How to install Windows 7 or Windows 8 from a USB stick

This is a repost of a post from an old blog, made on August 19, 2012, that used to be on:

http://beginner.adminramble.com/install-windows-7-windows-8-usb-stick/

Original post:

Here is a small guide how to make a bootable USB pen drive, from a ISO image of Windows setup disk, which you can use to install Windows 7 or Windows 8 on your computer that doesn’t have a DVD drive. The USB stick that is going to be used needs to be at least 4 GB and all the data on it will be erased in the process.

First thing you going to need is Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool that can be downloaded from here. Download the file and install it on your computer.

Run the program and point it to the location of your ISO file, I used the Windows 8 RTM evaluation ISO here.
(If you have a .img file you can just rename the .img extension to .iso, or use a converter like ISOBuddy or MagicISO to convert from some other image format to ISO file)

 

On step 2 choose USB device as the media type.

In step 3 select the drive in which your USB stick is plugged in, press Begin copying and wait for the process to finish.

The tool will reformat your USB stick and put Windows setup files on it.
After it is done you can unplug your stick and install windows on any computer that can boot from a USB ( if a computer is not starting the Windows setup, check your BIOS if it is set to boot from USB before the hard drive).

If you get “We were unable to copy your files. Please check your USB device and the selected ISO file and try again.” error check this post

Besides Windows 7 USB/Download tool you can also try to use Universal USB Installer

Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool error: We were unable to copy your files. Please check your USB device and the selected ISO file and try again

This is a repost of a post from an old blog, made on December 19, 2012, that used to be on:

http://beginner.adminramble.com/windows-7-usbdvd-download-tool-error-unable-copy-files-check-usb-device-selected-iso-file/

Original post:

I have written about how to make a bootable USB installer for Windows 7 and 8 by using the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool. Sometimes if your USB stick has something in its MBR you might get the error

We were unable to copy your files. Please check your USB device and the selected ISO file and try again.

I found the solution to that problem in this post.

You have to start command prompt as an Administrator (On Windows 7 that means right clicking the cmd and selecting Run as Administrator) and use the diskpart utility.

  1. Start command prompt as Administrator and type  diskpart
  2. type  list disk
  3. type select disk  and number of your USB disk ( like select disk 1 )
  4. type  clean
  5. type  create partition primary
  6. type  select partition 1
  7. type  active
  8. type  format quick fs=fat32
  9. type  assign
  10. type exit  to exit the diskpart utility
  11. type exit  to close command prompt
diskpart

Some FortiGate commands you might need

This is a repost of a post from an old blog, made on December 27, 2011, that used to be on:

http://adminramble.com/fortigate-useful-commands/

Original post:

I been using FortiGate devices for a few months now, and I have mostly been doing the administration through the web interface, but even that will require you to do some stuff through CLI.

Here are some of the commands you might need.

(If you don’t have a CLI on your dashboard, you can add it by clicking on plus sign on a Widget button on top of your dashboard and selecting a CLI Console from it.)

To execute all of this commands you need to click with your mouse inside the CLI Console widget so you can type in it.

 HOW TO PING OR TRACEROUTE AN ADRESS FROM A FORTIGATE UNIT:
  • type “execute ping” or “execute traceroute” followed by an address you want to ping e.g.“execute ping 10.10.10.10″
HOW TO SHUTDOWN OR REBOOT A FORTIGATE UNIT FROM A CLI:
  • type “execute shutdown” or “execute reboot”
HOW TO CHANGE AN ADMIN USER PASSWORD:
  • type “config system admin”
  • type “edit” followed by a user you want to reset the password for, e.g. “edit Joe”
  • type “set password” followed by a new password, e.g. “set password NewPass1“
  • type “end” to finish the procedure
HOW TO RESET A LOST PASSWORD ON A FORTIGATE UNIT:
  • start some terminal emulator and connect to the device using a a console cable. Depending on which device you use it will be a RJ-45 to Serial or Serial to Serial cable
  • Reboot the device and immediately it starts up login with user “maintainer” and password “bcpb%deviceserialnumber%” e.g. “bcpbFGT60C1A01102345″ (This should be done inside 14 seconds i think, i took me a few tries before i managed to do it, also the serial number is case sensitive)
  • change the user password as described above
    config system admin
    edit %user%
    set password %password%
    end
HOW TO RESET FORTIGATE TO FACTORY DEFAULTS:
  • type “execute factoryreset”

ConfigServer Internal Server Error 500, after cPanel update: fixed

This is a repost of a post from an old blog, made on June 29, 2013, that used to be on:

http://adminramble.com/configserver-internal-server-error-500-cpanel-update-fixed/

Original post:

After the WHM/cPanel update to 11.38 you might get the an error like this in your browser:

Internal Server Error
500
No response from subprocess (/usr/local/cpanel/whostmgr/docroot/cgi/addon_csf.cgi): subprocess exited with status 2

And something like this in /usr/local/cpanel/logs/error_log:

BEGIN failed–compilation aborted at /usr/local/cpanel/Cpanel/JSON.pm line 15.
Compilation failed in require at /usr/local/cpanel/Cpanel/Template/Plugin/JSON.pm line 12.
BEGIN failed–compilation aborted at /usr/local/cpanel/Cpanel/Template/Plugin/JSON.pm line 12.
Compilation failed in require at /usr/local/cpanel/Cpanel/Template.pm line 53.
BEGIN failed–compilation aborted at /usr/local/cpanel/Cpanel/Template.pm line 53.
Compilation failed in require at /usr/local/cpanel/Whostmgr/HTMLInterface.pm line 12.
BEGIN failed–compilation aborted at /usr/local/cpanel/Whostmgr/HTMLInterface.pm line 12.
Compilation failed in require at /usr/local/cpanel/whostmgr/docroot/cgi/addon_cmc.cgi line 25.
BEGIN failed–compilation aborted at /usr/local/cpanel/whostmgr/docroot/cgi/addon_cmc.cgi line 25.
For help, please send mail to this site’s webmaster, giving this error message and the time and date of the error.

when going to ConfigServer cPanel plugins in WHM like:

ConfigServer Explorer
ConfigServer Mail Manage
ConfigServer Mail Queues
ConfigServer ModSecurity Control
ConfigServer Security & Firewall

This happens if  the installed ConfigServer scripts on a cPanel/WHM server don’t get updated.

The solution for this error is simple.

To resolve this error simply SSH into your server as a root user and run the following command from command line:

curl -s configserver.com/free/csupdate | perl

This script will update: cmm, cmc, cmq, cse, csf, cxs, msinstall, msfe

You can see the ConfigServer blog post about the update here.

How to map client certificates in IIS 7 through graphical user interface

This is a repost of a post from an old blog, made on July 20, 2012, that used to be on:

http://adminramble.com/map-client-certificates-iis-7-graphical-user-interface/

Original post:

As you may know if you want to map client certificates to IIS 7 for authentication purposes, you must use the editor by default, as described in this blog.

If you want to have the IIS 6 like option of mapping the certificates through UI, you cam checkout this blog, and download the ClientCertificateMapping extension for IIS 7.

After installing the extension you will get new Client Certificates option in the IIS right side window

 

which will open a window like this one