Ugh…. you hate to see those exception OE messages. This particular one happened on an old Windows 98 machine. (Yes, I know, but they want to keep it in service if possible.) The full details are as follows

An Exception OE has Occured at 0028:C004EA3A in VxD VCACHE(01) + 0000019A. … Was Called From 0028:C004BD2E in VxD VFAT(01) + 00009CB6

For starters I loved the detail that got recorded by my client – you feel like you can sink your teeth into that much better than “my computer crashed – it gave some strange error message – could you fix it?” Of course, when I looked at it I couldn’t reproduce the error and was told that it was maybe once per day.

If I remember correctly the OE exceptions with address 0028 seem to be hardware related. So, I see it refers to VCACHE and VFAT (Fat32 filesystem of course on win98) – so I do a few disk checks. Scandisk says everything is okay, so I tried a smart test from a linux livecd. That seemed to declare the hard drive healthy with no current/previous failures, so I moved onto a full read/write test to see if there were any badblocks on the drive. Again, all came up as clean.

So, the message came up again and this time I turned my attention to the system memory. I ran memtest and all was reported as being okay, then I ran the Windows Memory testing utility, again all came up as good and healthy. The system had 64MB of memory.

Now, I’ve seen bad memory manage to pass the memory test utilities before. With this system it sounded like the error message was more likely first thing in the day, then after a reboot it was fine, so I suspected there might be some “cold boot” issue with the memory that I wasn’t getting an opportunity to really test, so I decided the simplest thing to do was to swap the memory and just see if things happened again.

So, I had some used memory (128MB) that we had pulled from another machine there that I used in place of the 64MB installed. It’s been a few months now and from what I hear there aren’t the random startup errors like we saw previously (and of course performance has improved.)

I had told them that if that didn’t solve things we’d just need to look at a replacement machine (which is still on the horizon, but now has been delayed a bit longer.)

Internet Explorer 7 is going to be an automatic upgrade through WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) on February 12. This was announced last fall, but is now about to become reality. According to Microsoft there will no longer be a requirement to prove the copy of Windows installing IE7 is legitimate. Windows Genuine Validation would have prevented the install on copies of Windows that were not officially licensed. Many of those “not officially licensed” copies are pirated, but there have been problems with the reliability of Windows Genuine Validation. Some users have reported legitimate copies of Windows failing the test in the past. So how do you avoid Internet Explorer 7?

Companies using WSUS that want to avoid the auto rollout will need to disable the auto-approval of Update Rollup Packages.

Ultimately, the reason for the forced update is enhanced security. Internet Explorer 7 is more secure than it’s predecessor. So why would people want to decline the update? I know many find the new user interface a bit disorienting, but there is a more significant reason some have avoided IE7. The most crucial reason I’ve seen people avoid it is compatibility problems with their software. At one point some versions of Quickbooks did not get along well with Internet Explorer 7 for example. It’s always good to find a “test system” to test such updates on. (Especially if you’re making upgrades to a business critical machine.)

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 run into a few problems with a windows xp repair install in the last few days that I wanted to detail the problems and what the resolution was. First, it was someone elses laptop needing a hard drive replacement. The drive was imaged, but windows still would not boot, so I broke out the XP Pro disc for a repair installation *(after trying to chkdsk from the recovery console first and fixboot /fixmbr…) Anyway, I went through the repair install process and the system booted up just fine. My next task was windows update and here’s were I started running into problems. Typing an address in the address bar of internet explorer caused a new window to open, which seemed to hang. Opening the home page seemed fine (i.e. the page that loads when you first open explorer), but you couldn’t navigate to another address.

I thought a toolbar was the cause so I disabled all toolbars and still got the problem (even through a reboot). I worked around in part by setting the windows update address to be the homepage, then opening the browser, but there were still some problems. Anyway, here’s what I discovered IE 7 had been installed before the repair install and you’re “supposed” to uninstall ie7 before performang a repair install of windows now. Given that I couldn’t boot into windows this was an impossibility. (blue screened and wouldn’t enter normal/safe mode.) There is a way to manually uninstall from the recovery console. There are details in this knowledge base article, but c:\windows\ie7\spuninst is the folder to look in. Unfortunately if you have already done the repair install this isn’t an option, so downloading a copy of ie7 is necessary (they do allow a standalone download now). I copied it via usb memory stick and installed ie7 over ie6 and was able to fix the main browser problem.

But that wasn’t all folks! No, there was more fun ahead. No, the IE icon was not showing in the start menu, but more importantly updates wouldn’t install either via the web or through the automatic update scheduler. The ie icon was easy….

A good tip via the techrepublic… At registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Clients\StartMenuInternet\IEXPLORE.EXE\DefaultIcon
you should have C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe,-32528

I seem to recall seeing this on another system that had reverted to IE 6… Anyway.

The update issue was apparently caused by Microsoft’s stealth update of windows update components a few months back. Yes, the one that they have really tried to downplay… Anyway apparently the two fixes are to download an older version of the windows update components and reinstall those, or do some dll registering….

regsvr32 /s wuapi.dll
regsvr32 /s wuaueng1.dll
regsvr32 /s wuaueng.dll
regsvr32 /s wucltui.dll
regsvr32 /s wups2.dll
regsvr32 /s wups.dll
regsvr32 /s wuweb.dll

Yuck… but it worked… except there were 4 updates that kept downloading and running – to those I just downloaded them manually and installed one at a time with the command prompt NAME_OF_UPDATE_FILE.exe /o

the /o option I think is for overwrite. (As each update then needed a reboot.) But I’m not certain – after 4-6 times of seeing the same 4 updates I was ready to try anything. (I did remove the Softwaredistribution folder under c:\windows and c:\windows\system32)

If you’re interested the procedure for this is….
(viathis forum thread

(start… run… cmd)
1. proxycfg -d (to clear proxy cache)
2. net stop wuauserv (to stop Automatic updates service)

Using Windows Explorer
3. Delete all files and folders in
C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution (your windows folder may vary)

Again using command prompt
4. net start wuauserv (to start Automatic updates service)

Anyway.. filed for future reference.

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).

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.

and you can’t turn it on without an error… Oh boy… last week I first saw this system and it was running less than the minimum amount of memory, so I thought that could be part of the issue. (It certainly made it slightly less than tolerable to work on.) So, now, with new memory installed. Norton still shows problems, Antispyware is off, phishing protection is off and the catch is when trying to enable either there’s a cryptic error message….”internal program error” and a string of numbers which is nowhere to be found in symantecs online support. But the online support does say to try and use symantecs utility to “fix” the problem and if that fails or is unavailable uninstall using the Norton remover that they provide as a free download and reinstall…. thanks Symantec…. (You might find the antivirus removal tool list helpful.)

After the clean uninstall and reinstall, I still needed updates (dialup… ouch.) And initially things looked good, but the update aborted for some reason and I rebooted to clear the liveupdate process from memory and yet again…. antispyware protection is off, trying to switch it on causes the same error. So, I expanded my web searching and found (in google’s cache) a forum post from someone who spent 3 weeks (!) working through symantec support to get this fixed. Finally, they got to an executive support contact with a senior product specialist who essentially said, “it looks like you may have two copies of ccApp.exe running, try getting rid of one and see if that fixes it.” It turns out there WERE two entries for ccApp.exe, one in the registry’s run list and the other in the all users startup group menu. So, I removed the link in the startup menu and rebooted and voila – ALL components of Norton loaded happilly (except updates and full system scan which ran LONG after I left.)

I contacted back though for a followup to make sure all was well and after the liveupdate and scan finished Norton was good, they went through several reboots to make sure.

Now why couldn’t Symantec have that in the knowledge base for NIS 2007? (The day I searched it wasn’t there for the “internal program error” issue.)

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….

There could be a record number of vulnerabilities addressed next week when Microsoft releases an expected dozen updates for its Windows and Office products. (According to Brian Krebs at the Security Fix.) Tuesday February 13th is the date scheduled for the release of updates. One critical udpate will affect Microsoft’s security software (onecare/defender/etc.) 3 patches will affect Office. Most of the updates to be released are rated as critical.

What’s frustrating to me is that the responsiveness of Windows Update has gotten to be so slow on update Tuesday that many systems I find I HAVE to postpone for a day or two so I can get them quickly installed. I’m wondering if anyone else has noticed the slow down on patch Tuesday.

If course, it’s important for the security of your systems to keep as up to date as possible on security patches for the operating system and any and all software that’s used. (Even drivers have security updates.)

If you’re upgrading to Vista and use an ipod (true Apple branded iPod)… you might want to refrain from hooking the ipod up to the Vista pc. theregister has reported that Apple is sounding the alarm over a serious data corruption issue due to an incompatibility with Vista. It sounds as though users should wait for the next release of iTunes before using their iPod with Vista… there is a workaround….

Folk who can’t wait for the next version of iTunes – due “in the next few weeks”, according to Apple – should deauthorise any iTunes Store accounts held on the PC, enable disk use on the iPod, uninstall iTunes, perform a clean Vista install, re-install iTunes then re-authorise the iTunes Store accounts. Phew. We think we’d rather wait for iTunes 7.0.3…

(yuck.)

There is also an iTunes Repair tool to fix permissions on files required to play store purchases… Apples link is here.

Now you know why they call it “bleeding edge” to have the newest/latest greatest….

–update–

It looks like none of Apple’s software is yet fully compatible with Vista.