Hard drive reliability

The problem with modern day reliability tests of hard drives is that it is difficult to test how time affects drives.  Running a drive for five years is not the same as reading and writing terabytes of data to a drive for a month.  Voltage spikes on booting up a computer and vibrations from removing a drive from a case can't be mimicked in a lab.

Brand reputation doesn't mean a whole lot either.  No brand that I've owned has been immune to the click of death or the high pitched wheeze that accompanies a dying or dead drive.

I've gone through lots of hard drives in my time.  Thankfully, most have died after being decommissioned, or I was able to recover the data from them before putting them out to pasture.  As a service to someone out there (and for my own record), here are the hard drives that have died on me.

Western Digital 2.1 gb.  This is the first ever drive that died on me.  The motor spinning it just got weak, and I'd have to give it a quick twirl in my wrist to get it in motion.  Once in motion, it was fine for a short while.  Eventually, I got write errors, so I put this drive out to pasture.  I was glad for the excuse--it was by far the loudest drive I've ever owned.

Samsung 20g (SV2002H).  I've always liked Samsung as the maker of the quietest drives.  Unfortunately, they do have a reputation as unreliable drives.  I'm 1 for 2 as far as reliability is concerned for this brand.

IBM Deskstar (IC35L040AVER07).  I chose this one mainly for the performance reports from some online source.  They were commonly referred to in the hardware community as Deathstars.  This is the only IBM drive I've ever owned.

Western Digital (WD1200).  I didn't buy this drive; it was part of a RAID config when it failed, so no big loss.

Quite a few Maxtor drives have passed through my possession, but surprisingly none have died.

The moral of the story is that all drives will die.  Even you fans of Solid State Drive might one day be disappointed that your drive is dying (though I'd expect them to be more reliable).  Run a back up system.  For a while, I was running a file mirroring software over network shares, but that required me to be diligent about running it.  Currently, I use a software package that backs up the folders on your computer to another computer on the network, which takes care of the two most likely reasons to need a backup - drive failure, and theft.

Switching inputs on HDTV to PC not picking up signal

I'm now using my Optiplex 620 as my media PC rather than D's PC for a few reasons:
- it doesn't supply any USB power when turned off, so our USB printer (Epson Stylus 520) goes nuts for about 30 seconds with a cleaning cycle when the PC is shut down
- The Windows install that I thought was fixed was still really wonky after that repair I talked about in the prior post: the NetGear drivers would crash every once in a while, a particular Windows Update simply wouldn't work, and I fudged up some of the NTFS permissions on some key folders preventing the Windows Firewall Service from starting up correctly

Because of this, the Optiplex is now on our LCD TV (Samsung).  I soon realized that there was a problem of sorts.  When I switched inputs to the TV from the PC HDMI to anything else and back, the signal would not return to the TV.  I had to unplug the cable, and replug.  I figured it might be a driver problem, so I switched from Dell's driver to ATI's driver for the video card, a Radeon X600.  No cigar.

Then I started reading about similar stories for which the out-of-reach fix would be a mythical ATI Catalyst driver that would solve the problems.

The source of the problem is that some video cards (or their drivers) will stop sending a signal when the output is lost connection (in the case of the LCD TV, that happens when you switch modes and it is no longer "listening" on the HDMI PC connection).  When you switch back to that mode, the TV starts listening, but the video card does not resume sending the signal.  When you unplug and plug the cable, a HDMI handshaking happens communicating the output parameters, fixing the problem

Unplugging the cable is not a viable permanent solution.

I eventually found this tool, which effectively resets the display to force a handshake:
http://thydzik.com/hdmion-a-solution-to-loss-of-dvi-video-epid-signal-on-hd-tvs/

I assigned it to a hotkey on my keyboard, so I can now manually reset the display.  Not quite as good as automatically, but until I upgrade my TVPC to Win7, this will have to do.

Able to browse to shares, unable to enumerate them

I've struggled with this problem on one of my WINXP Home boxes for years, and have simply resigned myself to jumping directly to the \\machinename\share rather than being able to conveniently browsing it from \\machinename.  Finally, tonight, I figured it out (with the help of http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/workgroup-issue-can-see-shares-but-can-t-browse-computer-t1902202.html):


start | Run | type 'Regedit' in the box.

On the left hand pane, navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\LSA\

In the LSA folder, look in the right-hand pane.
look for the value 'RestrictAnonymous'.

It needs to be zero.
If it is not, double-click it and set it to zero.

( The value of RestrictAnonymousSam can be left at 1. )

Close regedit, and re-boot the server machine.

Migration of XP in IDE drive to SATA in a Dell Optiplex

Moving one XP installation to another drive typically will take several days.  Basically, it is

1. prepping your old drive
2. imaging your old drive to the other drive
3. booting up the other drive
4. fixing all the problems that come up.

With that in mind, I still thought it would be better to migrate my wife's WinXP home installation to the Optiplex than installing Windows from scratch (which, if I did, would be with Win7) which would require me to source the various software packages that she uses.

This took about 3 days, but it's finally (mostly) working.  Here it is in detail.  Read through it before following the steps, as not all steps are necessary, or you may be able to adjust the steps more efficiently.

1. Backup your essential info on your IDE drive with your old pc
2. Download the optiplex network, chipset and display drivers and save it - this will save you time later when you need these drivers but have no network connection with which to get them
3. Prior to the last time you shut down the source install of Windows, go into the Device Manager and remove the IDE controller.  This step was required for switching to a different IDE controller (or else your machine wouldn't be able to boot past the low-res Windows logo), but I'm not sure if this is necessary anymore since we're moving to SATA.  It doesn't hurt though, since Windows will auto-install the controller on bootup.
4. Create a UBCD4WIN bootable CD
5. Move your IDE drive into the Optiplex (which already has a SATA drive)
6. Ensure that your IDE drive is accessible by pressing F2 at bootup to enter the BIOS setup and making sure the PATA connections are set to ON.  Also make sure you can boot to the CD while you're here.
7. After booting up UBCD4WIN, use a tool to create partitions that will at least hold the data of your old drive.  I just used the Disk Management tool that comes with Windows (r-click on Windows Explorer and choose Manage).
8. Run DriveBackupXML to copy your IDE partitions to the SATA partitions.  In my case, my IDE drive was drive 0, and SATA was drive 1, but DriveBackupXML will at least show drive labels to help you confirm this.
9. Go back into the Disk Management Tool of step 6 to set the main partition as Active.
10. Shut down your computer, and disconnect your IDE drive.
11. Boot up, making sure that your are booting up to your SATA drive and not your cdrom drive (in case your UBCD4WIN is still in the drive)
12. See how far Windows gets in its bootup. (once Windows can boot up, you can put your old IDE drive back into your old machine, in case you still need it to access the internet and look up problems)
13. If you are able to see the mouse cursor, then you know that the drive is accessible through Windows.  If not, boot back into UBCD4WIN and run FIX_HDC.  Then try booting back into Windows.
14. In my case, it seemed everything was working except for mouse and keyboard.  Normally, those would autodetect properly.  However, the network drivers weren't installed for the onboard ethernet, and its Yes/No dialog  prevented any further drivers from being installed. There is no way to install drivers from within a UBCD4WIN environment, nor is there a way to do it from the Recovery Console. My only recourse was to do a repair, also known as an in-place upgrade: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978788 . Note that you'll need your original XP install CD to do this.  I had made an XP SP3 slipstreamed CD a few yrs back, so this did the trick...sorta.
15. While I was now able to use the mouse and keyboard, there were a few new problems:
1. the Network Connections showing up no connections despite the network adapter drivers having been installed correctly (as reported in Device Manager).  I followed all the steps here, to no avail: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/825826
2. The second issue was that ATI Control Centre (which I no longer needed in the optiplex) which ran on startup was complaining that it didn't have security settings to change anything. "You Do Not Have Permission to Change The Catalyst Control Centre Settings"
3. The third issue was that running any sort of installer (such as the drivers) would display an error that Windows Installer wasn't working.
16. My SP3 slipstream cd has always given me some amount of trouble, so I thought I'd try my RTM copy of WinXP for the repair.  After repairing for an hour, the results were even worse, as upon bootup, the mouse cursor would appear momentarily, a messagebox would appear for a brief instant, then the machine would immediately reboot.  After trying this several times, I finally got a glimpse of the error - something about the virtual memory.  Having never seen that before, and also not too excited to debug a problem for which there isn't a clear error message, I returned back to the SP3 slipstream repair.
17. I tried addressing each problem in #15 individually, but no solution seemed to work.  Eventually, I took a look in the event viewer and looked up an error message, which pointed me to this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909444 and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/916254. Bingo!  A single problem which describes all the symptoms I was seeing.  To change security permissions on XP home folders, you need to boot into Safe Mode, then turn off Simple File Sharing.  I didn't end up acting on the second KB article, but include it for reference.
18. I rebooted into normal mode, and finally, all of those symptoms disappeared, revealing new problems.  Since the repair moved my IE back about 8 years to IE6, a lot of dependent services were failing.  I downloaded and installed IE8.
19. My wireless network adapter would occasionally crash.  I figured that my base install sans Windows Updates has a little to do with that.  I proceeded to run a Windows Update. However, IE would enter its "not responding" state as soon as I tried to download the ActiveX control.  I booted up into Safe Mode, and tried again.  This time, the ActiveX control installed, but Windows Update then gave me the 8007043C error, indicating that Windows Update can't run in Safe Mode.  I booted back into normal mode, and Windows Update then worked.
20. Windows Update will barf when it tries to install IE8 again, causing all subsequent steps to fail. You'll need to choose Advanced and unselect the IE8 install to get the rest of the updates installed.  Later on, you'll be able to tell Windows Update to ignore the IE8 install.

64-bit conversion...nearly perfect

Being a late-adopter generally means things work, or that someone has figured it out already.  I picked the right week to try getting my Sony Net MD running with a Win 7 64-bit box.  Sony discontinued their software for this 2 years ago, and the latest version will not work.  Until last week, nobody has gotten it working, and I suppose lack of demand for this 10 yr old technology didn't help.

Link for the google crawler to bump the thread:
http://forums.sonyinsider.com/index.php?/topic/26009-netmd-for-windows-7-64bit/

Computer Viruses

My main motivation for starting this blog was because I was exceptionally annoyed at a virus that had infiltrated my machine.  I've never spent this much time in trying to fix a single problem--more than 15 hours of my time...and my computer's been on for about two weeks straight running virus scans.  I can only imagine what kind of bill you'd get from Geek Squad for this kind of service.

I've never succumbed to a virus so badly that there was data loss...but this time it came close.

Symantec anitivirus...its the only antivirus protection I have on my home PC. About half the time, I have it turned off as it really thrashes the hard drive.

I use Outlook to aggregate my mail. I love not having to log in to three different websites to see my new messages.

I hate how Outlook automatically runs scripts within email. Especially now that it's helpfully deployed a few different trojans on my machine. It started with popup windows appearing all over the place a week ago.

SuperAntiSpyware nor MalwareBytes were able to detect anything wrong.  And I didn't want to bother the good folks who inspect HiJackThis logs.

Enter UBCD4Win. I've used this several times over the last few years to get me out of windows-cannot-boot jams. And now, I use it to boot into a clean environment, start up MalwareBytes Anti-Malware, update the definitions, and scan the drive.  It fixes a few things, but upon booting back up, Windows is still atrociously slow.

Back into UBCD4Win...now, I use a McAfee cleaner (Stinger?) which finds a few viruses, and removes them.

Back to Windows, which boots, shows the "Loading user profile" momentarily, before showing the "saving user profile" message (essentially a login and logout).  Uh-oh, looks like the overzealous virus cleaner wiped out a few files (or didn't fix the registry redirects put in place by the virus)

Thought I'd try the in-place upgrade of Windows XP with a WinXPSP3 CD I made using nLite a few years back.  The CD didn't give me an option to repair, so it started installing instead.  Scared that it had actually reformatted the drive without me knowing (the default nLite settings will do this), I cancelled out. Fortunately, it only created a new Windows.0 directory instead of reformatting. Phew.

Back to UBCD4Win, so that I can use a web browser to find out this log in/log out behaviour is because of an invalid entry in the registry for winlogon.exe .  Not being able to find the registry editor in UBCD4Win, I took a chance that wininit.exe was not working, and copied it from D's XP Home installation.

Yay, now I can log in.  However, most of my apps would crash, including IE6 (on startup), Chrome (after a few minutes), and Firefox (which seemed to be hijacked still, based on the google search results redirections). The system is basically at a SP3 level, so I'm missing quite a few critical security updates, and also experience told me that running all the updates usually fixed up some key system files in the process and got the apps to work again.  Not wanting to get hit with another virus, my first priority was to get Windows Updates to pull in all updates.  However, IE6 would crash upon starting (and hence Windows Update disabled).  Alternative browsers weren't an option either as Windows Updates won't work with them.  I downloaded IE8. Incidentally, that step also fixed the problem where Services.msc wouldn't show anything in the Extended tab.

Windows update still not working, due to a more common issue with BITS not started, but going to the Dependencies tab yielded "Interface: class not registered" error.

Initial google searches directed me towards the little-known "sfc /runnow" command, which attempts to restore ones files back to their original condition. Problem was that it asked me for the WinXP CD, and it would neither accept the original CD nor the nLite SP3 CD.  A more manual approach was needed.

Later on, I found this was the answer:

rundll32 wbemupgd, UpgradeRepository
as described here:
http://windowsxp.mvps.org/repairwmi.htm

BITS still wouldn't start due to error 0x80070BC2.  I needed to re-register a few files:

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=87323

http://www.updatexp.com/0x8007043b.html

http://www.windowsbbs.com/windows-xp/print-34624-xp-wont-update-0x8007043b.html

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/910337

That enabled BITS to start.

but when starting Automatic UPdates Service, got this:

---------------------------

Services

---------------------------

Could not start the Automatic Updates service on Local Computer.

Error 1083: The executable program that this service is configured to run in does not implement the service.

I reregistered some more files, and was finally able to get all the Windows Updates to run, and got the computer running smoothly for the first time in a week.

Still suspicious that there was a virus somewhere (Google results were still redirecting), I did a complete scan with Symantec Antivirus, which picked up a few.  I also ran Windows Onecare Safety Scanner, which I've good experience with in cleaning out stuff Symantec couldn't find.  While the quick-scan was clean, the complete scan would show 6 items found. Unfortunately, the complete scan would never finish, and I'd never be able to clean out those files--it would loop inside the c:\windows\installer for nearly a day (before I cancelled the scan).

I updated MalwareBytes and SuperAntiSpyware once again, and ran a quickscan on each.  MalwareBytes picked up the virus, while SuperAntiSpyware missed it.  After deleting the virus, and rebooting, I did one final scan (just yesterday) and can now confidently say (after about 2 weeks of dealing with this) that I'm finally clean.  There are still a few lingering issues on the system, most likely to do with certain DLLs needing to be reregistered, but for the most part, the system is back to normal.

Acceptable camera quality...for the masses

HTC Cameraphone (default settings) (handheld) vs high-end Panasonic Lumix point & shoot (sunset mode) (handheld, with image stabilization) vs Canon dslr (+1 on saturation) (on tripod).