Category Archives: tech

When a BIOS update goes bad!

The BIOS update a scary update that might mess up your PC if it goes wrong.

So recently i wanted to play a Blu Ray disk i bought on Amazon and i remembered (probaly wrongly) that the BIOS of my motherboard the MSI 450 a Pro Max had problems with the Blu ray drive i have the Pioneer BD-202.

So i had the bright idea of rolling back the BIOS to see if that would fix it. I had done so 3 times previosly and there was no problems that was until an ipdate that made my CPU work the motherboard.

AMI BIOS 7B86vMC

Description:

  •  Optimized and support AMD Ryzen 5000 series processors.

Basially this update made the motherboard work with AMD Ryzen 5600 CPU’s and rolling it back past this update would “probably” break the compatability.

Now i knew this was kinda stupid but i wanted to see if a previous BIOS update would make the Blu-Ray drive work properly.

Disaster:
BIOS updated but when the PC went to reboot there was nothing put the white motherboard light on and nothing on the screen. it was at that moment i knew i had fucked up!

USB M Flash:
I knew there was a way to recovery if i could rollback the update but how. id never used this feature before on any motherboard and since nothing came up when the PC came on how would i even enable this recovery mode which is called “M-Flash”.

Mikes Unboxing Video:
so i googled this motherboard and the bios and was searching for some way to fix the mess i had made and i found this video and i cannot thank this guy enough for making a video like this.

What i needed:

  • USB Flash Drive
  • A Working BIOS Rom file
  • Way to move and rename the BIOS File

Problem:
I only had my phone and had no access to a laptop or other PC.  i had to copy the BIOS file to the root folder of the USB drive and rename it to “MSI.ROM”.

Without a PC this would normally be impossable but i remembered that i had saved the BIOS working previous update on the flash drive i was using and only needed a way to rename and move the file.  How to do this with no PC?

The flash drive i had both a USB A and USB micro connector and my phone was now USB C. It was a Sandisk 16Gb drive.

How to connect a USB C Slot to the Flash drive. A few months ago i ordfered a Pen mouse from Amazon;

CestMall 2.4GHz USB Wireless Optical Pen Shaped Mouse Adjustable 800/1200/1600 DPI Handwriting Smart Mouse for Laptop Android Tablet PC-Blue

I remember at the time if had some weird adapters for it. I thought to myself i will never need them but i kept the box for some reason and when i opened it to see what adapters were inside it;

When i connected the Flash drive and adapter see below;

Two USB adapters
The handy USB C to USB A adapter that came with the USB Pen.

My phone was able to detect it as a Flash drive and now all i had to move the file to root dir of the flash drive.

Doing the Flashback.

This is where the youtuber Mikes Unboxing Video’s saved the day. He went through the process of how to get the motherboard to “re-flash” or “flashback” to different BIOS version.

After putting the BIOS that was working fine in the root folder of the flash drive and renaming it as per intructions.

  • Power off PC
  • insert flash drive to the correct slot on back of motherboard
  • hold down the bios button near the USB slot until PC comes on
  • once the BIOS light at the back of the motherboard starts flashing wait!

This process was nerve wracking it took 5 agonising mintutes of waiting to see if i would have to my PC back and luckily it came back to life.

Huge thanks to Mikes Unboxing, give him a sub on youtube at;
https://www.youtube.com/@mikesunboxing

 

How to enable Blu-Ray support in VLC media player

Playing Blu-Ray discs in windows 10 is a bit og a pain.  In order to get it to work you have to go through a few hoops with VLC.

https://vlc-bluray.whoknowsmy.name/

Part A: Keys database

Create the folder “C:\ProgramData\aacs\”

Download keys.cfg from the link and place in the folder you created “C:\ProgramData\aacs\”

Note:
finding keysdb.cfg file isnt available at that site for some reason anymore.

Part B: AACS dynamic library

Depending on the version of VLC you have you just need to copy this dll file into the same directory.

VLC 32 bit on Windows: put that file in your VLC directory
VLC 64 bit on Windows: put that file in your VLC directory

HackTheBox: FFUF not showing file sizes in Kali console

Was working my way through the exercises on hackthebox.com and every FFUF scan was saying the file size as 0.

 

 

 

 

 

Turns out it was Bitdefender’ “Online Threat Protection” ->”Network threat protection”.

This blocks the filesize of FFUF results so the will come out as 0 if you are connected using VirtualBox.

 

Windows 10 Wont enter sleep mode with Logitech Extreme 3D Pro Joystick plugged in

 

 

 

 

 

 


Windows 10 Wont enter sleep mode with Logitech Extreme 3D Pro Joystick plugged in.

I ran into this problem a while back as no matter what i did my PC would enter sleep mode.  i tried everything;

  • bios settings
  • windows power saver settings
  • driver updates

Turns out it was due to having the Logitech Extreme 3D Pro Joystick plugged in which i might add is a superb Joystick for Flight Simulator 2020.

Geforce Experience Bug:

Turned out, there is a bug in nVIDIA experience, down in the Windows driver level that would prevent the system from being idle, if you have a joystick plugged in (the article goes a bit deeper into details, it is very interesting if you are a software development related kind of person).

TL:DR , if you have nVIDIA GPU + nVIDIA GeForce Experience installed + have any kind of joystick plugged into the system , Windows won’t be able to sleep/turn screen off automatically until either:

  1. You turn off nVIDIA GeForce Experience in-game overlay.

  2. You unplug ALL joysticks off your system.

PSA: if GeForce Experience is enabled and joysticks are plugged in, Windows can’t automatically turn off screen / go to sleep. This is critical if you are using an OLED screen for your simpit. from flightsim

create your own search engine using searxng and linux

The excellent network chuck on youtube made a video the other day about making your own search engine with searxng so i thought id put the steps involved on doing in locally in Linux.

Update our linux installation

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

install docker;

sudo apt install docker.io

install docker compose tool:

sudo apt install docker-compose

navigate to dir where you want to keep searxng, in this example well put it in “/usr/local/”

cd /usr/local

download searxng;

git clone https://github.com/searxng/searxng-docker.git
cd searxng-docker

create secret key;

sudo sed -i "s|ultrasecretkey|$(openssl rand -hex 32)|g" searxng/settings.yml

start up docker containers

sudo docker-compose up

point your browser to;

localhost:8080

Tweaks and settings;

See here for how to change things;

https://docs.searxng.org/admin/engines/settings.html#use-default-settings


refs;
https://github.com/searxng/searxng-docker

Fix performance problems with Virtualbox and Vmware on Windows 10

If Virtualbox & VmWare is causing massive problems with just getting a Virtual machine running in windows 10 its probably because you have Hyper-V enabled.  I learned the hard way that having Hyper-V enabled and running Virtualbox is a nightmare.  I kept getting the error;

MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC

Disable Hyper-V if its enabled in windows 10 by going to “Turn windows features on or off” and un select “Hyper-V”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Also make sure that its disabled in bcdedit by making sure that you run the command;

bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off

Reboot your System and Virtualbox and Vmware will now work much better.

refs;

The Ultimate Guide to Uninstalling or Disabling Hyper-V in Windows 10

How to remove the Bitdefender context menu from Windows 10

Bitdefender is a great piece of software with a huge range of security features but doesnt give an option to remove the annoying menu option that pops up when you right click on a file., of course there is a way to remove it.

Download a program that makes this easy called “ShellxView” from https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html#DownloadLinks

Load it up and look for an entry called “BdShlExt” (see below) and right click and select disable.