Tire Pressure Sensor Fault - If it goes away - electronic interference

Tire Pressure Senor Fault

I got this error on my vehicle, and then it went away. I took it into the dealership and they tell me all tire pressure sensor's "trained" correctly and nothing was wrong.

Why did I get the error? The dealership tells me that the pressure sensor inside the tire uses wireless communication to let the car know about the tire pressure, and if something happens to block or interfere with the signal, this is the error message the car will give you.

At the time, I was streaming music from SomaFM on my iPhone via Bluetooth to the Ford Sync speakers, using my passengers iPhone to do Google Maps turn by turn direction, while at the same time my passenger was using an iPad to do research on the next location on the internet.

So if it happens and goes away, ignore it.

Winbook backup

I should flesh this out more later, but for now:

http://www.mctsol.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=55&t=1058&p=3645#p3645

Winbook - Tiny and fun

I got that Winbook TW700 as mentioned in the previous blog post; I also asked the "pay per post" service how they wanted me to post so that I would get paid, and never heard back from them.

My favorite thing about this tiny tablet, is it fits in my back pocket. I carried around an iPad for a few days to test it, and it was always a problem of where I was going to set it down when I needed to do something with my hands.

My biggest complaint, is the size of the hard drive. The specs list it as a 16 gig drive, and I figured that would work just fine; but once you login to the Windows 8.1 stock install, you see a drive of 8.77 gigs, with something like 3 gigs free. The "Recovery Partition" is 5.57 gigs of the drive.

Now there is a micro SD card slot, and the Quick Start guide says the biggest card it can read is 64 gigs, so I got a "fast" (as opposed to "cheap") 64 gig micro SD, and the first thing I did was try and put the "Users" folder onto the it. (The micro SD card is called the "D" drive). I then ran into a problem with the "Windows Store" app not opening, as well as some of the other "tiles" programs. I eventually find out that the micro SD card is on a format called exFAT, which doesn't like some file that shows up in the Users profile that relates to the new kinds of Windows apps. I wrote out on their forums the problem, I don't expect them to come up with an answer, but I expect to find a way to "mklink /d" some of the bigger directories so my data files don't fill up this tiny hard drive.

I did have a success story that I also shared on their forums. You can install programs into C, then do the "mklink /d c:\name d:\name" and program still work. So far I've done this with Hearthstone, Chrome, Teamviewer, and Microsoft Office.

Another thing that's tiny are the system menu's and icons that look oversized on a PC, are tiny on the Winbook; I've had more than a few problems with clicking the right thing. So far I think I have this licked by putting "Magnifier" on the Start Menu, and using it if I am having problems with hitting the right option with my fat fingers; and also by using "Teamviewer" to remote into the tablet, then use a keyboard/mouse to get done all the configuring.

So the tablet was $80 on Amazon, got the 64gig card for $30, then I'm using this great tablet stand, then a USB hub that has a keyboard/mouse/external hard drive plugged into it when I want to use those directly (like if I want to fiddle with the BIOS), and use my regular PC to remote into it if I want to do some file cut/paste mklink /d work since that's fairly time consuming to do via the on-screen keyboard.

Okay, now what do I use this tablet for?

I'll be right back

When people suddenly get the "NTLDR is missing" error on their computer it's not on a system they bought yesterday, it's a system they've owned for years and they don't want to be buying a new system, they need something from that old system, usually locked away in a program, or it's the program itself.

I'm going to try and spend some time either coming up with a "convert your old system into a virtual machine" or "copy your old system onto a new hard drive", I've seen these tablets made by a company called "Winbook" running Windows 7 selling for less than $100, with hardware comparable to older systems. I'm thinking this could make for a fun project, and a reason to post here more often. Also, I was contacted about having some "Sponsored Posts", and I figure that I had better post something else here or it'll all be sponsored posts. See also "Native Advertising"

The title of the post is a reference to the line from the movie "Scream" where one of the characters says "Don't ever say 'I'll be right back', that's the kiss of death in a horror film"; I recall hearing John C. Dvorak mention on a show that if you ever see a blog that's been abandoned, the last blog post will always be "I've been neglecting this blog, but I'm going to post a lot more"; which reminds me of every diary or journal I've ever tried to keep.

Recent spike in web traffic at start of 2014

I've gotten more web traffic the last few weeks than I'm used to seeing. Was there a recent software patch or something that's causing issues? Please email me (or comment below) and let me know so I can better tailor the page to this new info: milescomer@gmail.com

Cloned Hard Drive AHCI booting with cd - awesome accidental fix

Vinny Eggers emailed to let me know of an unexpected fix.

He had cloned a hard drive, and when he went to use it in another computer, all he got was a blinking cursor.

Both computers had their hard drive type set to "IDE" but were modern computers that also offered "AHCI". Just to try something different to see if he could get it working, Vinny switched the new computer to AHCI and got the BSOD 0x07B screen you would expect to see for a "Windows installed as IDE, and now BIOS attempting to boot as AHCI".

However, this let him know that the hard drive was working, and had a Windows installation going because after the BSOD it would reboot and get to the "Boot in Safe Mode?" prompt.

So Vinny goes back into the BIOS, sets the data type back to IDE, and uses the ntldr is missing bootable cd as the boot device, which bypassed whatever was going on that was just causing the flashing cursor. So Windows loads just fine.

Now the fix, which worked here; was to go ahead and load the AHCI drivers into the Windows installation, then set the data type to AHCI, and it booted and worked just fine on it's own. AHCI is supported by Windows XP from Service Pack 2 forward, so you'll need that to if you don't already have it.

I'll include some of his email so you can get how he got the AHCI drivers into Windows.

"""

- Boot the PC with the NTLDRfix CD

- When in Windows, remove the CD and download the appropriate AHCI driver for your machine (manufacturers usually list it as a pre-install SATA driver, or AHCI F6 driver)

- Go into the Device Manager and look for IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers

- Expand the list and right-click on the storage controller (commonly ICH9 etc) and click update driver

- Choose the option at the bottom of the list and click next, keep doing this until you're met with a list of drivers

(select the manufacturer and model of your hardware device.....)

- Click Have Disk and proceed to install the driver from the location you downloaded/extracted the driver to

- Acknowledge any warnings and restart the machine once you're done (you may have more than one SATA controller to update)

- Go back into the BIOS before the computer boots and switch to AHCI

All going well, your PC should be booting all by itself and with native disk drivers!

"""

Thanks Vinny!

Selling TinyEmpire.com - info on making boot disk will still exist

I got an email thanking me for the help and saying they were sad to see I'm selling TinyEmpire.com; but I reassured them that while tinyempire.com may go away, the information about making the boot disk to work around the problem will not, it will likely just be located on another website. A few years back I purchased ntldrismissing.com and requested people link to that instead of tinyempire, and right now I'm pointing it to the specific tinyempire page, but I can point it to whatever other site, probably milescomer.com slash missing.htm if I had to guess.

Whoever runs that ComputerHope website that has the top ranking on google for "ntldr is missing"; I should really reach out and ask them to either link to my new site: ntldrismissing.com , or have them copy the boot disk info in it's entirety, and have them upload the files needed to make it as well. It's not like I own any of the files anyhow, they are all Microsoft system files.

While I'm at it, I'll answer the question "why don't you sue other people who take the files, put it into a boot disk, and sell it"; because they aren't my files. ntldr, ntdetect.com, and a very basic boot.ini is in your Windows XP install right now; if you delete it, you can get copies from the Microsoft installation disk. All I'm doing is making it super easy, giving directions, providing answers if questioned, and adding a bunch of extra choices to the boot.ini file.

And I have to give it away for free; if nothing else because of all the free help I've gotten from all the other webpages out there that give away answers for free :-)