If At First You Don't Succeed...

The Definition of Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. -- Albert Einstein

When dealing with Microsoft products the definition of insanity is: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the same results.

I thought I was being clever when I bought software to change may partition sizes so I would not have to reinstall Windows 7 yet again... But a few days after resizing my C: partition and the hidden System Reserved partition I noticed that the system could not recognize my optical drive any more. I tried several times uninstalling the device driver and reinstalling it, but every time I tried to reinstall it Windows reported that the driver was corrupted. Interestingly enough I was able to boot from the optical drive because I used the Windows 7 Setup DVD to try to repair the operating system - unfortunately that did not fix the problem.

Then I also notice that my printers stopped working and I could not seem to fix them. I was also having problems with the print spooler and had to keep restarting it.

Finally I tried restoring the system image from my previous backup. That seemed to fix the printer problem, but not the optical drive problem. I figured that during the resizing of my partitions there was probably some file system damage - given that it took over 25 hours of solid disk activity to perform the operation. There seemed nothing left to do but to do a clean install of Windows 7, yet again.

Unfortunately I had invited my sisters and nephews over to finally see Gemini - but I had to cancel because so many things were not working right, and I needed a full weekend to work on getting Gemini working again.

Overall the installation went fairly smoothly - no real surprises. I was very methodical, taking notes at every step. When I past all the Windows updates I started installing drivers and applications. The first application I installed was my BitDefender security software because I wanted to make sure that while I was installing the rest of my applications I was not introducing any malware into the system.

Next I stated attaching devices to Gemini. I have gotten into the habit of disconnecting all my devices: USB drive, printers, TV-tuner, etc because it makes the update process slower and more stable. Each time I did something I kept checking the state of the Optical Drive - and it seemed OK.

I bought three computer games after Christmas: Dragon Age Origins, Mass Effect, and East India Company. All three seemed to install properly, but Mass Effect and East India Company would not run because of some error that told me to wait for a future update. Interestingly enough a week later Windows automatically downloaded an updated version of Mass Effect and that seem to fix that problem. I still haven't tried East India Company yet.

A week later I've got most things installed again and restored my personal files. So far nothing seems to be persistently wrong - aside from the usual Windows networking that never works right. In the case of Windows it's netbroken. Anyway, I'm really hoping this is the last time I have to install Windows 7 again. I've gotten really good at it, but it usually takes a whole weekend of my time - time I could better spend doing fun things.

Cheers, Eric

A Fresh Start

The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something that will always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful. -Mark Twain

I thought I had everything sorted out properly on Gemini and reinstalling Windows was now something that was behind me - but boy what I ever wrong.

An ongoing issue I've been having with Windows 7 is that the search function just doesn't work properly. Apple and Google have figured out how to do simple effective search, but this technology, or even understanding the issue, is far beyond Microsoft.

I found a forum discussion on Microsoft's site where people were complaining that search did not work properly in Windows 7. Unfortunately someone had closed the discussion, so I created a new discussion with the same title. It was very popular as people still had a lot of complaints on this issue. People had many suggestions on things to try, and I tried many of them but none ever solved the simple case I was trying to get working.

Recently someone posted a procedure he claimed solved the problem. Part of the procedure involved changing ownership of all the files and folders on my C: drive from the systems to belong to my account. I knew this sounded dangerous and I should have followed my gut and stopped, but I didn't . After completing the procedure it still did not fix my search problem, but worse, it destabilized my entire system. Many of my device drivers started failing, and I was not able to reinstall any of them. My graphics driver got totally hosed so I removed it, and could not reinstall it. As a result I could not run any 3D graphics any more.

I tried restoring my system to an earlier point before the trouble started. Windows restore takes a long long time to work - stupidly long - and it didn't fix the problem.

Eventually I figured the issue was so bad the only thing left to do was reinstall Windows. The problem was I have moved everything over from my old computer to Gemini, and installed many new applications and got them configured. I could think of no other solution than making a clean start.

Last Saturday I bit the bullet. I backed up all my user data to my external drive (used for backups) and went to reinstall windows. I've done this so many times before that you would think this part would be easy - not! One of the things I was trying to do was create my C: drive with a 64 KB cluster size. This makes the file system blocks bigger than the standard 4 KB ones so that it's faster to access. It wastes more space, but I have so much space I don't really care. Unfortunately Microsoft does not make this process easy as it's not a standard setup. One thing I had to be careful of was that my System Reserved partition was at least 200 MB so that backup would work.

It took me 3 tries at installing Windows to finally get things right and I spent the rest of the day restoring all the user files I had backed up, and installing my applications over again. Unfortunately when I went to back up my system the backup failed again. Somehow in all the confusion of installing Windows 3 times my System Reserved partition got set back to 100 MB - this is a bug in the Windows Setup by the way.

I didn't want to reinstall Windows yet another time so I thought I would just change the partition sizes. Unfortunately while Windows has tools to change the partition sizes, it does not have the tools to change them way I needed. I checked the Norton site to see if I could get a copy of Partition Magic, but they don't offer that product any more. Then I downloaded a demo copy of Acronis Disk Director (because I've heard so many good things about it). It appeared to do exactly what I wanted, but the demo version would not complete the operation. Next I paid for the complete version, but it would not install because Windows 7 is not supported. You would have thought the demo version would have told me that - sheesh. Finally I found a product called EASEUS Partition Master that worked under Windows 7.

Yesterday Morning at 5:00 AM I changed the partition sizes to what I needed. This operation has to be performed before Windows actually boots, so I rebooted my system to see what would happen. The process started and there was a nice little display showing the progress, but the progress was really slow, so I left it running and went to work. When I got home after work the process was still not finished, it was going incredibly slow. Finally at 6:00 AM this morning the process finally finished and my system rebooted. I checked the partition sizes, and they were finally set correctly. I tried doing a backup of Gemini and it worked this time.

The moral of the story is when people offer you advice in a forum on how to fix something on your system - take the advice with a great deal of caution - especially if it sounds like something dangerous.

Cheers, Eric