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Sunday 17 June 2012

Dell mini Inspiron 910 - STEC SSD repair faulty disk

We would like to thank the original author of this review at www.punj.co.uk for granting us permission to publish this particular blog content. The original contents of the review can be found at http://www.punj.co.uk

How to revive your Dell Mini 9 failed Mini PCIe SSD disk 

On this page we are going to look at the Dell Mini 9 Inspiron 910 mini laptop / netbook and a common problem that some users have faced.


The Dell Mini 9 Inspiron that we are going to talk about here had the following specifications and were all just over twelve months old.
Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz, 1GB DDR2 RAM, 16GB SSD , 8.9" WSVGA, Integrated Webcam
Graphics Media Accelerator950, USB 2.0 Ports: 3 , Video Out Ports: 1, OS XP Home
            
We have had several of these mini laptop / netbooks sent to us for repairs all giving symptom's of a failed disk. When switching the Dell Mini 9 on,  the screen would show errors as " Operating system not Found" and on two of these the SSD disk was being reported as 0MB within the bios.

Normally this error in most cases is the symptom's of a failing hard disk and usually requires the hard disk to be replaced.

On the Dell Mini 9 the hard disk consists of a Mini PCIe PATA SSD disk which unlike normal hard disks consist of no moving parts. The Mini PCIe PATA SSD is made of memory chips which will retain data after power loss.


The STEC Mini PCIe PATA SSD on the Dell Mini can be located on the rear of the laptop by removing the hardware compartment lid which is held by two screws.

Most people that we have come across seem to replace their SSD disks when they encounter this error as this is the advise by Dell Support to them. Further when you encounter these errors the disk becomes inaccessible for any of the usual disk utilities including Linux GPart. You will find that using the Linux Live CD for accessing the SSD for partitioning, formatting and other tests is always unsuccessful. 

We believe that occasionally some of the data on the disk becomes corrupt and the disk is also occasionally unable to re-align itself. The disk will then go into a lock and give symptons as described above. You will also find very limited information on the Internet to resolve this issue.

Our method for recovering your STEC Mini PCIe PATA SSD disk evolves running a utility within a bootable CD or USB media to re-align and updating the disk firmware. This utility was made available from STEC the SSD Disk manufacturer to whom we are very grateful to. The utility will destroy all data on the disk and when completed revive what was a dead SSD disk. You will then need to re-partition and format your SSD disk. If all goes well your final task is to re-install your OS and data to your Dell Mini 9
You Should be aware that this procedure will destroy all data on the disk. We offer no guarantee or warranty that this procedure will work for you.

To repair and revive your failed STEC Mini PCIe SSD disk this is the procedure that works for us.
You will need to download the utility firmware and prepare the bootable media on another computer or laptop. Below are the step by step instructions we use to repair our STEC Mini PCIe SSD.
  1. Prepare a USB Pen Drive formatted with Fat32 and with a bootable dos system.
  2. Instructions for creating a bootable usb pen drive can be found at How to make a bootable usb flash drive
  3. Download the following STEC SSD 8 / 16GB util firmware to your desktop and unzip the contents with winzip.
  4. Copy the unzipped "stecssdutil" utility folder to your bootable USB pen drive.
  5. When the above steps are complete remove your newly created USB pen drive and now go to the Dell Mini 9.
  6. Ensure that the Dell Mini 9 is plugged into the power supply. This is very important.
  7. Now plug in your USB bootable pen drive with the stecssdutil folder contents.
  8. Switch on your Dell Mini 9 and keep pressing 0 (Zero) on the keyboard. You should be prompted with a screen asking which device to boot from. You will need to ensure that you are booting from the USB pen drive (USB Hard Drive).
  9. If the usb pen drive has successfully booted you will be navigated in to the dos environment with the screen at the command prompt C:\  .
  10. Now type "CD stecssdutil" and press enter. You will now be navigated into "c:\stecssdutil" folder.
    If a message is shown that the directory cannot be found or does not exist then for those people type "cd stecss~1" and press enter. For those people you should now be navigated into "c:\"cd stecss~1".
  11. Type "mcru004.exe" and press enter.
  12. Now do not touch any thing or switch off. Let the utility complete. This may take some time to complete. Let the utility firmware finish or you will destroy your disk.
  13. If an error is shown by the utility then the chances are that the disk is failing and should be replaced. We recommend that you carry out the procedure again to confirm that the disk is failing. If no errors are shown then go to the next step. 
  14. When the utility completes you will be back at the C:\ prompt or C:\stecssdutil\ prompt .
  15. You can now remove the pen drive and switch the Dell Mini 9 off.
The final steps require preparing your repaired STEC SSD drive and then re-installing your OS from your recovery CD's.
We used the Linux Live GParted CD which can be found at http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php for deleting the old partition and then creating a new NTFS partition and a NTFS format to complete our procedure.
The final step will be to re-install the Dell Mini 9 OS and drivers from the Dell Recovery media that came with your Dell Mini 9.
Finally this is the very same procedure that some people are selling on ebay to revive this particular SSD disk for you. We hope that our readers will save some money and have the satisfaction on carrying out this repair themselves. Our personal opinion is that Dell Support should offer this publicly as a free of charge repair for the user's effected to carry out. They should also make more of an attempt to make this issue more known on their support site and the Internet.
We hope our readers have enjoyed our project and will come back to www.punj.co.uk for our views on more technological projects and products.

If you have enjoyed our latest tip or wish to discuss this further then please leave your comments and suggestions below.

** Update **
We will publish updated firmwares at our main site at  www.punj.co.uk 
once we are satisified that they are safe to do so.
So please keep checking our main site for further information and updates at www.punj.co.uk

Please Note:- We do not offer support for disk passwords. Please do not ask us for password support. We are sorry but we will not be able to assist.

punj

Sunday 29 April 2012

BT Homehub V 3 Open ports 161 and 4567 stealthed

We would like to thank the original author of this review at www.punj.co.uk for granting us permission to publish this  particular blog content. The original contents of the review can be found at http://www.punj.co.uk/

On this page we are going to discuss why the BT Home Hub V3 is shipped with open ports




On our previous blog we discussed using OpenDNS with BT Broadband and the BT home hub. We still congratulate BT for providing their customers with a great home wireless router but like most people we cannot understand why they supply their router shipped with open ports.
It is now confirmed that the current BT Home Hub v3 is supplied with ports 161 and in some cases 4567 permanently open and not closed. We are also going to provide our readers a simple fix to stealth these open ports. 
Further the BT Hub Manager settings do not allow these ports to be further configured or turned off.

There is a lot of discussion at the BT Care Community Forums at
With people asking this very same question and the response from BT. 

You can check to see if your firewall or router has open ports by visiting the Gibson Research Corporation port scanning service called ShieldsUp. This can be found by following this link


The image below shows our test BT Home Hub V3 with port 161 open.


We would agree with the Gibson Research Corporation comments regarding port 161 and why open ports are vunerable to hack attacks.


“Most users will not be exposed to SNMP (nor will they ever find port 161 open) unless some piece of their networking equipment has an active and open SNMP service port. If our port analysis ever shows that a router (for example) or other network device exposed to the Internet has its SNMP interface open you will want to arrange to disable and close that port immediately. Malicious hackers know that some consumer networking equipment has been shipped with exposed SNMP ports and with default access passwords. Therefore, it would not be at all unlikely that such a router or other equipment would be quickly discovered and exploited. Malicious hackers would find this amusing, but you would probably not”
  
You can read the Gibson Research Corporation full description of port 161 at

Port 4567 is explained at

How to temporarily fix and stealth open ports 161 & 4567

OK now how can we stealth these open ports. Well it’s really up to BT to provide a permanent fix with an updated firmware to fully secure these open ports. As BT currently leave these ports open we can carry out a temporary solution in stealthing these open ports.

In brief we are going to access the BT Home Hub manager settings and use the port forwarding settings to route these open ports to an unused IP address on our network. 
We must ensure that this IP address is not or ever used for any device on our Lan network.

Well here is the simple fix. 

  1.  Login to your BT Home HUB  manager settings at 192.168.1.254.  
  2. Select “'Settings”. then 
  3. Select ‘Advanced Settings'. then 
  4. Select 'Port Forwarding'. 
  5. In 'Device’, select 'User-defined IP' and enter an unused IP address eg 192.168.1.250.  (Must be unique and not to be used by any device on the network). 
  6. Now Click 'Add' and 'Assign' and then 'Apply'  
  7.  In this same screen, click 'Supported applications'.  
  8.  Now add a new application. Name this as  SNMP/TRAM. This will represent the two protocols ports 161 & 4567.  
  9.  Set 'Protocol' to 'Any'.
  •  In all the boxes labelled 'Port Range' and 'Translate to', enter 161 then Click 'Add' 
      •  In all the boxes labelled 'Port Range' and 'Translate to', enter 4567.then Click 'Add'. 
        • Now Click 'Apply' to save and apply the new changes.
          Now if you go to

          and try the Gibson Research Corporation port scanning service called ShieldsUp this should show the previously open ports as now stealthed.


          So to re-cap what we have done is used the port forwarding settings to route these ports to a unique unused IP address within our network which doesn’t exist. When the port scanner now tries to communicate with these ports to the non-existing IP address it can’t because the IP address has no device to communicate with.

          Finally it’s really up to BT to provide a permanent fix with an updated firmware to fully secure these open ports. The port forwarding solution above is only a temporary solution in stealthing these open ports.

          We hope you have enjoyed our latest tip and if you wish to discuss this further then please leave your comments and suggestions below.

          punj

          Sunday 15 January 2012

          Solve wireless router connection problems

          We would like to thank the original author of this review at www.punj.co.uk for granting us permission to publish this  particular blog content. The original contents of the review can be found at http://www.punj.co.uk/

          Many people today connect to the Internet using a wireless router either provided by their ISP or purchased by themselves.  Wireless routers are great devices letting people connect to their home networks without having a wired connection between the device and the router. As an example you can sit in your garden and connect wirelessly to your home wireless router to access the Internet.

           

          We have come across many occasions when the wireless router sometimes becomes problematic and intermittently disconnects the user providing an unsatisfactory connection. To help we are going to give our readers some useful tips on how to resolve these issues.

          You may have experienced one of the following symptoms:

          1. Your PC or laptop frequently connects and disconnects you from the wireless router.
          2. You are connected to your wireless router but the wireless connection seems very slow.

          We have resolved these issues on many occasions by just following some simple tips.

          Some useful tips to resolve wireless problems

          Nearly all wireless routers today come preset so that the user simply connects their wireless router to the ISP connection and by using the security key provided they are ready to surf the Internet.
          The security key will normally be found on a sticker on the back of the router.
          The manufactures try very hard to make the installation of the wireless router an easy experience for the user.
          An example of this setup by the manufacturer would be that the wireless router comes pre-configured with the wireless channel pre-set to "Auto" or Channel "6".
          Normally in all occasions an unsatisfactory wireless connection is due to external interference interfering with the wireless connection.
          The external interference can come from neighbouring wireless routers and devices. Indeed even the neighbours microwave can interfere with your wireless connection.
          A simple solution to resolve and fix your connection is by changing the channel your wireless router uses to communicate with your devices eg computer or laptop.
          To change the channel you will need to go into the wireless router set up pages. You can find more information on how to get into your wireless router setup pages by reading your router manual or by searching in google for your router.
          Once you are in the wireless router setup page you will notice that the wireless channel is set to "Auto" or channel "6". This channel setting can normally be changed. You can normally manually set the channel number between 1 to 13.
          By simply changing this to say channel "2" you can resolve a lot of issues. You may even find that your wireless router can now be picked up at longer distances and stay satisfactorily connected for a longer time.


          Some of the more experienced users will also tweak their devices in other ways in an effort to get the best wireless connection. How ever some of these tweaks can also result in making the connection unsatisfactory and even worse for the user. An example of this is one that we came across very recently.
          We had a user who had the DD-WRT firmware on their wireless router. They were able to set the transmit TX power settings which basically either transmits the wireless signal at higher or lower power settings.
          They thought by using higher power settings they were improving their wireless signal so that it would be picked up more easly by the wireless devices. However by setting this at higher power settings they were just saturating the signal to their wireless device. We recommend that you never increase the power transmit settings on your wireless router. Not only will you saturate additional noise but you will most probably shorten the the life of your wireless router. We were able to resolve this issue for this user by just lowering this slightly lower than the default setting. In our case this was lowered from the default setting of "70" to "50".

          Some people will also access the wireless NIC settings within the wireless NIC device on the laptop or computer. Within the "Wireless Network adapter connection" you can get access to the wireless adaptor settings within the advanced menu. Here you can also see that on some wireless adaptors you can set the "Transmit Power". Some people think by setting this to the "Highest" setting they will be able to iimprove their wireless signal as it is now operating at the highest setting. All they are doing here is again shortening the life of their wireless adaptor and as stated before saturating the wireless signal. 
          We again recommend that you choose a medium setting for the transmit TX setting.
          The lower the setting the better the wireless connection will perform. Also the wireless NIC card will use less power which will result in less heat and a longer life for that device.

          We are amazed that the tips we have detailed above are not given as standard by the manufactures support  personel.
          We have come across many users replacing their wireless routers stating that the previous router that was purchased not so long ago as poorly made by the manufacturer. Indeed the same has been said for the free ISP supplied wireless routers.  In our opinion manufactures do try to make good quality products and ISP do want to provide the best for their customers. However by just changing the wireless channel will most defantly in most cases give amazing results.

          Over the years we have resolved many wireless issues by just using the simple tips above.

          So finally if your wireless router is playing up whether this is the one you purchased or this was given free to you by your ISP,  we recommend you try our tips here, Hopefully you will once again have your wireless router and devices working as they are suppose to.

          If you have enjoyed our latest tip or wish to discuss this further then please leave your comments and suggestions below

          punj