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APC and its readers can be one giant helpdesk. If you have a technical problem, chances are one of us can solve it.
WINDOWS RECOVER DATA AND SETTINGS FROM BACKUP
I’ve backed my computer up with Macrium in order to fix my non-booting PC, but can you tell me how I recover data from the fail-safe Macrium drive image I took, please? Anthony Parsons First, reinstall Macrium Reflect Free. Then follow the step-by-step guide to recover files from your image — when done, right-click the drive icon in File Explorer under This PC and choose ‘Macrium Reflect > Unmount Macrium Image’.
Open drive image: Browse to the folder containing your fail-safe drive image. You should see that it’s marked as a ‘Disk Partition image’ with a blue drive icon. Simply double-click the drive image and click Yes when you’re prompted to open it with Macrium Reflect Free. The Backup Selection window will open. Tick the largest partition — your Windows drive — and be sure to tick ‘Enable access to restricted folders’ to bypass permission issues. Click OK. Macrium Reflect Free will assign a drive letter and open the image.
Recover files: You can now browse the image’s contents like any other drive, then simply copy off any files you wish to recover to a folder on your new storage media. Open ‘Users > [Username]’ to locate your personal data, such as documents and photos.
Find program settings: Your user folder also contains an AppData folder — look inside the Local, LocalLow and Roaming folders for program folders containing your settings. Also look inside ProgramData and both Program Files folders on the drive root. Nick Peers
MAC MY BACKUPS HALT IN SIERRA
I upgraded to a 27-inch iMac with a 1TB Fusion Drive, but every time it tries to run a Time Machine backup, the process stalls at the same point. I have even bought a new external hard drive, but it won’t complete the first backup to that either. Is Time Machine broken in Sierra? Mike Thompson Some users have reported problems backing up with Time Machine, but most of these issues can be fixed. If you can, archive the drive containing your old backups and switch to using the new one, starting afresh with it. Ensure that Sierra is fully up to date, and that there’s ample free space on the external drive to perform a full backup, as well as incremental backups thereafter. It’s also wise to check that any migration from your old Mac didn’t bring old or buggy software across to your new one,
particularly extensions and enhancements. Turn off Time Machine, connect the new external drive, and restart in macOS Recovery. Using Disk Utility there, run First Aid on your Fusion Drive, then initialise the external drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format. Restart your Mac as normal. In Time Machine’s preferences, click Options and add any folders you don’t wanted backed up to the exclusions. Re-enable Time Machine to back up to the new drive. Leave the iMac alone to back up, running no apps; overnight is ideal. If Time Machine sticks again, Sierra’s Console isn’t much help in diagnosing it. You could try to use Recovery to reinstall Sierra, erase the new back-up drive, and then try again. Howard Oakley
LINUX GUMMIBOOT GONE
I started using the Gummiboot boot manager on my UEFI computer. However, this has now been assimilated into the systemd collective, which I have no desire to install on any of my hardware. That was fine as long as it was still available separately, too, but that’s no longer the case. I have two questions for you. First, is it possible to continue using Gummiboot without systemd? Second, if not, what alternatives are there? Anthony Williamson Gummiboot will continue to work for you. It has a simple job, to present you with a list of kernels or OSes to boot. The job doesn’t change so you can continue to use it. The only concern is if a security vulnerability is found: as Gummiboot is unmaintained, it will not be fixed. It’s possible to extract the boot manager from systemd and install that without using systemd itself, although this may not always be possible. Another alternative is to switch to a different manager, such as rEFInd ( www.rodsbooks.com/refind). With UEFI, the kernel itself becomes the bootloader, so programs like Gummiboot and rEFInd only need to manage the options without the complexities of a full bootloader like GRUB. UEFI computers provide their own boot menu that can be used as a very basic boot manager, or it can be used to choose one, so installing rEFInd alongside Gummiboot isn’t only possible, it’s recommended as that gives you a fallback while getting used to rEFInd. The web page includes installation instructions but most distros now have rEFInd in their repos. After installing, run: $ sudo refind-install This installs it to the UEFI partition and sets it as the default bootloader. It also retrieves the options used to boot the running system and adds
them to the configuration. You can now reboot and try it, knowing that if anything goes wrong, you still have Gummiboot. There are two configuration files that control rEFInd’s behaviour. The main one is at EFI/refind/refind.conf and is heavily commented. The options here mainly control the appearance and behaviour of the menu. The other file is / boot/ refind_linux.conf that contains the kernel options for the Linux menu entries. This was created by refindinstall using your existing boot options and is used whenever booting a Linux kernel. You can create manual configurations but this is generally unnecessary, the auto-detection is good. That also means that you don’t need to run anything after adding or removing a kernel, rEFInd picks up changes automatically, unlike Gummiboot or GRUB. APC Team
INTERNET BROWSER ADD-ON HIJACK
I was looking for a browser extension to capture a screenshot of an entire web page and settled on Fireshot, but after a recent update, I’ve found it’s now somehow installed itself to my Taskbar Notification area. How do I now get rid of this? Tim Ellis This is rather sneaky behaviour, as Fireshot has added a desktop instance of itself, which basically runs whenever your browser is open. You can close this manually without closing your browser via its Taskbar Notification area icon, but you can’t remove it permanently.
If this is a dealbreaker — it was for Tim as the program hijacked key shortcuts from other programs — then you’ll need to remove Fireshot completely. Tim was using Firefox, so we instructed him to type “about:addons” into the Address Bar. Locate Fireshot and click Remove, restarting Firefox to complete the process. Ian Sleightholm
SOFTWARE ONE CALENDAR PROBLEMS
I bought the One Calendar app after it being recommended to me by a friend. It’s a big improvement over the built-in app in Windows, but although I can colour-code events on screen, only one colour appears when printing. I also get a sync error message at the top of the screen — I thought I’d paid for the full version. Tony Lawrence We’d purchased One Calendar, so knew this wasn’t normal behaviour. We tracked down the sync error problem to the fact that Tony had been attempting to save events to a readonly calendar, typically one shared by another user — One Calendar isn’t smart enough to recognise read-only calendars and prevent you from saving changes to them. The solution is to contact the calendar’s owner and ask for full access, or log on to your calendar account online to see if there’s a setting you can change. Failing that, recreate the event in a calendar that isn’t read-only — select the event and click Copy to quickly do this, then delete the original event.
As for the print error, we were unable to replicate this on our PC — basically, One Calendar colours events according to the calendar they’re assigned to (change these colours via ‘Settings > Options > Colors’). Tony subsequently reported that the print function worked correctly when he set the app up on his laptop, suggesting it
“One Calendar isn’t smart enough to recognise read-only calendars and prevent you from saving changes to them. The solution is to contact the calendar’s owner and ask for full access.”
might be related to a printer driver issue on his main PC. Nick Odantzis
WINDOWS CAN I RECOVER WINDOWS?
While updating Windows 10, I stupidly switched off, and now it won’t boot. It goes through several screens and then halts. I can access the BIOS/UEFI settings and have access to my wife’s PC. Can you help me recover my system? Miles Mead Download and launch the Media Creation Tool on your wife’s PC from www.microsoft.com/software-download/ windows10 — choose to upgrade another PC when prompted, then create bootable media (preferably a USB flash drive). Insert this into your malfunctioning PC and attempt to boot from it — if necessary, enter Settings to make the drive the first bootable device. When you come to the Setup screen, click the Repair option then follow the prompts to access the automatic repair tool to see if Windows can resolve the problem.
If this fails, you may need to try the Refresh option to recover your files, settings and Windows 10 apps (but not desktop programs). Miles subsequently reported success in getting Windows working again. Nick Peers
LINUX VNC VS FIREWALL
A colleague of mine was talking about a problem he was having with remote desktops, specifically connecting from a work computer to a remote home computer. I assume the home machine is probably behind a router with a firewall? Would that mean he needs to open a port in this firewall at home before he can connect? Is this risky? Which port is used for VNC? David Hignett A home computer behind a router is inaccessible from outside by default. It’s not just a firewall, Network Address Translation (NAT) on the router means that the external IP address only gets as far as the router. Your colleague needs to set up port forwarding on the router to forward specific ports from the internet to a specific computer. In the case of VNC, the default address uses port 5900. However, this is considered a security risk and will open him up to all sorts of attacks from people trying to find vulnerabilities in the VNC software. A safer approach is to use a VPN (virtual private network) which creates an encrypted tunnel through which the remote computer becomes a part of the home network. We’ve covered this in the past, but it can be a little tricky to set up. Fortunately, there is now a simpler alternative in the form of the ZeroTier service. This allows you to create a virtual network in your web browser. The first step is to go to www.zerotier.com and install the software on both computers. Next, create a network, which you do from the website. This has a 16-character ID, used to add computers to the network. On each computer, run $ sudo zerotier-cli join ID You don’t want anyone to be able to connect to your network, so you need to go back to the web control panel at myzerotier.com, go to your network and tick the Auth box for each computer. Now each computer has a new IP address that can only be accessed by other authorised computers on your network. All traffic is encrypted and goes directly between your computers and the software only connects to the zeroTier server to get the location of the other computer.
Unlike a VPN, ZeroTier creates a new private network rather than joining a computer to an existing network, so you need to add each computer separately. Apart from that, it’s a simple way of safely accessing a computer from afar, and it works with mobile devices too. APC Team
“A VPN (virtual private network) creates an ecrypted tunnel through which the remote computer becomes a part of the home network.”