Fixing the Nexus 5 update error

My old Nexus 5 is with my father now. I did a factory reset before I passed it to him. After a few days, the phone received a security update, but when we tried to install it, it would fail mid way with an error screen as shown above. To exit the error screen, we had to press and hold the power button and the volume down button; then it would reboot the phone and everything would be back to normal. However, after a while, it would show that an update is available (it is the same one that failed), but it would result in the same thing. We tried several times with no success. The phone only had about half a dozen apps installed other than the stock apps, so it must have been a real mess up.

Next thing to do was to do a factory reset. It also did not fix the problem.

Then we decided to completely erase and manually install the latest official firmware for the phone. I had not done this in a while, so I had to look for a tutorial. Last time I followed this YouTube video but it was telling me to download Android Studio to get the ADB Bundle. Then I found this written guide, which suggested an alternative way to get the ADB bundle installed.

And it was a success. By that I mean that we are not getting that error anymore. But we have to give it a couple of months to see if it really got fixed, because since the phone is already running the latest build for the Nexus 5, there would not be any new updates for a while.

Installing Jekyll on OSX

I wanted to play with Jekyll after watching this video. You would usually install it using the terminal using the following command:

$ sudo gem install jekyll

But unfortunately, it failed for me with an error saying:

ERROR: Error installing jekyll:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

It appears the make command is not found on the system. you need to install OSX command line tools.

I'm sure you can download them from Apple somehow (some people say you need to install XCode and then install the Command Line tools from it) but what I found the easiest way to get it into my installation was by installing Homebrew (it's a package manager like apt-get on Unix) using this command:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Then it would run the Homebrew installer but after a few seconds it would pause it and ask you if you want to install the Command Line tools in a separate dialog. You tell it to do that (that's the whole point it all this) and it will take a moment to finish install the tools (1 minute to download, 1-2 minutes to install). After that's done, you press Enter in the Terminal window to resume the installation of Homebrew (sadly I couldn't capture a screenshot to show you, but it's straight forward, so don't be scared) and it will finish after a few seconds.

Now if you run our first command (yes, that one you use to install Jekyll in the first place), it will go through. Now you can play with Jekyll; yay!

My Nexus 5 couldn't connect calls with my wife's Nexus 5

All this started couple of days ago. Calls from my Nexus 5 could not be connected with my wife’s phone. It always showed as ”Line Busy”. However calls from her phone could be received from mine without any problem. Weirdly, her phone could receive calls from others (also from Skype and Viber) and I could call others as well. The only combination that was failing was I calling my wife.

It was as if she had blocked me. Well,  she hadn't - at least not intentionally. But I cannot trust the kid. There is always something missing from the home screen after he gets his hands on a phone. I try my best to keep him away from my phone.

I couldn't find caller blocking functionality in Android. I was in the assumption that my phone was the culprit since from the point of view of my wife's Nexus 5, it was working perfectly as it should. I reluctantly factory reset my phone. This was the first time I had done it so even if it didn't fix the problem, I thought it would at least be educational.

I wasn't really educational. It didn't need my intervention until the initial setup screen showed up. From there onwards, it was identical to a manual OS upgrade which I'm not quite familiar with after performing it few times. And more important, it did NOT fix the original problem. I still couldn't connect with my wife's phone. I had to waste like 1 hour setting up the phone like was before. I wish it was possible to backup and selectively restore the individual app settings as well.

Go the "A disk read error occurred" error at Windows startup!!!

As usual, I turned on my PC today when I woke up. Went to the kitchen and came back to the PC to find out that the PC hasn't booted into Windows yet. In fact, it was halted at the boot loader saying that it cannot find the boot loader.

I hit the reset button but there was no change. So I went into the BIOS and checked what's up with the boot drives. For some reason, the boot drive was changed to my Toshiba data drive from my usual Samsung SSD drive. I set it back to my SSD and the I got the following screen.

I panicked. This SSD is a new drive and it only has TLC flash. This is the first of its kind so naturally there should be unforeseen issues. I thought this was one of it. The mind runs too fast. I was already thinking about how I'm gonna RMA the drive and how I'm gonna use the PC without the SSD. I thought I would have o install Windows onto the data drive and etc. etc. Then I snapped out of that thought and came back to the real world.

I don't have to think about RMAing anything just yet. There are so many things that I can do before getting there. First I checked if there was a loose connection between the SSD and the motherboard. Didn't appear to be so, but I unplugged and replugged the cable. That allowed me to load the Windows boot screen but even after a minute, Widows didn't fully boot into the desktop. I knew something was up. It should have booted within 10 seconds. I was still scared.

I had a spare SATA cable lying around. So I replaced the old one with this one and guess what happened? Everything was back to normal. Phew! Why do all these cables go kaput?

Note: 

Because of the problems with the SATA cable, the SSD had not been detected the first time thus BIOS had automatically changed the default boot drive from the SSD to the next drive in the order of the SATA port.

Intel® Rapid Storage Technology is trying to connect to the service

If you have installed Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers in Windows 8 (doesn’t have to be RTM I suppose) or any other Windows version and you are getting the following error message when you try to launch the RST control panel, you have come to the right place. Because there is a FIX.

Intel Rapid Storage Technology is trying to connect to the service.

You get this error message because the Intel RST DM Service wasn’t created when you installed the driver. You have to register the service and start it before you can launch the control panel. Apparently the current drivers are not completely compatible with Windows 8.

Edit: Intel have come up with a new driver (version 11.6.0.1030) which is compatible with Windows 8. You can grab it from here. You don’t have to go through the following fix. Thanks Rich.

Here’s how you add the service to the services list.

First launch command prompt as Admin and change current directory to “C:\Program Files (x86)\Intel\Intel(R) Rapid Storage Technology”.