Thursday, March 17, 2011

Windows 7 SP1 error fix

INSTRUCTIONS:

01. Reboot your computer while it's starting up.

02. When your computer starts up again, choose the option "Launch Startup Repair"
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03. When the Startup repair starts, click cancel.

04. After you click cancel it will show a box. Click "Don't Send"
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05. Click the link "View advanced options for recovery and support"

06. In the new window click Command Prompt at the bottom.
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07. In Command Prompt type this and press enter: %windir%\system32\notepad.exe

08. Notepad will open. In notepad go to File-->Open.

09. Change the type of files notepad views from .txt to All Files (see pic)
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10. Now in Notepad, go to C:\Windows\winsxs\ (or whichever drive Windows is installed on)

11. In that folder, find pending.xml and make a copy of it

12. Now open the original pending.xml (it will load really slow because the file is huge)

13. Press CNTRL+F and search for the following exactly: 0000000000000000.cdf-ms

14. Delete the following text (yours will be a little different):




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Your PC might not have all 3 sections of code (, , ). Just make sure you delete section "Checkpoint" and whatever other sections have "000000000000000.cdf-ms". They will be right next to eachother.

15. Save the file, close notepad, close command prompt, restart your computer.


Once your computer starts up, do a normal startup (it may stall for 5-10 minutes at the "starting windows" screen, but leave it going) and the Service Pack will install some more stuff and restart a few times and then everything should be working! For some people, it reverts everything and cancels the service pack installation. For other people, the service pack installation completes. Either result is fine.

Renew SSL certificate exchange 2007

Solution 1:


Verisign has a support article that matches this error message: https://knowledge.verisign.com/support/ssl-certificates-support/index?page=content&id=S:SO8467&actp=search&searchid=1219125132143. Their recommendation seems to be to replace the certificate with a new one. This method has worked for at least one of my customers in this place with a GoDaddy certificate. All they had to do was make a new certificate request (CSR text file), log into the the Godaddy web interface and re-key (we chose re-key rather than re-issue) their certificate. The new file processed fine.


Solution 2:


Begin by importing the .crt file into the Personal certificate store for the local computer. (Start button > Run: MMC > File Menu > Add/Remove Snap-in > highlight Certificates snap-in and click the ADD button > select Computer Account and click Finish > Click OK > drill into Personal > Certificates > right-click and select All Tasks > select Import > guide to the .crt file.) At this point your certificate is basically a half-certificate. It is still missing its private key.


Second, double-click the crt certificate file you just imported, select the Details tab, scroll all the way down to Thumbprint and highlight Thumbprint. In the lower pane, block and copy all the letters of the thumbprint. Paste the thumbprint characters into notepad. Open the command prompt and run this command: Certutil /?
The command you’ll want to run is:



certutil -repairstore my "{insert all of the thumbprint characters here}"


When you see the response: “CertUtil: -repairstore command completed successfully” you should have a private key associated with the .crt file in the personal store. There should no longer be any need to run through the “Complete Certificate Request…” wizard. The certificate should show up in the IIS Manager’s list of server certificates at this point. It should also be available in the SSL Certificates drop-down list when attempting to edit the https binding for a website.


Incidentally, a common way of attempting to deal with this error is to take the .p7b file from the Certification Authority and import the CA's certificates into the Trusted and Intermediate stores. As far as I can tell, this approach has no useful effect upon this problem.

Also, even though the Name for the cert is blank in IIS, this can be remedied through the MMC.

start -> run -> mmc -> File -> Add/Remove Snap-in -> select Certificates etc.

Then go to Certificates -> Personal -> Certificates -> select the desired cert, right click, properties -> set a friendly name. Easy.