’t even find that on their website. But once again Google comes to the rescue, there are plenty of links to it out there.

What to do:

1. Open the HP format tool.
2. Make sure you select the correct drive.
3. Choose either of the FAT file system options.
4. Under volume label give the USB drive a name.
5. Check the box for creating a DOS startup disk and select using dos system files located at:. This is where you either point to your floppy drive if you created a boot disk or to the folder where you downloaded the files to. Tell it to start.
6. You aren’t quite done yet. Go to my computer and open the location of the startup files that you either downloaded or had windows put on the floppy – copy those and paste them onto the flash drive. DO NOT overwrite any files when prompted.
7. Done. Now you can use it as is or add more files to it like I did with ghost and ghostwalk.

HOW TO: Play DVDs on your Wii

I got it working on my 4.2 version firmware and will add directions for that within the next couple days.

This isn’t normally something I would blog about since it isn’t computer related, but I figure enough people would want to do this that I would post it and I’m a tech geek in general so it fits.

I do have to warn you that there is a possibility that you can brick your Wii (making it an expensive paper weight), so be aware of that before messing around with this.

This is the way to make DVDs playable on your Wii, system 4.0 or above (mine is 4.1 right now and it works fine), without having to do the Zelda hack that I’m sure you’ve come across if you have found your way here.

I found this video on youtube explaining how to do it, but I had to do it a bit differently to get it to work. You can go there and watch it if you want and come back to see what I had to do differently. I’ll type out a few things here to get you started, but I won’t type everything out since he has a readme file in the download that has it all step by step.

1. The first thing you want to do is download this zip file that the guy who did the video on youtube put together and save it to your Desktop, or somewhere else easy to get to.
   a) If you don’t have an extracting/unzipping program you can go here to download 7zip.
2. Put your SD card in your computer and go to My Computer or Computer in Vista and open your SD card.
3. Open the zip file that you downloaded and open the readme.txt file. You may need to tell the zip file to open with 7zip if you just downloaded that program. Minimize the readme file for now.
4. Double-click the HackMii Installer folder to open it.
5. Highlight all of those folders and the boot.elf file and extract them to your SD card.
   a) If you already have a folder called private, you can rename it to privateold. That you way won’t delete anything if it’s important. I didn’t have any issues though.
6. Go back to the readme file from before and start from step 3.
7. After you’ve done everything in the readme file open the homebrew channel and go to the homebrew browser.
   a) You now need to download the program that will play the DVDs and not all of them work. It took me a couple hours to figure that out. Go ahead and update the browser if it prompts you.
8. Go to the Media section and find MPlayer CE (Christmas Edition) and click download.
9. Once that is done you can either look around and see what else there is to download (there is tons of stuff). Or you can press the home button on your wiimote and either reboot the wii to get back to the wii menu, or return to loader to go back to the homebrew channel. To get to the menu from the homebrew channel, hit the home button again and then exit.

Playing a DVD on your Wii:

1. Go to the homebrew channel you just installed and click MPlayer CE -> Load.
2. At the black and white menu arrow down to open and press the right arrow button to select it.
3. Go down to DVD Video and press the right arrow again to select it.
4. Use the same controls to go to Play DVD and select it to start the video or go to chapter if you want to select a specific chapter.
a) If you go down and select Play DVD (libdvdnav) instead of the top option to Play DVD, it will send you to the DVD menu so you can get to any extra stuff on the DVD (gag reel, etc.).

The only annoying thing is that there is a volume control on the wii itself that you need to turn up because it’s pretty quiet and you will probably have to turn the volume up on the TV pretty loud after that. Besides that it works perfectly. To increase/decrease the volume on the wii press the plus or minus buttons during the movie.

For controls on how to work the menu during the movie and skip forward or backward, etc you can go here and look at the little table thing. Press the B button during the movie to bring the menu up and press it multiple times to make it go away.

The SD card must be in your Wii for this to work since the programs are not installed on the Wii.

Enjoy your movie

Malwarebytes installation error

I went to install Malwarebytes on my desktop computer but got a weird installation error message; “mbam.exe – Unable To Locate Component.  This application has failed to start because MSVBVM60.DLL was not found. Re-installing the application may fix the problem.”

I tried downloading another copy of Malwarebytes and re-installing it, thinking I got a bad file, but I just got the same error.  Doing a quick google search led me to the bleepingcomputer.com forum.  I guess that error means that visual basic is damaged.  How it got damaged is beyond me, but it’s a pretty easy solution.  Be sure to uninstall Malwarebytes first.  Then all you have to do is download and install service pack 6 for visual basic 6.0.  Install Mbam again after that is finished.  *Poof*, all fixed.

Code 10: device cannot start

Another awesome error message from Microsoft.  I came home for winter break and plugged my mp3 player in to recharge it and edit some music files to get this error message in the device manager.  The most irritating thing is that I’ve plugged this mp3 player into my computer I don’t know how many times before without any sort of problem at all – I have no idea where this came from.  The first thing I thought was maybe the cord is dying or the device itself is tweaking out.  I went downstairs and plugged it into my Dad’s computer to test it and within seconds his computer recognized the device perfectly, Sansa e280.  Now this really irritated me because it works on my Vista laptop and my Dad’s XP sp3 machine which is exactly like mine.

So the research began and the ideas I saw until I luckily came across the actual solution were to:

1. Update the firmware on the mp3 player (FAILED)
2. Update my computer’s BIOS (FAILED)
3. Update the mobo’s chipset drivers (FAILED)
4. Uninstall/reinstall everything listed under universal serial bus controllers in the device manager (FAILED)
5. Manually install it through add hardware in the control panel .  (FAILED sort of)

As you can see nothing worked except #5, but that was only part of the solution for me.  Finally after getting fed up and taking a break I came back to it and updated the firmware using my Dad’s computer since it detected the device properly to begin with.  I think this was part of the solution, either that or I’m completely blind because in the Sansa mp3 players, at least the e280, there is supposed to be a setting where you change how it’s detected.  There’s MTP and MSC (I don’t honestly know the difference and don’t care enough to look it up) or just automatic.  But in mine I couldn’t find that setting anywhere until I updated the firmware.

Now that I had the detection options I tried switching them around to see what worked.  I got all excited when, in MSC mode, that happy little bubble popped up in the bottom right saying my device had been installed and is ready to use.  But when I looked in the device none of my music was in there anywhere.  MTP and automatic still didn’t work and by that time I was pretty pissed off and just about ready to chuck something out the window.  Then I found this forum which suggested adding the hardware through the control panel and changing it so that it looks for the driver in C:\Windows\inf.  Every other time I tried adding hardware manually I pointed it to the drivers folder – who would’ve thought that drivers would be in the drivers folder?  Why the hell wouldn’t Windows search there to begin with?  Anyway, That worked, but only when I had my mp3 player set for MTP mode.  It still doesn’t work in MSC mode, but now automatic works as well.

Make sure you play around with the USB detection settings in the mp3 player itself and tell the computer to search in C:\Windows\inf when installing the hardware manually or if a prompt pops up when you first plug it in.

Our new office

We finally got rid of the old crappy desks that everybody smacked their knees on.  I’m putting up some before and after pictures for old staff to take a look at in case you’re curious.  I’ve worked my ass off getting this office organized so we can actually find things and it’s happening, believe it or not.

Before:

During:

After: