Install Windows 11 without a Microsoft account

 It used to be possible to install Windows 11 without a Microsoft account using the bypassnro command. But in the latest update Microsoft has removed this possibility. 

However it is still possible to install Windows 11 without a Microsoft account and with just a local account. 

When you reach the point, during the installation, where you have to select your country, press [Shift] + [F10] to open the command prompt. 

Here enter the command start ms-cxh:localonly, and create your local account. 

Lost local administrator password

 A customer came to me who had bought a second hand laptop. He only had a user password, but not the local administrator password. 
Without the local administrator password he was not able to install new programs on his laptop.

I tried several ways to retrieve the local administrator password. The common solution is to reinstall Windows, but the customer did not want that. 

Then I read about 'Hiren's BootCD'. When you download it to a bootable USB and start your computer with it, it offers a lot of tools. 

One of them offers the possibility to clear the local administrator password. 

Ventoy

 When I needed to reinstall an operating system to a computer, I used to have one USB stick per operating system. So with a collection of some Windows, Linux and anti-virus related operating systems I used to occupy several USB sticks.

Now I heard about Ventoy. Ventoy offers a tool that allows you to create a bootable USB stick which can host several operating system installation files (ISO's) on one USB stick. 

I now use it, and it works like a charm. The only limit is the amount of space on your USB-stick. 

How to find your Raspberry Pi in your network

Last week - with some struggle - I updated my Raspberry from Buster to Bullseye.

After I succeeded to complete the update, I had to reboot the Raspberry and was unable to reconnect to it with the known IP-address.

The trick I then used was to ping the hostname, only to find out that my Raspberry was using an IP 6 IP-address.

I disabled IP6 by editing the /etc/sysctl.conf file. I added these three lines;

• net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1
• net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6 = 1
• net.ipv6.conf.lo.disable_ipv6 = 1

And reboot.


Then when I wanted to access my Raspberry I still was not able to use the known IP-address. Ping-ing the Raspberry showed that it was using a IP4 address, but not the required static one.
With ifconfig I saw that the network interface was given a new name. In /etc/dhcpcd.conf I entered the same name to the network interface and finaly I got my static IP-address working again.

Unable to upgrade after update to Bullseye

 I updated my Raspberry Pi from Buster to Bullseye. In my previous blog you could read that I had some issues starting Pi-hole ater the update.

I noticed that I also could not upgrade Raspberry OS completely. 

After a lot of Google-ing I found this post what was a working solution for me. LINK