Thursday 6 June 2019

Outlook 2016 with Gmail keep getting prompted for "Sign in with your Google account" IMAP

Outlook 2016 loads up with a Google Gmail or Googlemail account configured and imediately prompts with a Sign in with your Google account prompt. It happens as soon as the Send/Receive runs to download new messages.

You might see error 0x800CCC0E Outlook cannot synchonize subscribed folders.

If you login, it prompts to authorise Microsoft, which you can do. It just doesn't seem to retain that setting and keeps prompting. Everything looks ok and correctly authorised if you look at https://myaccount.google.com/security

The account is an auto setup from the Outlook 2016 email wizard when you Add Account, which configures IMAP with servers imap.gmail.com and outgoing as smtp.gmail.com

In fact the same setup worked perfectly on another computer. Recreating the profile, the account, checking OST, etc would not fix the problem.

In the end, the fix was found to be related to the account having previously been a @googlemail.com account. If you manually change the servers to be:
   *      Incoming server:  imap.googlemail.com
   *      Outgoing server:  smtp.googlemail.com

the problem is fixed and your Gmail in Outlook will work normally.

Tuesday 19 March 2019

Bootrec rebuildbcd or scanos - total identified Windows installations: 0

We've just had a Windows 8.1 Lenovo laptop that stopped booting. It reported attempting Automatic Repair and kept failing and rebooting through the same cycle.

The advanced options after that has failed also gave you you a startup repair option. That wasn't able to fix the fault either.

The usual fix under those circumstances is to go into advanced options, choose command prompt, then load Diskpart. From there you can fix the drive letter order if its got changed, remove unnecesary drive letters. Then fix the boot table using the bootrec command - often a chkdsk followed by deleting/renaming the existing Boot folder, then running bootrec /fixmbr, then bootrec /fixboot, and bootrec /rebuildbcd, will do the job.

The error reported was Total identified Windows Installations: 0

In the end the fix was from the command prompt option, but we had to go into C:\Windows\System32\Config and rename the registry files (Default, Sam, Security, Software, System), eg. default.bak. Then copy the replacement files from the Regback subfolder where there is a recent backup.

The laptop rebooted with no bootrec tweaking needed.


NOTE - Looks like since Windows 10 version 1803, Microsoft are no longer creating a backup in Regback. You can still recover registry files from a Shadow Copy. See this article for details https://theitbros.com/restore-windows-10-registry-from-backup-or-restore-point/

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