{"id":1874,"date":"2009-03-21T12:39:51","date_gmt":"2009-03-21T17:39:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.starkeith.net\/coredump\/2009\/03\/21\/computer-recovery-day\/"},"modified":"2009-06-13T23:50:49","modified_gmt":"2009-06-14T03:50:49","slug":"computer-recovery-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.starkeith.net\/coredump\/2009\/03\/21\/computer-recovery-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Computer Recovery Day"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It started innocently enough \u2013 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/windows\/internet-explorer\/default.aspx\">Internet Explorer 8<\/a> came out just the other day, so I figured I\u2019d give it a try. Little did I know that this was to become the catalyst for a computer meltdown unlike any I\u2019ve had in a long, long time.<\/p>\n<p>Here\u2019s the story, broken down into little snippets for easy consumption. Our story begins mid-morning on a Friday\u2026<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Hmmm, IE8 is getting a lot of press. I guess I should give it a try.<\/li>\n<li>Downloaded &amp; Installed IE8. It said \u201cyou need to reboot and install some more Windows updates.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Ok, reboot. Wait forever for startup programs to finish.<\/li>\n<li>Try to connect to VPN for work\u2026 Windows says \u201cI couldn\u2019t find any connections!\u201d Huh?<\/li>\n<li>Notice that the network connection icon has a red \u201cX\u201d on it. Hovering over it gives the message \u201cConnection status: Unknown. Access is denied.\u201d WTF?<\/li>\n<li>Even more strangely, the Internet connection works just fine \u2013 I can get on-line. Curious.<\/li>\n<li>Something fishy is going on with my user account and permissions &amp; things\u2026 certain control panel applets won\u2019t open, like the add\/remove users applet. It normally would give a UAC prompt, but now it just opens a blank window which immediately closes. Huh?<\/li>\n<li>Try to fire up VirtualBox to look at my virtual Vista machine for comparison, but VirtualBox won\u2019t start: \u201cE_ACCESSDENIED\u201d it says, quoting error number \u201c0x80070005.\u201d Something about COM?<\/li>\n<li>Spend some time looking up help (thank you, Google). Tried some solutions like adding the \u201cLocalSystem\u201d account to the \u201cAdministrators\u201d group. Didn\u2019t work. (Shouldn\u2019t be needed, anyway.)<\/li>\n<li>At this point I\u2019m getting rather frustrated, so I enable the Administrator account and try logging in under it, just to see what\u2019s up. To my surprise, everything works. Hmmm.<\/li>\n<li>So, must be a problem with my user profile\u2026 not surprising, since it was sort of half-assed migrated from XP. Maybe it\u2019s just time to bite the bullet and make a new profile and copy my relevant data and a few program settings over.<\/li>\n<li>At this point, I\u2019ve basically given up on getting any work done for the day, so I fire off an email summarizing my sad story thus far, and settle in for spending some quality time with Windows.<\/li>\n<li>First step: dismount my user profile drive so nothing gets touched.<\/li>\n<li>Delete old account.<\/li>\n<li>Create new account.<\/li>\n<li>Mount user profile drive.<\/li>\n<li>Log in under new user account\u2026 d\u2019oh! Windows goes and makes it\u2019s own, new directory for the profile instead of using the one I mounted. (Now I have Users\\Keith and Users\\Keith.ELYSION).<\/li>\n<li>Log back in under Administrator, move drive mounting to the new user profile folder that Windows created.<\/li>\n<li>Try to log in under that account. Nope! Windows says \u201cI couldn\u2019t read the user profile, so have a temporary one!\u201d Damn.<\/li>\n<li>Obviously, I\u2019ve got some files to delete, probably NTUSER.DAT.<\/li>\n<li>Let\u2019s see if I can start again and do this right \u2013 instead of mounting the volume as a directory, I\u2019ll use a directory junction instead.<\/li>\n<li>Log in as Administrator.<\/li>\n<li>Delete user account.<\/li>\n<li>Oops, Windows Vista doesn\u2019t just leave the user profile directory where it is if you choose not to delete the files \u2013 it \u201chelpfully\u201d tries to copy the profile to your desktop.<\/li>\n<li>My user profile is huge \u2013 the whole reason it\u2019s on a second drive, after all \u2013 so this isn\u2019t going to work. Rather than wait around, I try to cancel it.<\/li>\n<li>Can\u2019t cancel it \u2013 so I shut down instead.<\/li>\n<li>After restart, made directory junction to a new folder on the 2nd hard drive.<\/li>\n<li>Moved the new (empty) user profile over to this new folder.<\/li>\n<li>Logged in under the new profile \u2013 now I\u2019ve finally got a user profile that\u2019s correctly running on the 2nd hard drive. Now I just need to move my user data over selectively.<\/li>\n<li>Easy stuff first \u2013 Documents, Music, Videos, Pictures, etc.<\/li>\n<li>Hard stuff second \u2013 specific folders from Application Data and Local Settings (Firefox\/Thunderbird profiles mostly).<\/li>\n<li>Finally got stuff moved around, but\u2026 why does my Documents folder only contain files starting with the letter P or later?<\/li>\n<li><strong>Horrible moment of realization:<\/strong> the \u201chelpful\u201d copy that took place when I deleted the profile a few steps (and by now, a few hours) ago wasn\u2019t just a copy \u2013 it was a \u201cmove.\u201d And apparently shutting down wasn\u2019t the smartest thing to do.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Half of my \u201cMy Documents\u201d folder is gone. <\/strong>Begin slight panic.<\/li>\n<li>Calm down, remember that I\u2019ve got <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mozy.com\">Mozy<\/a>. Backups are GOOD.<\/li>\n<li>Begin trying to recover files from Mozy. Because only half of my stuff is gone, I have to go through and select what to restore manually, by hand. Mozy is not the fastest program in the world, so this takes some time.<\/li>\n<li>Begin the arduous process of restoring files from Mozy.<\/li>\n<li><em>[Many, many hours pass.]<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Mozy\u2019s not super-fast at restoring files (and it doesn\u2019t help that I had it set to throttle back its bandwidth usage during the work day &#8211; oops!) but it gets the job done. Thank goodness for backups!<\/li>\n<li>Files restored, but of course to totally wrong folders, since now everything\u2019s \u201cVista-Style.\u201d Why, oh why did Microsoft decide to re-arrange where user\u2019s files go???<\/li>\n<li>Spend some time copying\/moving files around. OK, documents, music, videos, pictures, etc. Back where they belong, nothing seems to be missing. Cool.<\/li>\n<li>Fire up a few programs (Winamp, iTunes, Quicken) to make sure they work \u2013 they do\u2026 sort of. iTunes says it can\u2019t save the iTunes library file, and Quicken says I don\u2019t have permission to open the file. Huh?<\/li>\n<li>Winamp also won\u2019t save any settings \u2013 it keeps resetting to the default style. Something is not right.<\/li>\n<li>Find out that there\u2019s a weird permissions problem on my new profile \u2013 the CREATOR OWNER doesn\u2019t have ANY rights! Ah, the joys of NTFS file permissions.<\/li>\n<li>Spend some time fiddling with the permissions \u2013 setting my new user account as the \u201cOwner\u201d of the files, giving myself full control, etc.<\/li>\n<li>OK, permissions set \u2013 programs working. Excellent.<\/li>\n<li>Fire up Firefox \u2013 and it starts walking me through the \u201cnew profile\/new settings\u201d wizard. Crap.<\/li>\n<li>Try to figure out where my Firefox (and Thunderbird) profiles are.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Second horrible moment of realization: <\/strong>my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles weren\u2019t backed up. Apparently, they both have a \u201cProfiles\u201d folder under Application Data, and another one under Local Settings\\Application Data. One contains the real profile \u2013 the other contains some, I don\u2019t know, extra .xul files or something. <em>Guess which one was part of my backup set?<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Manage to find an old copy of the \u201creal\u201d profiles folder in Mozy and restore from it.<\/li>\n<li>Spend some time re-creating the \u201cprofiles.ini\u201d file for Firefox and Thunderbird.<\/li>\n<li>Open up Firefox \u2013 my profiles appear!<\/li>\n<li>Try to start my default profile \u2013 and Firefox crashes. Ditto Thunderbird. Some problem with an add-in?<\/li>\n<li>Start Firefox and Thunderbird in \u201csafe mode\u201d with no add-ins or extensions. Disable them all, restart.<\/li>\n<li>Go through extensions one-by-one until I find the troublesome ones. (Enigmail and the Calendar plugin.) Ok, fine, they\u2019re not that important, I can always re-install them later. Uninstall them for now.<\/li>\n<li>Success! Firefox and Thunderbird open properly. Except\u2026<\/li>\n<li>For some reason, Firefox has lost all of its history, saved form data, and saved passwords. Fuck. I kind of depend on them.<\/li>\n<li>At this point, it\u2019s well past midnight for a process that started mid-morning. I\u2019m tired, and aside from the saved passwords thing, my computer is <em>mostly<\/em> working. Well enough that I feel OK going to sleep and picking it up in the morning.<\/li>\n<li><em>[All too-few hours of sleep pass.]<\/em><\/li>\n<li>The next morning, I fire things up again, and it\u2019s working as well as you could expect. Actually, it\u2019s working just fine. I feel a lot better about the whole affair now that things are back together again!<\/li>\n<li>After a good nights sleep, I hit upon a brain-wave. I occasionally use <a href=\"http:\/\/mozbackup.jasnapaka.com\/\">MozBackup<\/a> (not Mozy) to do complete backups of my Thunderbird and Firefox profiles! I can use these backups to restore my passwords and other settings!<\/li>\n<li>Looking through my files, I see I did a backup not long ago \u2013 less than a month, in fact. SWEET!<\/li>\n<li>MozBackup, restore profiles, lather, rinse, repeat.<\/li>\n<li>Ka-ching! Profiles restored. Bookmarks, saved passwords, cookies, history, the works.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So now I\u2019m pretty much back up &amp; running. I\u2019ve still got a few niggling little things to work out (like my Outlook\/Exchange email for work), but nothing terrible. I\u2019ve also got to go through Mozy and make sure that I really did restore EVERYTHING I need before I let it start backing up the newly arranged profile \u2013 because Mozy doesn\u2019t store differential backups; you\u2019ve only got the most recent backup, and that\u2019s it. So if I start backing up now, and I forgot to restore a file, it will assume I deleted the file and it\u2019ll be removed from my backup. So I need to do some further checking, but I\u2019m confident.<\/p>\n<p>I also need to go through my backup sets and make absolutely sure that they include the entirety of my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles.<\/p>\n<p>Although in the end I didn\u2019t lose anything important (some virtual machines were lost, but they\u2019re easy enough to re-create and I just use them for testing anyway), the whole experience was <strong>very frustrating<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>When computers break down, when things go wrong like this, it <strong>totally destroys the metaphor<\/strong> of the computer. When you find out that your carefully arranged media libraries are gone now because you physically moved the files on disk, you really begin to curse and swear. I think Neal Stephenson described it as <strong>metaphor shear<\/strong>, and I think that\u2019s a good description.<\/p>\n<p>Suddenly, you\u2019re not dealing with pictures and movies and documents anymore \u2013 you\u2019re no longer working \u201cin your terms.\u201d Instead, you\u2019re now working with the computer\u2019s terms \u2013 folders and files and paths and ACLs and profiles and user accounts and permissions and so forth. Honestly, it\u2019s terribly disheartening. It almost makes you want to give up on the whole \u201ccomputer\u201d thing, maybe go live \u201cin the cloud\u201d where you don\u2019t have to worry about this sort of shit anymore.<\/p>\n<p>But in the end, it\u2019s all just fluff, all just levels and layers of metaphors piled on top of one another, abstractions built upon abstractions \u2013 and like any other work of man, eventually it all falls down and you\u2019re left holding broken sticks and trying to figure out how they used to be put together to make the Internet.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a humbling experience, in a way. And one I hope not to go through again for a long time!<\/p>\n<p>For the future, though, I\u2019ve learned (or re-learned) a few things:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Check your backups carefully on some sort of regular schedule. Things change, and you don\u2019t want to have something be left out!<\/li>\n<li>When deleting a user profile, if you want to keep the user\u2019s data where it is, don\u2019t use the Vista control panel applet to delete the account \u2013 use the \u201cComputer Management\u201d MMC console to do it instead.<\/li>\n<li>Hard drive space is cheap; although I used to turn off \u201cSystem Restore\u201d because I didn\u2019t like the disk space it used, my disks are big enough these days that there\u2019s no reason not to have it turned on now. If I had used it to create a restore point before installing IE8, I probably could have avoided this whole mess. And Vista has \u201cVolume Shadow Copies,\u201d too, so I probably could\u2019ve recovered my missing files easier, too.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Ah well \u2013 always something new to learn! At least it\u2019s over now, and I\u2019ve learned my lessons. Now I know, and knowing is half the battle!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An agonizing tale of computer malfunction, data recovery, and pain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"webmentions_disabled_pings":false,"webmentions_disabled":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[200,10,5],"tags":[138,23,62,24],"class_list":["post-1874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-life","category-rants","category-technology","tag-backup","tag-computers","tag-microsoft","tag-windows","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pimUj-ue","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1526,"url":"https:\/\/www.starkeith.net\/coredump\/2008\/12\/04\/dont-reboot-just-logoff\/","url_meta":{"origin":1874,"position":0},"title":"Don&#8217;t Reboot &#8211; Just Logoff","author":"Keith Survell","date":"December 4, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"A while ago I wrote about how Windows still works just fine for me, and I wanted to follow up on that. Today I was having some problems opening new windows - from any program. Being a programmer myself and knowing a thing or two about how Windows works on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;tech&quot;","block_context":{"text":"tech","link":"https:\/\/www.starkeith.net\/coredump\/category\/technology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.starkeith.net\/coredump\/wp-content\/uploads\/\/2008\/12\/exit.png?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3390,"url":"https:\/\/www.starkeith.net\/coredump\/2011\/03\/26\/some-completely-pointless-benchmarks\/","url_meta":{"origin":1874,"position":1},"title":"Some Completely Pointless Benchmarks","author":"Keith Survell","date":"March 26, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Just for fun, I timed how long it takes to start up my desktop computer and my netbook. Guess which one won?","rel":"","context":"In &quot;personal&quot;","block_context":{"text":"personal","link":"https:\/\/www.starkeith.net\/coredump\/category\/personal\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2951,"url":"https:\/\/www.starkeith.net\/coredump\/2010\/02\/23\/living-with-windows-7\/","url_meta":{"origin":1874,"position":2},"title":"Living with Windows 7","author":"Keith Survell","date":"February 23, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Keith's review of Windows 7 after living with it for almost a month.","rel":"","context":"In &quot;My Opinion&quot;","block_context":{"text":"My Opinion","link":"https:\/\/www.starkeith.net\/coredump\/category\/personal\/my-opinion\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1554,"url":"https:\/\/www.starkeith.net\/coredump\/2008\/12\/17\/nows-the-time-to-switch-to-firefox\/","url_meta":{"origin":1874,"position":3},"title":"Now&#8217;s the time to switch to Firefox","author":"Keith Survell","date":"December 17, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"A serious security flaw has been found in Internet Explorer - no big surprise there. 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