Tech Support Hotline

TechThief · January 1, 2022, 9:17am

Thought I would just share my frustrations, and how IT does not make sense.

So I got an SSD for Christmas, which I will be using as my C: drive, so I cloned it overnight with AOMEI Backupper, a program that I have been using for years now and has only failed once on a windows 7 PC which had an HDD that was very corrupt, so I did not pay much attention to the failure, until the same error happened on my PC now on windows 10, basically AOMEI, did not clone the winload.exe file both on the aforementioned windows 7 PC and now mine, which causes windows not to boot, so with it failing I put back my original HDD and looked around for another cloning software I could use.

Found Clonezilla, which I had also used it the past, however I stopped since it could not clone to smaller drives, but seeing as my SSD was the same as my HDD, I decided to give it a shot, this time a different error appeared “INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE”, so here I go again, before just chalking it up to: “my windows does not want to be cloned” I ran the windows startup repair, screwed around with the bcd, running bootrec commands, changing active partitions in diskpart etc. etc. eventually coming to a point where I wanted to give up I ran the startup repair a second time, still got the error, however after restarting from that error it went into a menu where I could boot into “safe mode” so I thought “why the hell not, I have got nothing to loose” and lo and behold it booted into safe mode, I tried to login though and it did not accept any of my passwords, restarted again, this time it booted fine!, why? because fck me! that’s why!

It booted fine, I could login, I shut down the PC, connected all my game hard drives, external HDD, network cable, booted up again, and all is now working, and I am now sitting with an SSD, and my PC is now speedier in every way. Why is everything working? I don’t know. do computers make sense? nope.

NOTE: The first time I got the “inaccessible” error there was no screen afterwords where I could boot into safe mode, or else I would have most likely done that first.

aldyr · January 1, 2022, 1:15pm

Welcome to 2022. Thank you for your service

Mottamort · January 2, 2022, 11:32am

Likely too late as it sounds like you sorted, but yea, we use aruba switches at the one school i’m involved in. wasnt our first choice, but they seem to work well, and adding new switches to the stack is pretty much automatic which is nice.
its also nice they come with lifetime warranty. had one that had its poe controller board die/go faulty (apparently a not-uncommon error), so every now and then it would just stop providing poe to our AP’s and camera’s and you’d have to hard reset it (pull out power cable, hold in power for about 20 sec and plug back in) and it would have a 50/50 chance to work on next bootup and then last a few days before just switching off and just “searching” for poe devices. reported the fault, sent in the putty-generated log report that they requested, and bam, we got shipped a replacement. very little fuss.

I wasn’t part of the initial vm/stack creation tho, but quite involved in adding new switches to the stack and configuring them with our existing vlans. very easy, but that might just be because they were setup properly to begin with

z1oc · January 2, 2022, 12:49pm

I looked at the stack option and yea that would have made it a lot nicer. But in the end, it was the SPF connections that did not work, I have to look up the model of the SPF modules I was given to make sure.

The SPF connection I ordered off amazon works great, and the 50m fiber cable i needed to connect to two offices together are working as I wanted. All in all my biggest frustration was that i could not stack and the fact that I was given SPF modules that did not work.

I fixed so much that week, Connected 3 switches, fixed Vlan, re-did the patch pannels, cleaned up the network cabenets, mounted the APs set up the mesh, and installed three backbone connections to the switches. LOL hopefully I fixed everything for now. and when the New fiber connection comes then the network should be good for next while

Mottamort · January 3, 2022, 1:35pm

Yea we made sure to get the same HP spf modules as are compatible with our Arubas. No issues, but spf modules can be finicky beasts hence we stuck with the overpriced officially compatible ones

I’m also (not) looking forward to finishing up a new IT lab soon as holiday is over. Cabling done, patch panels done but not tested yet. just gotta mount switch, plug in flyleads and start setting up pcs and configuring switch…then to smooth out issues before kiddies come back

murfle · January 4, 2022, 7:01am

Anyone got any suggestions for FOSS help desk software and/or inventory management? I can do one for each if there’s nothing acceptable that do both. I’ve been looking at Zammad for the help desk, but I’m still struggling to find something that runs officially in docker to keep track of our hardware… Spreadsheets aren’t cutting it.

GregRedd · January 4, 2022, 7:17am

Android phone users… need some help trying to figure out what’s hogging the storage on our gardener’s phone. He’s been getting “out of storage” space errors, deleted all his images and stuff, but now still gets the error. Needless to say, he’s acid as heck that he lost all his pics and is still having issues anyway.

Cleared the cache and everything else obvious I could find, but there’s still a bunch of space and I can’t figure out what’s using it.

If I investigate that 2.6GB Used Space it’s all in Applications, but when I go to look in there, there’s nothing larger than the 300MB in Google Play Services.

Also, we put a small SD card in it but can’t figure out how to set WhatsApp (pretty much the only app he uses) to use that instead of the internal storage. Any help in that direction would be appreciated too.

ETA: Found the Move to SD Card option, but phone still says WhatsApp is using Internal Storage

Avatar · January 4, 2022, 7:44am

Do you mean inventory management like IT assets management? Or sales inventory management a la ERP system? For the first there’s Snipe-IT with a lekker linuxserver.io docker container available…

For help desk, there’s a bunch on Awesome-Selfhosted, but I really don’t know which are good, complete, or dockerized.

murfle · January 4, 2022, 7:51am

Ya, IT asset management. I’ll check out those links, thanks! I like the look of that selfhosted list. Wish I’d known about that earlier.

I see snipe-it is actually in my bookmarks, so I obviously was looking into this last year. Too bad I didn’t retain any of that information lol

Appreciate the input. That really helps me finalise my decisions

DarthMol · January 4, 2022, 9:48am

This is one of the biggest frustrations with lower end android phones. 8GB is too little these days even before you install an app.

There is a way to use a memory card as part of the internal storage.

It does depend on the Android version being new enough to have the option and you cannot remove the memory card otherwise things will stop working. But it’s about the only solution to the problem.

Edit: I read through the linked article and see that it notes that Samsung has disable the adoptable storage feature on their phones

DarthMol · January 4, 2022, 9:52am

One other thing to check is if the phone has a “recycle bin” function. If so the deleted files and apps still take up space as “other” and you’ll need to clear that out to reclaim the space.

GregRedd · January 4, 2022, 10:21am

Thanks Darth. Glad to see that it’s not just me being daft. Will see what we can find, and look for a Recycle Bin option too.

Wyvern · January 5, 2022, 5:51am

Good luck withthat
We have learnt nothing you do on those “lite” phones really work to give you space

TechThief · January 5, 2022, 2:43pm

I had the EXACT same problem with my old phone, in the end it caused me to just get a new phone, ( I know this is not an option for everyone) I installed ES file explorer, all you see is “OTHER” is taking up a bunch of space, and I could never find this so called “other” and I don’t just want to go around deleting stuff, however even when connecting the phone to my PC and trying to just find the biggest thing on the phone, I still could not find what the hell was taking all the space, so I just gave up, My new phone has 128GB which is overkill and I can now see that “System” is taking 18.56GB and “other” is taking 17.40GB. I do hope you find a solution, but after I struggled so much, I think the only thing that can be done is to just get a bigger phone, I am never getting 8GB again, even my older Samsung S3 with 32GB is perfectly fine.

oltman · January 9, 2022, 8:19am

Hello, tech support?

I have 2 motherboards and CPUs I would like to donate to anybody who wants them. I am not expecting much as the reason I am replacing them is due to the amount of problems I had. But if you kike to tinker and try to fix it for a possible upgrade, then have at it.

Intel Core i7 3770 and mobo and 8gb DDR3 ram

Intel Core i7 7700 and mobo, no DDR4 ram

Please DM me if you want it and I can send it to you in about a week’s time. In order to cover Postnet feel free to make up for it with a little Steam something (not really required)

oltman · January 9, 2022, 8:25am

Sidenote, bought an AMD Ryzen 5 for the kids. This is my first AMD cpu since the AMD Athlon!

DarthMol · January 9, 2022, 9:32am

Nice! The Ryzens are great. Intel only just caught up with them now with the latest series.

On the flip side, this RTX 2070 Super I’ve got now is the first Nvidia card I’ve had since my old 6600 which was an AGP card! And the funny thing is the Nvidia Control panel still looks the same as back then

Edit: Ah it was this one with the fanless design

oltman · January 9, 2022, 10:07am

Wow! A single slot, fanless GPU??? Imagine the current cards in that config!

GregRedd · January 9, 2022, 10:14am

TechThief · January 10, 2022, 10:03am

Bring me your recommendations! I am in the market for a WiFi Range extender, not too expensive, just to give simple access to the woodwork workshop for my dad to stream music on his laptop and whatsapp on his phone, we already have 2 extenders throughout the property, Netis E1 and a TP Link RE220, both working fine, but would like to hear if I should just get one of these again, or if anyone here has ones that have worked fine for them.