Switch Windows 10 from RAID/IDE to AHCI

Systems installed with RAID drivers (among others Intel's RST) can be switched to AHCI without reinstalling Win10.

Run MSCONFIG and enable Safe Boot (minimal).

Reboot into UEFI/BIOS and change to AHCI.

Boot into safe mode, run MSCONFIG again and disable Safe Boot.

Reboot.

Corrupted certificate store in Firefox

Browsers usually demand adding an exeption for self-signed certificates, an update to Firefox recently broke this functionality. The solution is to remove the certificate store which forces FF to regenerate it at launch:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-does-your-connection-is-not-secure-mean#w_corrupted-certificate-store

Cloning Windows among drives

Cloning a Windows install is usually simple but you can also run into trouble (say with dynamic disks of various sizes). The most resiliant method is here on the ArsTechnica forums, but here's a copy-paste:

• Install Windows 7 onto the SSD, don't bother configuring. This sets up the partions and makes it bootable.
• Boot to a Linux rescue CD, and use gparted to resize the source Windows 7 partition to the same size as the SSD partition. (Windows disk management will not do this resize if you need to shrink past the "unmovable" files in the middle of the partition).
• This fails because gparted cannot resize a partition on a dynamic disk, but it does move the "unmovable" files.
• Now boot back into Windows, wait for the checkdisk run, and use Disk Management to shrink the partition.
• Boot back to a linux rescue CD and use DD to clone the source Windows partition over the top of the destination Windows partition on the SSD (make sure the partition sizes match when resizing). e.g. "dd if=/dev/sdb2 of=/dev/sda1 bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror". Don't get them the wrong way around.
• Note that you can use Clonezilla or many other tools (Acronis, AOMEI backupper) instead of DD.
• Boot to a Windows rescue CD (made from the Backup and Restore utility) and use the automated boot-fix step to fix the boot manager.

One thing to note - if a Windows install CD says that "This version of System Recovery Options is not compatible with the version of Windows", when booting up, hit F11, the boot options should specify UEFI boot of the CD (instead of AHCI).

RDP - function request not supported

As of Microsoft's security patch in May 2018, RDP from patched clients to unpatched hosts gives a 'function request not supported' error. In the event that one can't (for some reason) patch the host, one workaround is to change group policy on the local computer:

In gpedit.msc:
Computer configuration -> Administrative Templates -> System -> Credential Delegation -> Encryption Oracle Remediation.

Choose 'Enable' and change protection level to 'Vulnerable' and apply (restart usually not needed).

Another option is this workaround, which I haven't tested:
http://blog.fmsinc.com/remote-desktop-authentication-error-function-requested-is-not-supported-credssp/

Accessing Windows shares

I've come across problems accessing Windows shares, specifically, where \\server\share doesn't work but \\ip\share does. I resolved this through SFC (see previous blog post), but deleting the CSC cache is also often suggested, as per:

https://superuser.com/questions/384981/can-access-windows-share-by-ip-or-fqdn-address-but-not-by-hostname/

Run SFC on external (or other) drive

Useful info on running SFC on an external (or second installed) drive:

https://www.ghacks.net/2017/05/21/run-sfc-scannow-on-external-drives/

sfc /scannow /offwindir=d:\windows /offbootdir=d:\

 

Logs in Linux

Most logs are in /var/log/, including /var/log/apt/history.log (log for apt). Use zless for reading .gz files (zless /var/log/apt/history.1.gz).