Windows users know chkdsk, linux users know fsck… users of each MIGHT have heard of SMART. These are different ways of TESTING hard drives. Well, there’s also a utility called TestDisk that looks promising for recovering data… Here’s the clip from their site. “free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.” It runs under a variety of OS’s and recognizes several different disk formats.

I’ve had a fun time this week dealing with a STRANGE Vista problem on an HP computer (I doubt it’s HP specific, but don’t know for certain.) The error goes like this… “A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.” “CLFS.sys” “Page_Fault_in_nonpaged_area” “If this is the first time you’ve seen this stop error screen….” And the stop error code looks like this “stop 0×00000050″ The real problem is everything tried leads to the same place.

The last thing the owner described happening was a storm that knocked out the internet connection (but not power) and in attempting to regain the internet connection they rebooted and were welcomed with this blue screen on reboot. (Just after the copyright Microsoft screen with the green scrolling animation.) Startup Repair didn’t solve the problem, starting in the various safe mode options led to the same error. I verified there were NO other hard drives attached to the system and at times pulled all peripherals (including the keyboard and mouse.) Most boot attempts were made with ethernet cable/ps2 mouse/ps2 keyboard/vga monitor/1/8″ speaker, but some boots were attempted with ethernet/mouse/keyboard disconnected which made no difference.

So after a while of trying various attempts to boot or repair or reload the last known good configuration I booted up an XP based livecd and copied the data to a USB key and prepared for the system restore. Well, bios came up pressed f11 to launch the system restore and…. SAME $$!$!$! error. “It’s worse”… call HP (1 month old system…) Somewhere along the line here I pulled one of the two memory sticks and tested with each, no difference. HP basically sold us a recovery cd (thanks HP.)

Well, the recovery cd arrived and !surprise! it booted to the same bluescreen – hello HP again… (I heard an AWFUL lot of “hmm”’s on the other end as I explained the case history and he read the previous notes. It looked as though we were heading for a bench repair on the machine, but he had a suggestion that seemed a little far out… one person complaining of this problem online had it suggested to them that they might have a virus… “well if it’s a virus, then removing the hard drive ought to allow the recovery cd to at least boot (unless it’s a REALLY clever virus)..” Ok – So I pulled the drive and low and behold the recovery cd booted…

New drive arrived and today the recovery cd installed everything to the new drive in ~2 hours.

All in all this was VERY odd… the drive passed ALL S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics that were run on it, it’s filesystem apparently was in good enough shape for a winxp boot cd to be able to browse and copy files from it. But something must have gone sideways that Vista didn’t like.

CLFS is related to Common Logging…

System specs:

HP Pavilion a6000n PC

AMD 64×2 dual core 4200+
1GB memory
250GB Sata drive
multi dvd burner

I’d love to know what had gone sideways and if there had been ANY way to recover (outside of WIPING the disc).

I like the PDF file format for so many reasons – free writer under linux is one of them, usually it’s just configured out of the box – openoffice does a nice export to PDF too. Of course, PDF is accessible on all platforms with free viewers…. there are some pdf writers for windows that are free, among them…. PDF Creator and cutepdf also distributes a free pdf writer. Printing to the virtual pdf printer makes archiving web pages fairly easily done as well.

For years I’ve been using smartmontools on my linux-based machines. What I’ve absolutely LOVED about it is the advance notice I’ve had of hard drive failures. Two consecutive Decembers I received an email from my server claiming that a drive was dying and had time to replace them rescuing the data. (Although the first one was falling to pieces as I copied.) If I had not know until I NOTICED a problem I would have likely lost a good amount of data and had a long rebuild process from various backups.

One of my LONG standing frustrations with Windows is the lack of useful command line tools (including the ability to email from the command interface which, to me, is CRUCIAL when scripting.) But on studying the smartmontools documentation I found reference to blat blat is a simple command line emailer for windows. You install it to the path (Windows\system32 is a good choice), then from the cli can install it to use a default mail server and sending address and then you’re in business. All that’s needed then for your windows boxes to email smartmontools distress calls is to edit the smartd configuration file to do routine tests, add the -m option and address to mail to (you can also have a message box popup too).. Then install and start the smartd service and you’ll hopefully have a bit earlier warning on those hard drive failures.

Sometimes drives fail quickly, but if you can have a 12 hour heads up that might be the difference between a quick and easy drive cloning and a long and tedious rebuild.

You had to know it would be a matter of time. Not long after I wrote about the limitations of Vista’s upgrade version I found this. First let me reset. Previous versions of Windows upgrade versions would allow you to do a “clean” install (format the drive) if you had the previous versions install media at hand. The install would stop to validate the install media and you could proceed. Very handy if recovering from a full hard drive failure, virus infestation, etc. Well the word was, Vista upgrade requires the previous OS version that you upgrade from to be installed on the Hard drive. This makes the rebuild process from such failures sound VERY nasty and tedious (read: just go buy a new pc…) However….

There is a workaround for the vista upgrade process. It doesn’t sound pretty though. Essentially what is involved is the following…

Boot from the upgrade DVD and start the setup program.
When prompted for your product key DON’T enter it and just click next – this installs the 30 day trial version.
When prompted select the version of vista you’ve purchased and next. (I guess you choose between home basic/home deluxe/business/ultimate).
Once setup completes and you are at the desktop start the installer from WITHIN vista.
Type in your product key when prompted
You’ll be asked to choose between upgrade and custom installs – choose custom for a clean install. (Time for the SECOND installation routine…)
Now you should be able to activate vista normally and even delete the windows.old directory that had the 1st vista install.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this “breaks” when the first service release of Vista install discs come out, but it may not….

Microsoft Vista is now out, the next version of Windows, successor to XP. While Windows XP will continue to receive updates into 2014 there are many that might be eager to upgrade and move to the latest greatest. (Note to those: Service Pack one may be en route THIS calendar year, so unless you like to bleed on the edge…. you MIGHT hold off until that’s out.) But those that do look at getting Vista are met with a dizzying array of choices.

First there is Windows Vista Starter edition which is not expected to be available in the US or other “high income” countries. This is targetted as a cheap and lean version of Windows for developing markets (intended to compete with pirated Windows and Linux installs.) If you’re in the US/Canada/European Union/New Zealand/Australia just go ahead and forget this one exists….. as it’s not expected to be sold in these areas.

Windows Vista Home Basic
This is the cheaper of the available versions with the OEM version for 64-bit system builders….
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic 64-bit for System Builders [DVD] running around $109.99

There is the upgrade version for end users though Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic UPGRADE [DVD]

The upgrade runs around $99.95. Of course, there is the full version as well….

Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic FULL VERSION [DVD]

Which runs around $199.95 (with the spanish version running an extra $30….) Windows Vista Home Basic SPANISH FULL VERSION [DVD]

So, what’s in the home basic edition (or more importantly what’s not…)

For starters, there is no media center functionality. Will you be able to play music and videos – really, yes, some features should be workable with Media Player, but you won’t have the full screen menu media center mode suitable for remote control style/appliance use. There is no scheduled backup included in this version, but windows defender and firewall are included as is the web browser. There is no drive encryption, no bundled software to make dvds (although third party software should be available for that.) No high definition support in windows movie maker, limits in networking functionality (no domain support, no remote desktop.) No aero desktop eyecandy bundled in home basic, no tablet pc support and no “Windows meeting space” which is a tool for collaborating on documents. So… this is pretty much analagous to XP Home in many ways, extra features that aren’t included may be available through third party software if you’re interested (although the domain support wouldn’t be.)

If you want to move up to Home Premium, you get all the features of Home Basic, plus the Aero desktop, table pc support, bundled dvd creation software, windows meeting space, high definition support in windows movie maker, windows media center addons, scheduled backups and extra game packs.

Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium UPGRADE [DVD] The Home Premium upgrade edition will run in the neighborhood of $159.95….

Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium FULL VERSION [DVD] the full version of home premium runs around $239.95. With the spanish version….
Windows Vista Home Premium SPANISH FULL VERSION [DVD] running $269.95

Windows Vista Business is the next version under the microscope. This version doesn’t have any of the media center “stuff” as the last version, nor does it have high definition video creation/dvd creation support (or the added game pack). It DOES add, full system backup capability (the scheduled backup of the other versions only supported data backups, this supports complete system backups.) They also add more network support in the realm of remote desktop and domain support.

Microsoft Windows Vista Business UPGRADE [DVD], this upgrade version of Vista will run around $199.95, while the full install…..

Microsoft Windows Vista Business FULL VERSION [DVD] … is in the ballpark of $299.95

There is also Windows Vista Ultimate for those wanting the domain/full backup capabilities of Vista Business plus the Media Center and DvD/high definition capabilities of Home Premium.

Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate UPGRADE [DVD] This upgrade version is $259.95.

Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate FULL VERSION [DVD] The full version runs $399.95.

All of the prices above mentioned have been full retail unless otherwise noted as OEM or system builder prices.

This page could be a good reference from Microsoft on the different versions of Vista. I should note that there is also an Enterprise version of Vista that adds hardware encryption, software assurance features and services for Unix support as well as multilanguage support and “It also provides the right to run four virtual operating system sessions, which enables you to run a legacy application in a virtual environment on top of Windows Vista Enterprise.”

One other consideration to keep in mind is the hardware requirement of Vista. If you’re buying Vista preinstalled this shouldn’t be an issue, but it’s worth thinking about (usually systems get undersold on the installed memory… i.e. install the bare minimum). Here are the requirements for Home Basic….
*

1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
*

512 MB of system memory
*

20 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space
*

Support for DirectX 9 graphics and 32 MB of graphics memory
*

DVD-ROM drive
*

Audio Output
*

Internet access (fees may apply),

Other versions double the memory requirement to 1GB and the hard drive space to 40GB as well as upping the video requirements a bit….
*

WDDM Driver
*

128 MB of graphics memory (minimum)
*

Pixel Shader 2.0 in hardware
*

32 bits per pixel

There is an upgrade advisor available here, but I would seriously suggest that if you’ve read through the specs and your system JUST meets the minimum that you seriously consider upgrading to exceed the minimum requirements before upgrading.

What’s the old saying… “jumping required, parachute recommended…” Usually the requirements are pretty close to the bare minimum that the system will run with. In other words your experience with the OS will be severely limited if you are stuck with the BARE MINIMUM.

After looking at all of these (expensive) options for upgrading windows…. I’m reminded of a post I saw recently about ubuntu vista… it seems that someones father asked him to get and install vista when it came out. The young man in question was a linux user and instead installed the latest version of Ubuntu on his fathers machine. The man has raved to his son at how great Bill Gates is that this is so much better than what Steve Jobs has put out with the Mac… he says he’ll probably let the prank go a bit longer before giving his dad the money back….

Depending on your usage it’s worth considering alternatives. I have a few ubuntu installs in service right now (Dapper) I haven’t tried Edgy yet (outside of a virtual machine), but I must say I’ve been really impressed with the polish that Ubuntu shows. If it were not for free software I would NOT be able to do the kind of work that I do. I have… 5 computers, one came with Windows ME, I have bought 2 XP licenses for use (in virutal machines) if open source linux were not available for me, I would have probably another $2000 in cost (likely more counting hardware upgrades.) As I also keep several test systems and virtual machines. (If I recall correctly the Server version of Windows is required to host VMs on a network without running into some of XP Pro’s network number of client throttling issues….

I want to make a note of this here… Microsoft has announced that XP Home and Media center editions will get extended support on par with that of XP Pro. Essentially this means security updates for these versions of the OS should be available until 2014. Previously support for XP Home was to have ended as soon as December 2006, but was then extended modestly until after the release of Vista. The “Home” oriented products weren’t given the same length of support as the “Professional” or Business class products at that time. This announcement puts the two versions of XP on par with Pro.

Haven’t had the chance to try this one firsthand yet, although I’ve been watching for this. You may be familiar with ies4linux which is a script that uses wine to download/install multiple versions of Internet Explorer on a linux install. (But why oh why would you do this?) For many that do web design it’s a tremendously good idea to test what a website looks like in multiple browsers because they all have their own unique …. quirks. Of course, there are other reasons…. sites that refuse to work with anything but IE. (Blue Cross/Blue Shield for instance has some web apps that will not work with anything else.)

Well… now Internet Explorer 7 is supported by ies4linux….

This news is about 2 weeks old, but I wanted to make sure I had it on my site so I can find it when I’m ready to add IE7 to the installed IE’s on my desktop. Here’s the ies4linux site. It should be noted that you are supposed to have a valid windows license before installing IE on your linux system. One of the REAL beauties of running linux is you have the choice of keeping MULTIPLE versions of MULTIPLE browsers installed side by side without virtualization.

Oh… you’ll need ies4linux 2.5 beta to have a choice to install IE7 and they still recommend that you not use IE for browsing but instead use firefox….

The first thing I should mention is that this months update from Microsoft is the last for XP SP1 users should plan a migration path to SP2 to keep getting updates to XP. Multiple vulnerabilities this month have been patched in Office There are 4 advisories, but a total of 15 issues covered by those four. Powerpoint, Excel, Word and Office/Publisher there are a variety of exploits, some public (like the powerpoint) others that were privately reported. Also, Incidents.org gives a nice summary of the advisories and the severity of each (urgency of updating.) The setslice vulnerability is patched in this batch by the way.

Unfortunately, this patch day has already had it’s share of problems Zdnet reports the following….

“Due to technical difficulties experienced on the Microsoft Update platform, security updates released today are not currently available via Microsoft Update, Automatic Updates, Windows Server Update Services or Windows Update v6,”

Which explains why the workstation that I led to windows update this afternoon saw that there were 0 new updates available….

Brian Krebs at the Security fix has a few good points as well… Two of these updates affect Vista. Also, among the Office updates, they are most critical on Office 2000, which is not serviced by automatic updates and so Office 2000 users SHOULD VISIT OFFICE UPDATE…. office.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdate/

These days the focus of crackers seems to be client applications and the distribution of updates seems to reflect that. (Which makes it all the more important that even Office 2000 users get their updates.)

What follows are some notes that I’ve taken on the Vista beta that I installed into a VM. I’ve got a lot of toying around yet to do with it (and at least one Internet Explorer bug I want to mention.) But… I’ll go ahead and post this. [warning - rambling and long text...]

A few days back I undertook an effort of self torture. After finally getting the Vista Beta 2 downloaded and having Vmware server up and running I thought I’d give a go at installing and see what things looked like. I did NO pre-googling for tips and so this is a pure “discover as you go” process.

Windows Vista install notes in a VMware virtual machine on Virtual server…. First try, it booted up and to my amazement took 450MB-500MB memory to run the installer. Note that Windows 2k Pro at desktop in the background was running ~20MB active memory use and a DSL linux was around ~12MB active memory use (both backgrounded). I tried backgrounding Vista to see if that memory use dropped – instead the VM powered off (in mid install).

Second install attempt, seems to start off quite well. Unfortunately when VMware server asks you if you want a 16GB disk, it doesn’t always check to see if you’ve got 16GB to spare. I chose not to allocate the space on disc creation and found out that only about 7-8 GB is what I had, so…. disk full I had to kill of the VM and remove it’s virtual disk and start on a fresh partition with dozens of GB of free space….

Take 3… install seems to go well until the reboot bootldr not found. (Maybe it’s the emulated scsi drive?) I delete that one and create an IDE drive and restart

Take 4 – finally success, the reboot takes me in to a configuration wizard.

Some thoughts on the installer. I like that we are now seeing a full GUI installer (as opposed to the old blue screen NT/Win2k style or the clunky Win9x era installer.) It looks quite pretty, however I’m frustrated with the lack of details. NOT that it should spew details automatically, but I’d like a CHOICE so I can troubleshoot problems.

We have basically… two clicks before typing in the license key (which I’ve now done 4 times…) then a choice of disks to use (there are some advanced partitioning options available which might be promising, I’ll have to revisit those and investigate further.) For these installs I just ate the entire (virtual) hard drive though. After that choice it says…

copying files
expanding files
installing features (??!?)
installing updates
and I forget the last item. I really think 3 of those are fairly self-evident although the installing features is kind of odd. I’d like an advanced or “show detail” button that would show what files are getting copied, expanded or what features are being setup, but at this point they don’t. (Even the ability to save a log to a storage device would be nice.)

Anyway, desktop impressions are that it’s very pretty, but quickly I find the new interface somewhat frustrating. Welcome to Windows (12) is in a box in the middle of the screen and after seeing it several times and wondering I FINALLY notice the bit of text a paragraphs space down that says “click to show all items in this category.” (Four were showing) The menu is structured differently, now you click to go “deeper” in the start menu and the next level down loads in the same “box” as the original start menu, scrolling is required to find items. Weird…. I don’t think that helps the usage of the menu. In fact, I know many that NEVER use the start menu (some longtime users.) I see people making more desktop links and forgetting the menu.

Highlighting running programs in the task bar highlights them. OK – visually that’s nice, but is this worth the upgrade? The interface for programs is a bit hard to get used to. Instead of the traditional file menu followed by an icon bar, we have a ribbon that has several icons and a few menu items at the far right in Internet Explorer. For existing windows users this will take some getting used to.

You can, revert windows to the “classic” theme and start menu style, which is a bit of a relief. (However, that makes it a bit harder to do phone walkthroughs.) I don’t see anything that really jumps out and stands as a selling feature though.

With the user interface, I wonder if the deck has been shuffled JUST for the sake of shuffling the deck, trying to make things look a bit more like OS X and giving flash just for the sake of flash. I don’t know that many of these changes strike me as SIMPLER. I still have many users that have a hard time finding the same menu choices twice in XP due to the context-changing of options. I’m afraid this release is heading further in that direction.

There is a new approach to rating your system. The virtual machine got a 1 on this scale. The idea is that your computer will be rated with a whole number and you use that rating to decide if software will work on your PC. Funny, I thought we had something like that – memory and free hard drive space requirements. That plus 3d hardware requirements seemed to be fairly sufficient and although many are still a bit fuzzy on it, I think most people are at least vaguely aware what these numbers mean. My first reaction on seeing the VM with a 1 was … wow – that’s ranked pretty well. Uhm… no. Actually, I got a 3.something for memory (512 to the VM), 3.9 for disk space (about 9GB free after install) another 3.x for the processor and 1 for lacking “gaming graphics”. Again here, I don’t know if this isn’t just a change that doesn’t need to be made. SURE – make it easy to report the specs of a system. I DON’T recall windows giving a GOOD BRIEF summary of memory/cpu/hard drive/graphics capability. (Instead they give you that + the kitchen sink in msinfo…)

These are just a few of the things that I’ve noticed right off. Fortunately after the system is installed and to a desktop the active memory consumption dropped off to a more reasonable level (only using about 250MB of active memory from the host OS.)

Yes, I know, it’s a beta, it still has debugging enabled and after that’s disabled it will be lighter on the hardware and some of the more “beta”-ish bugs things should be much better is the theme of what I’ve seen online…. I haven’t even mentioned some of the “beta-ish” bugs of the ilk of … “when the property tab on the right is chosen in a group the tab doesn’t line up properly”, or “wrong screenshot (xp) given in the configure taskbar properties..” or other OBVIOUS, SUPERFICIAL problems. For me the big problem is the whole direction of the UI. I don’t think it’s a better UI, I think it’s change for change’s sake and an attempt to out-MAC the MAC -OS.

I had previously thought that the default user setup would be as a limited user and at least at this stage, that is not the case (my user had full admin rights.) Although, in spite of being administrator I had confirmation prompts at EVERYTHING. Open the control panel (prompt – is this ok) open network applet FROM the same control panel… “is THIS what I want to do.” I can see WHY there are complaints about this. At this point in the process they’ve gone too far in trying to protect you from yourself. On a side note, I could do without the whole desktop greying before the popup window asking if it’s ok to do whatever I’ve just clicked on. It REALLY seems to slow down the process.

Yes. I can say that much of what I saw is visually pretty and striking, but I question if pretty=functional. And beyond that I REALLY wonder if it’s worth the hardware requirements. I was talking to my brother on this not too long ago. He’s trying to figure out what THE key upgrade “got to have” feature is and we’re struggling to see it. Yes, it appears Vista will be more secure, but most folks don’t upgrade their OS for that reason. Win98 brought better large partition support and USB support (if you had an early Win95 and NOT win95b), but additional stability fixes. Windows ME flopped for many reasons, but one was that it was an upgrade looking for a reason. Windows XP (or 2000) brought many improvements over the win9x line – the BIGGEST was the stability of better memory handling. Of course the NT filesystem gives some incentive as well (as does Pro’s support for encrypted filesystems, built in remote desktop, etc. (Wireless support in XP) The main point of this is that the upgrades caught on and were successes because they brought something new and needed in hardware support or a core stability improvement.

So what with Vista? A redesigned User Interface? I know in recent months features have flown off of Vista as the deadlines approach, with several ambitious attempts falling off right and left. What will remain? More importantly will it be worth it for people to care.

I’ve said before that I’m not looking forward to Vista. I haven’t heard anything that really jumps out as “oh that’s neat”. From a security standpoint it sounds like they’re doing MANY things better. That’s great. Why don’t we see some of these kinds of changes work their way into a service pack for XP. (Instead of the usual – “well for better security you ought to buy the latest version.”) I know, – but they’d break things. Yeah – well, so will Vista. Make it a highly recommended service pack – give vendors time to adapt and start pushing it to OEM’s as the default – that’s exactly what they’ll do with Vista and no one is too upset over that – why not just do that with a “security enhanced xp”. I guess they won’t because they won’t recoup their development costs on it if they go that route.

Of course, Vista WILL have one big new feature that I saw, there are some more prominent links to find ways to buy things…. through the computer rating area you can look for software that will run on your pc in Microsoft’s online store you can upgrade to ultimate edition from within the os (with $$$ I’m sure) and I’m sure I’ll run across others. Of course, I do see little things, but most of those can be had today on XP with add on applications – tabbed browsing, desktop search, backup…. (most of the add-ons for vista can be had for a free download… Firefox for tabbed browsing and google or msn desktop search)

I’ll close this entry by a little observation I made on the system requirements for Vista…. One of the reasons I like linux is, if I have an old 486/early pentium I can FIND a linux to run on it. Even if it’s going to sit without a GUI and be a fileserver or a firewall or print server. I don’t have to go out and find a new state of the art system and shell out three digits of $$$ more for a license only to find that it didn’t come with enough memory to load the core OS. A lot of businesses are on a 3-5 year upgrade cycle and have the budget to do that. But the reality is that a lot of places CAN’T do that and an 8-10 year upgrade cycle is what they can afford with hand-me-down machines getting recommisioned with slight upgrades and “as new as possible” versions of the Desktop OS to keep them as close to current as possible. To put it in real terms. There is one business that I do computer work for that has 19 computers. One of those is a linux server, another linux firewall. In the last year, 4 of those have been replaced (1 was from a donated system – which still required a new OS license and if I recall a memory upgrade. A SECOND of those was a hand-me down from one of the other users with more memory and new OS license.) We’re really trying to get most everyone with the same software set, but at this point there are still 5 desktops that are on Windows 98. 2 of those brand new XP systems are spec’ed enough to run vista. There are an additional 2 that had been bought new last year which might, with a memory upgrade, meet Vista’s minimum requirements. The year before that there were a handful of donated systems which would likely meet the 800mhz minimum, but likely fall short on memory and video (integrated if I recall DirectX 9??? – I doubt it.). Of course Vista will be on brand new systems and they’ll get it THAT way, we likely won’t be upgrading current systems.

By contrast, if they were to decide to make a move to linux, every single system could be migrated. There are a few that would need a memory upgrade (If I’m correct, the 5 that have Windows 98.) Of course, recently I did see someone explain – THAT is exactly why linux hasn’t broken through on the desktop – because it DOESN’T require massive hardware upgrades. The industry WANTS you to do a hardware upgrade…. They’re saying that “hope is on the way” with xgl (3d gui rendering) which significantly pushes up a desktops hardware requirements under linux. I’d be willing to bet that even in a couple years when “EVERYBODY” is shipping XGL that you can still get a plain old 2d GUI instead for an older system though.