Fortunately, it is the system I use the least; even though there were some 200+ GB of work-related files (4.5+ million files), those were mostly copies of files that existed on external media. Still, I noticed that the system was performing a lot slower than usual, which I assume was side effect of the disk problems. I couldn’t complete a Windows system backup onto an external drive — the process would end in failure after about 20 minutes — so I copied the work files onto an external drive. That took over 24 hours to complete, but it did complete.

Since I wouldn’t be able to restore from a Windows system backup, I began to wonder whether I had created the usual new-Windows-system recovery discs two years ago, and if so, if I could find them. Turns out the answer to both questions was ‘yes’. So I unplugged and popped open the system today and was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to pull the old hard drive (750 GB). In doing so, I saw that there were two empty memory slots (out of 4 — with 2 GB SRDRAMs in each of the other two slots). So I drove to Micro Center today — oh, I wish Fry’s would open a store in Colorado — bought a 2 TB hard drive (WD Caviar Green) and two more 2 GB simms. This is great — after recovery, I’ll have twice the RAM and three times the disk storage.

However…when the restore process completed and Windows attempted to reboot, I got an “Install Windows” error box telling me, “Windows could not complete the installation. To install Windows on this computer, restart the installation.”

Sigh.

So I hit Google to look up possible solutions. The first one that seemed potentially applicable was here: it suggested I download a bootable version of MiniTool Partition Wizard, burn it to a CD, partition the hard drive into smaller chunks, and re-do the installation. I did so, but realized in the process that I didn’t know the exact partition size of the main partition of the original hard drive. So I estimated it, created a partition named ‘OS’ of that size, create two other partitions, went through the recovery process again. This time, on rebooting…nothing happened. Nothing booted. The screen stayed blank.

OK, so now I do what I should have done in the first place: I plug the original hard drive back into the tower, boot, and examine the partitions on it. Get the data, then create the same partitions, same sizes, same names, on the new hard drive. Start the recovery process.

That doesn’t work, either.

I use MRW to repair the master boot record, do a surface check, try several different partition configurations, even zero out much of the hard disk. Nope.

I talk with my son Wes, who heads up sys/network admin for a very large, multi-state company. He suggests buying an off-the-shelf, non-upgrade copy of Win7 and installing it. At this point, I’m wondering if it might have been cheaper just to buy a new desktop system, but I order Win7 anyway. It should get here tomorrow. Stay tuned.

UPDATED [3/20/2012]

Well, doing a clean OTS install of Win7 Pro worked. Let this be a warning for those of us who rely upon the ‘recovery disc’ sets that our new desktops and laptops urge us to burn when we first boot up the machine. Not that you shouldn’t do it, but you need to realize that they might not work should you ever have to use them.

Now, on to my next project: rebuilding my Windows Home Server box.

But now a problem has arisen with the Apple TV devices (I own two). Some weeks ago — I’m not sure exactly, since I have been traveling heavily since the start of November — my Apple TV(s) started dropping their wireless connection with my dual-band N router (DLink DIR-825, hardware version B1, firmware 2.06NA). Prior to that time, I could start streaming a playlist from one of our computers that have iTunes libraries, and the music would play for hours. Now it’s hard to get it to play for more than an hour the Apple TV drops, then reestablishes the wireless connection (halting the playlist in the meantime). Sometimes it will happen two or three times in the space of 5 minutes; other times, it will run for a few hours before resetting. But the problem itself and its variability makes the Apple TV fairly useless for streaming audio and video.

I did some of the usual — rebooted the entire wireless network, did a restore on the Apple TV, swapped the two Apple TV devices, made sure both had the latest software updates, and so on. Same problem. Searches on the ‘net showed that people have complained about similar or identical problems going back to 2010, but my problem didn’t start until about 6 weeks ago — my Apple TVs were pretty solid before then.

I ran a test earlier today which strongly suggests that the problem does lie with Apple TV. The living room Apple TV sits side-by-side with that Roku 2 device; both are hooked up to the same TV and are the same distance from the router (which, by the way, is only about 25-30′ away; most of that distance is open air, and there are no walls in-between). As it turns out, both the Apple TV and the Roku 2 support Netflix. So I fired up the Roku and picked a relatively short film to play (Blackadder’s A Christmas Carol). Said film played perfectly all the way through with no pauses, stutters, hiccups, or other issues. I then switched over to the Apple TV, brought up Netflix there, and selected the same film. It played fine for about the first 14 minutes — and then went into a pause mode (rotating circular arrow). Every few minutes, it would come out of that mode, play for another few seconds, then go back into pause mode again. This went on for a good half hour before I finally killed it.

I have yet another test running as I type this: I have both Apple TVs connected to the same router band (the same one the Roku is connected to), streaming audio from the same iTunes library (on this laptop) simultaneously. If one drops the wireless connection and the other doesn’t, then that increases the chances that it is in fact an Apple TV problem. So far, both are running fine (of course).

In the meantime, if others of you have encountered this problem and have known solutions, please let me know.  ..bruce..

Back in July 2010, I bought an Acer Aspire easyStore Home Server running Windows Home Server 2003, primarily two solve two problems: (1) run nightly backups of all my Wintel PCs; (2) provide a common media file repository for myself and my wife (who runs Macs). After a few bumps, it worked just fine and has been working fine since.

Except that a few months ago — which at this point may mean something like this past summer or even late spring, given how time flies — I noticed that I could no longer run the WHS Console app from any of my PCs (all running Win7 Pro). Any attempt to do so resulted in an error box with the message:

This computer cannot connect to your home server. Check your network connection and make sure your home server is powered on. If your home server has recently restarted, try again in a few minutes.

Here’s what’s strange: the server itself still shows up in the Network panel, I can still access all the shares, and I can still log onto the server via the Remote Desktop Connection application (and, by the way, run the Console app there, on the server itself). I can ping the server in a console window via its name and its (fixed) IP address. And the automated backups keep happening (though more on this below).

At roughly the same time — and it may have been exactly the same time — I began to get certificate warnings when I used RDC to log into the server. This is a well-known problem with a kludgy work-around (configure RDC to ignore certificate warnings). That problem appears to be associated with Service Pack 1 of Windows 7, and I suspect the Console problem showed up at the same time as well.

However, to date, I have not found a workaround to the Console problem. What’s more, I’m starting to have backup problems. In particular, one desktop system stopped backing up. In an effort to fix that, I uninstalled the WHS Connector Software and attempted to re-install it. No go — I get this error during installation, after entering the server’s admin password:

This operation cannot be completed at this time.

Please try again later. If the problem persists, please contact Product Support.

This appears to be a well-known, if intermittent, problem, but one for which a variety of suggested-but-not-necessarily-effective solutions have been offered. I started to tackle the problem again this morning, trying some of the solutions, and found some other oddities:

• Even though I can see my server (which we’ll call foo-bar for now) in the Network panel, can access it, can ping it (by name or by IP), and can remotely log into it, I cannot bring it up in a browser, e.g., http://foo-bar or even http://<fixed IP address>. That last one is particularly surprising.
• Yesterday, I brought down and then brought back up my entire home-wide network (modem, router, access point, lots of computers and other network-accessing devices). I noticed that the Acer server box took forever (probably 15+ minutes) to reboot itself and reappear on the network.
• I’ve been getting flaky behavior from WHS itself over the past few months when I remotely log in (which I don’t do that often). For example, when I logged in today, I got three standard Windows “unexpected error – send info to Microsoft?” boxes, all associated with the backup utility.
• I did bring up the Computer Management panel on the server, thinking that the inability to browse to the server may depending on something running here. I did find that IIS Admin Services was not running and would not start, even though its two dependencies (RPC and Security Accounts) were, in fact, running.

I suspect that what I may actually need to do is reinstall WHS 2003, but that means that I will have to (for safety’s sake) back up the (non-automated) shares. Not a bad thing to do anyway, but not how I envisioned spending my Thanksgiving weekend.

What struck me while researching on-line is how many people had posts that said, in effect, “I did this and it fixed everything”, followed by posts saying, “I tried that and it still doesn’t work”. Similarly, not everyone running the same systems gets the same problems. It goes to the heart of the underlying complexity, uncertainty, and — to a certain extent — unknowability of the systems upon which we depend.

That said, I welcome suggestions.   ..bruce..

I poked around on-line a bit, found some other similar complaints, but found no clear solution or even explanation as to what was causing the problem. Since the iPad doesn’t expose its file system, I had no direct way (via Apple software) of examining it. So I went out and bought a 3rd-party application (the regular kind, not an iPad app) named Phone Disk, which — like several other similar apps — allows the iPad to be mounted as if it were an external hard drive. It worked as advertised, and some browsing via the Finder found that the iTunes Music folder held 40 GB of files — which was more or less the sum of the Music, Video, and Other segments as displayed in iTunes. None of the other folders on the iPad could account for that extra 10 GB, so it was pretty clear that the 10 GB of “Other” was hiding amongst the music and video files.

Next step was to unsync all music and video from her iPad. That done, the 9.9 GB of “Other” still showed up in the iTunes display. Checked the iPad directly with Phone Disk and, yes, there were still 10 GB of files in the iTunes/Music folder. I started opening the individual subfolders in Music and found a random assortment of audio and video files: songs, TV shows, movies (including at least one expired rental), even though the iPod and Video apps both claimed there was no music nor video on the iPad at all. There were never more than 3 or 4 files in a given subfolder, and many subfolders had no files as all.

I deleted all these files manually (via Phone Disk/Finder), then re-synced the iPad. Boom! (as Steve would say): that 9.9 GB of “Other” was now a tiny sliver measured in megabytes.

I’m not sure what was causing these file to be left behind, unrecognized by the iPad and Video apps; I did note that a large number (though not all) of the unrecognized files all had the same date (Nov 8, 2010). On the other hand, one of the “left behind” files was dated just this morning (a TV show episode that my wife had downloaded and synced); curiously, in the iTunes library on her MacPro, that TV show episode appeared twice. In any event, it’s clear that there are occasions in which media files are considered by the on-board iPod and Video apps to be wiped from the iPad but nevertheless remain on the iPad file system, taking up space.

Having looked at my wife’s iPad, I synced mine as well, and I see that I have nearly 2 GB of “Other” on mine. I plan to use Phone Disk (I bought a family license) and go through the same examination (and possible cleanup) of my iTunes files on the iPad. I’ll report back if I find anything interesting.  ..bruce..

It didn’t work.The adapter showed up as a network connection, but it was disabled and would not let it self be enabled. I went through some of the usual first steps (uninstall, reboot, re-install), but they didn’t work. I searched the net for newer drivers, and found some — went through the uninstall/reboot/install new drivers cycle. Plugged the USB device it. Same problem. There were comments in some of the on-line forums that this particular adapter didn’t work with Windows 7, so I figured that was likely my problem.

The next day, I stopped by the same store and bought a different USB wireless adapter, this one clearly marketed “Compatible with Windows 7!” Went through the installation cycle, and this one didn’t work either. Looked for newer drivers, found them, downloaded and installed them — still no luck. Used Google to search for similar complaints, and I found them, one of which spoke to my situation. The user had Zone Alarm installed on his system. He said that he had found that he could successfully install the network adapter only if he completely uninstalled Zone Alarm — not just turned it off, but actually uninstalled it — then installed the adapter, then re-installed Zone Alarm. I tried the same thing, and it worked. Of course, as I wrote about two days ago, I then started getting BSODs on my Gateway box, which had never happened before; my eventual solution was to uninstall Zone Alarm and replace it with Microsoft Security Essentials. I frankly wonder in retrospect whether that would have solved my problem with re-installing my Sprint U301 device as well.

I’ve written these last three posts to chronicle these solutions to anyone else who might be having these same problems (and, as I noted two days ago, to apologize to HP and Microsoft for putting the original blame on them for my multitude of BSODs). We’ll now move on to some other topics for a while.  ..bruce..

No problem: I got on the ‘net via the hotel long enough to download the latest and greatest SSV package (version 2.50.0094) from the Sprint support site, installed it, and…could not get my U301 to initialize and connect. The device, when plugged in, appeared to install itself with the requisite drivers, but when I launched SSV to connect to Sprint, SSV would see the device, try to initialize and connect, but never succeed. I did all the usual things (uninstall SSV, uninstall the 301 while deleting the drivers, do a clean reinstall of everything, etc.), but nothing worked.

As it turned out, Sprint had a repair center just four blocks where I was staying. Since I was paying the small monthly fee for equipment protection, I just dropped the U301 off, giving an explanation of my problems. Next day, I get a call: your device works just fine. I swing by the Sprint store, pick up the U301, and later in my hotel room try another clean installation. No luck.

Now, I had purchased the U301 in the spring of 2010, while doing extended work at a customer site back East; it had installed and worked just fine out of the box — same laptop, same OS (less whatever Win7 updates had come out), same system utilities. But I noticed that the SSV software I downloaded was dated 1/13/2011, so it was definitely not the same version I had originally installed.

So, on a hunch, I started searching the ‘net for older versions of the SSV software installation package. I found one: version 2.40xx (vs. 2.50xx on the Sprint site). I removed the 2.50 SSV software and the U301 (with its driver), installed the 2.40 SSV software, and plugged the U301 into my laptop.

Everything installed and ran just fine. It continued to run just fine when the 2.40 software upgraded itself to the 2.50 software.

Now, in light of my simultaneous problems with my Gateway box and the subsequent solution I found, I suspect there might have been another solution. But I’ll talk about that in my next post.  ..bruce..

Second, I have chronicled here my problems with two HP systems — a desktop and a laptop — that I each purchased new, with Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) pre-installed (and in each case upgraded to Win7Pro).  With both systems, I have had chronic problems with blue screens of death (BSODs), particularly when using a wireless connection, though sometimes even when being used with a wired connection. As I wrote last June, what was most telling was my acquisition of a third Win7HP system (also upgraded to Win7Pro 64-bit), a Gateway desktop system. Unlike the two HP systems, where I had lots of BSODs (sometimes a few dozen in a single day), I had never had a BSOD on the Gateway system. The HP BSOD problems would come and go in waves, but they have nevertheless persisted on the two HP systems. I did do a ‘factory restore’ on the laptop at Christmas (as I mentioned I might last June), but that didn’t cure the BSOD problem. As a result, I have been seriously considering buying a new (non-HP) laptop, and ultimately replacing my HP desktop as well. In the meantime, the Gateway kept chugging along flawlessly.

Until a few weeks ago. You see, I took the Gateway system with me out of town on a business trip because I needed to be able to use certain files and applications that were stored on it. The client site didn’t have a wired LAN connection for me, but they did have a wireless access point I could use. So I went out and purchased a wireless USB adapter for the Gateway, got it working after a bit (that’s another story), and then promptly got my first-ever BSOD on the Gateway. And then another. And then another. Like my prior BSODs on the HP systems, I’d get BSODs without even being logged into an account. In the meantime, back at my hotel, I was getting multiple BSODs on my HP laptop whether I was connected wired or wirelessly. I had to switch to my Sprint 3G/4G wireless dongle (yet another story) to avoid those problems.

This forced me to look around a bit more on the net for those with similar problems. I found them: several forums where people described the same symptoms. What was the common theme? Having Zone Alarm Security Suite installed, which I have used for years, and which I had installed on all three machines.

Facepalm.

So I removed Zone Alarm from all three system, replacing it with Microsoft Security Essentials. In the ten (10) days since doing that, I haven’t had a single BSOD on any system, even though I was averaging a bit more than 1 BSOD/day on my laptop alone (47 from January 3rd to February 4th).

I leave you, the reader, to draw your own conclusions.  ..bruce..

Most of the electronics that Dad dealt with were old-school: vacuum tubes, custom circuit boards, large and discrete components, and so on. He said that whenever a piece of electronic equipment started acting up, his first course of action — if a quick inspection didn’t reveal a core problem — was to sharply hit the equipment on the top or side. As he explained it, heat and motion tended to loosen connections; a sharp rap would often re-seat those components.

I thought of that tonight when I got a text message from my wife that our dual-band 802.11n router suddenly stopped recognizing her laptop. When I called her, she said that one band wouldn’t accept the household password while the other band (on entering the password) would hang and eventually time out. After talking with her for a minute (we’re about 1,000 miles apart right now), I told her to go power down the router, wait about 30 seconds, power it back up, wait a minute, and then try again.

It worked.

I find it interesting that even as the physical hardware has become smaller, cheaper, more integrated and more reliable, it is our software — the virtual and digital connections — that tend to “come loose” over time. When a piece of digital equipment starts acting funny, how often is our first act — if a first inspection doesn’t reveal a core problem — simply to reboot or power-cycle the equipment? And how often does that, indeed, end up fixing the problem? And it’s not just with home equipment and home systems; I’ve seen the same approach applied to mis-functioning “high-availability” systems in large corporate environments.

This says something, I think, about the fundamental complexity (usually high) and quality (often lower than it should be) of the software, systems, and protocols on which we depend, both personally and professionally. We adapt as individuals and organizations to these systems, rather than having the systems adapt to us. And we all poke along together.  ..bruce..

As noted below, last fall I bought an HP Pavillion desktop (quad-core 64-bit  processor, 8 GB ram, 1 TB hd) running Windows 7 (Home Premium 64-bit). It’s got an ATI Radeon 4650 with a chunk of dedicated RAM (512 MB, I think) and a 27″ HD display (1920 x 1080). It all worked more or less fine until a few months ago, when I suddenly started getting random Blue Screens of Death (BSODs), usually while playing a game or watching  a video for a while. Note that some of the games involved weren’t terribly graphic intensive (such as Civ4). Likewise, I had it happen while viewing a YouTube video embedded in a blog. Also note that I had no problems with the exact same games and video applications prior to that point.

As mentioned, I thought that the video card or something else might have gone flaky on me. I do have  a 3-year service warranty on the system, but didn’t want to drag my desktop in to where I bought it. I’ve been swamped for the last month, so I’ve largely ignored the problem.

However, it came up today while I was installing software for a new printer. There was an animated disk icon rotating on the screen, and — kablooey! BSOD! This time I went digging on Google, and I wasn’t happy with what I found. Poking around on several different forums, I found folks describing a variety of problems with ATI Radeon video cards and Windows 7 updates, including in Microsoft forums.

In particularly, I found a couple of posts describing pretty much the same situation I face, namely that things worked well for a while, but random BSODs associated with game and other video-related applications started up after a Windows 7 update sometime a few months ago.

Thank you, Microsoft. I was strongly considering converting over to all Apple hardware and software (with XP dual boot), but was seduced both by the low prices of Wintel hardware and the improvements of Windows 7 over Vista. Between this and my earlier problem, I’m starting to regret it.  ..bruce..

I was in the process of copying some files from elsewhere on my internal LAN onto my desktop’s internal drive — I believe I had two sets of copying going on, one from another laptop, another from a network hard drive. I was also downloading a new version of a particular software program that was already installed. The instructions for that program suggested uninstalling the previous version before installing the new one, so I started doing that as well. (Hey — Win7 is supposed to be a multi-tasking OS, right?)

The de-installation threw up an alert box stating that such-and-such a file could not be deleted due to permission issues. I clicked the ‘OK’ button (my only choice) and waited for the de-installation to complete or terminate.  It did neither, but pretty much hung without making any progress on its glowing green progress bar. I finally grew tired of waiting, brought up Task Manager, and killed the de-installation.

At that point, my desktop redrew itself, except that now almost all of the icons were missing. Uh-oh.

I keep most of my work in folders (not shortcuts, actual folders) on my desktop. Likewise, I tend to park files on the desktop until I decide where to to file them. l I immediately looked at the contents of “C:\Users\<username>\Desktop” and saw that it was empty. Completely empty.

I used a couple of different file recovery packages in an attempt to recover what had vanished. No luck. They found no deleted folders or files within the Desktop folder, and my efforts at doing more extensive scans ran for a few days straight — while still being less than 50% done — before I gave up. (Since getting the desktop, I had used it to collect vast file sets, move them onto external hard drives, then delete those sets. There were likely at least a few million deleted files with traces all over the 1 TB hard drive.)

Before you wag your fingers at me, I did have an external 1.5 TB hard drive to which I was running weekly backups. However, I had just a week or so before the glitch (and a few days after the last backup) moved my desktop system from the main floor to my office downstairs and had not re-attached that external hard drive. This means, of course, that I was able to recover the deleted folders, but the versions were about 10 days old. I didn’t lose a lot, but then, I’m not entirely sure what all I did lose.

Yesterday, I discovered that the same glitch had apparently emptied out the  “MyMusic” folder, wiping out my iTunes library. I restored much of that from my laptop (which had an older version of my iTunes library), but lost everything that I had purchased from the iTunes store and downloaded onto my desktop system.

I’m still not sure what happened. I did a fair amount of searching on the web for similar problems and found that other people had had the same thing happen to them. One posting suggested that my user profile may have been corrupted, but my efforts to fix things that way didn’t help.

I bought a second external hard drive for backups and plan to run them more frequently. I also rearranged things so that I no longer have actual folders within Desktop but only shortcuts to folders elsewhere.

Just a word to the wise.  ..bruce..