Installation Problem with PerfectDisk 10

While I have been very happy with our Win7 upgrades, I have had a nagging problem with one of my applications on this 64-bit computer, namely, my PerfectDisk 10 defragging software. I have used PerfectDisk for years and really like it. However, when I ran the Win7 installer, PerfectDisk was the only application I had in Vista that it said I had to completely uninstall first. In fact, even after I uninstalled it, the Win7 installer wasn't happy - it even wanted all folders removed in the Program Files folder. So that was fine, I did all that.

After running the upgrade from Vista to Win7, I ran into problems installing PerfectDisk 10.

Error 1402. Could not open key:
UNKNOWN\Components\DF0B6CEA0A4B4AA4E8A0436BEF7EADA3\9DC837B7701D7C84E856E266933AC9D8. Verify that you have sufficient access to that key, or contact your support personnel.



After I fixed this problem, as I explain below, I repeatedly got this error on different subkeys in the Registry. What the key names all had in common was the subkey 9DC837B7701D7C84E856E266933AC9D8, which is the Windows installer Product ID for PerfectDisk.

That UNKNOWN\Components part of the error above is actually the Registry key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData\S-1-5-18\Components

and the all of the Components entries are the various EXE's and DLL's it installs with it. For some reason, all of these Components subkeys for PerfectDisk became inaccessible after the Win7 upgrade. What SHOULD have happened was that the PerfectDisk uninstall should have removed these keys. Something went wrong though, of which I was unaware.

Anyway, as I tried to examine this Registry entry above, I was able to look at the

Components\DF0B6CEA0A4B4AA4E8A0436BEF7EADA3

key but not the

Components\DF0B6CEA0A4B4AA4E8A0436BEF7EADA3\9DC837B7701D7C84E856E266933AC9D8

key, even when I was logged in as Administrator.



9DC837B7701D7C84E856E266933AC9D8 cannot be opened. An error is preventing this key from being opened.
Details: Access is denied.

Hmmmm... something is amiss here. When I right-clicked Permissions...



I got this error:



You do not have permission to view the current permission settings for 9DC837B7701D7C84E856E266933AC9D8, but you can make permission changes. Um, OK.

Thankfully, after this error, RegEdit continued on to let me make changes to the permissions. When I got there, this is what it looked like - totally empty.



I tried all kinds of things but RegEdit wouldn't let me apply the changes because I didn't have permission (but could change the permissions, as it already told me earlier).

So I clicked on the Advanced button to look at other properties of this key, and noted that the owner of the key was corrupted. Probably the SID of a former user in Vista that was no longer valid in Win7.



So I clicked on the Adminstrators group to make Administrators the owner of the entry. If you don't see Adminstrators, you can click on the Other users or groups... button and add it manually.

After I clicked OK to go back to the previous dialog, I saw this:



Now that Adminstrators were the owner of the entry, I could add Administrators to the permissions for the key. To do that I clicked the Add... button and entered the Administrators group.



After I clicked OK to get back to the previous dialog, I gave Full Control to the Administrators.



Now, what Windows really wants is that SYSTEM be the owner of the key. Now that Administrators has full ability to update this key, I went back to the Advanced permissions on the key to set the owner again. Note that this two-step sequence is necessary. RegEdit wouldn't let me set SYSTEM as the owner the first time.



Since SYSTEM doesn't show up in the list of users to set the owner to, I had to add it manually. So I clicked the Other users or groups... button and added SYSTEM and pressed OK.



Now SYSTEM was in the list and was the highlighted new owner.



I pressed OK again to get back to the original Permissions dialog, then pressed OK again to close that dialog and get back to the main RegEdit screen. Now when I clicked on the subkey, it displayed as expected.



I had to search Components and repeat this procedure for every occurrence of the subkey 9DC837B7701D7C84E856E266933AC9D8. Hopefully this will help you when you are facing the same trouble.

Windows 7 Upgrades

It's been awhile since I've checked in. Things have been crazy busy at work and at home. Homewise, we are a family with three teenagers. Enough said there. Workwise, our company is weathering the recession just fine, thank you. We have a waiting list for customer installs (and no, we do not produce shrinkwrap software). It's a nice position to be in, of course, but the work pace is relentless.

In the last couple of months I have upgraded all of our home computers to Windows 7. This consisted of upgrading one Vista64 desktop and two WinXP32 laptops. I bought all of the software on eBay in the $50-70 range.

The experience went very well. The only upgrade path for XP computers is to do a fresh install of the OS. This requires all of your software to be reinstalled after the upgrade. But the installer copies all of the current folders into a new folder so there is no need to worry about it wiping the drive or reformatting. All of your files are still there. You would need to watch out, though, if you have data that you will need to export before the upgrade, such as email (including rules!), SQL data, source control, etc. If your data is flat files, no worry, they will be there, otherwise be very careful... Also, if there are multiple user accounts you need to make sure you get all of the data exported for the others, too. The fresh OS upgrade is very quick, since it only installs the OS files and lays down a new Registry. The most work it needs to do is to identify and install drivers needed for your hardware.

On the Vista box, I chose to upgrade it rather than install a fresh OS. It seemed to go OK, but was very slow. I'm talking several hours, like 5 or 6. In retrospect, I would do the fresh install. I am still considering doing that, even now. The reason I didn't is for the reasons I mentioned above: email, SQL data, source control databases, and settings configurations in various applications that would need to be exported and saved.

Overall, I highly recommend Win7 for everyone. It has an outstanding user experience.

For comparisons, here are examples of vanilla Vista and Win7 desktops.



This is an example of the Windows 7 installer screen.

New Gigabit NIC

A couple of weeks ago I installed a new NIC in my aging emachines box. The computer has an integrated 100 mbit NIC on the mobo which has been working just fine, but I have recently been upgrading my equipment to gigabit. My new D-Link DIR-855 Wireless N/gigabit router is the new core of our home network. Our 1 TB Buffalo TeraStation supports 1 gbit links, and now my main computer also does. I really wanted this to speed up my Ghost backups to the TeraStation.

It took a long time for me to decide which NIC to get for my PCI Express mobo. After a bunch of research, I finally decided on the D-Link DGE-560T. There are conflicting reviews out there on its worth, but I decided its cost was low enough that I could afford to take a chance.

Happily, the card has been working well, and after disabling the integrated NIC in the BIOS, it really was plug-n-play, even on this Vista 64 box. I did have one problem after the install, which was that the security rights got screwed up on a Windows system folder. I figured out how to solve that, though, and blogged about it here.

Here's a picture of the NIC. It is very small, smaller than I expected. The card edge occupies just a small portion of the PCI Express slot on the mobo.

Finally Figured Out My Vista Problem

Wow I have found the solution to a problem that I have had intermittently since installing Vista 64. Sometimes after upgrading my computer, my VPN connection would become inaccessible and my Ghost service would quit working (see A Painful Lesson and Fragile Vista). Tonight, I got bit by this again after installing a gigabit network card in my computer.

A natural thing to do when you get errors is to go look in the Windows event log to see if there are any messages. But when I tried to open the Event Viewer, I got this message:

Event log service is unavailable. Verify that the service is running.

Well, in fact, the Windows Event Log service was not running, and attempts to start it gave the error:

Error 4201: The instance name passed was not recognized as valid by a WMI data provider

So, I did some Binging and found a tip to check the permissions on the C:\Windows\System32\LogFiles\WMI\RtBackup folder. It didn't look good. They didn't at all match the permissions on its WMI parent folder. What it had was just my user name, and what the parent had were several system accounts.

I removed my account and added the system accounts to match the parent folder.

After rebooting, everything was back to normal again. I have no idea why certain installs mess up the permissions. Hopefully, this will be useful info for someone experiencing this problem.

Fragile Vista

I don't know what is up with this computer, drivers, or Vista 64 itself, but it has been showing itself to be very fragile and resistant to change. In my other post, I talked about how Vista would get screwed up, such as the Event Log service not working and unable to start, internet access not working, my office VPN not working, unable to connect to the Ghost service running on this computer, and maybe other problems I'm not aware of. Back then, I thought it was due to driver issues, Windows Update, or System Restore, but now I know that is not true. Well, maybe it is true, but there are other scenarios that will screw up this computer in the same way. The last two weeks have been a nightmare of backing up and restoring my system drive over and over trying to make simple changes. First of all, I originally had the system files and our family and personal files all on the same C: drive. To reduce the time to make Ghost images of the C: drive, I decided to partition the Drive 0 into two drives, one 100 GB partition for Windows and applications, and 150 GB for personal files. There is also a 250 GB 2nd drive D: in this computer as well, though I want to keep it empty and only hold temporary files there. So the first task was to copy all of the personal files from the C: to the 2nd D: drive, and retain only system files on the C:. To be able to shrink the drive using Disk Manager, you need to have free space at the end of the drive. So I defragged the C: drive, but unfortunately, Windows has unmovable files, such as the swap file, the hibernate file, and shadow copy files (Restore Points) for System Restore. One can shrink a drive up to the point of one of these unmovable files, but no further. You can get rid of the hibernate files by turning off the hibernating feature using this command:

powercfg -h off

You can get rid of all of the Restore Points by turning off System Restore, and you can get rid of the swap file by disabling virtual memory from the Control Panel. I did all of this, then Windows wants to reboot. Guess what? After rebooting, the system is screwed up. Why? Oh I have a Ghost image I can restore, but only from a week ago. Didn't think to back up before moving all of the personal files and disabling those features. Didn't think I would need to. So I got to start all over. In fact, I got to start over several times. I finally realized that any time I remove the swap file, the system gets screwed up. It is probably something to do with a low-memory condition. But as I say, that is not the only thing that will screw it up. I finally got a stable configuration for the C: drive, including good Ghost backups of the drive on my TeraStation network storage. So, the next thing I wanted to do was to install a new 1 GBit network card to speed up backups even further. I looked at a bunch of vendors and decided on the D-Link DGE-530T because I just love my new D-Link DIR-855 router. This was a huge mistake. I think. After several attempts, I have not been able to get Vista to even SEE that it is installed in the computer. My motherboard does have an onboard LAN connection, so I was sure to disable this in the BIOS before installing the new NIC. The directions say that Vista should see it and then offer to install a driver for it. But nothing I have tried will cause this NIC to be seen, and worse, it screws up my Vista, like all the other changes I make, and I have to restore from a backup... which is on the network... which requires a working network card... which requires the new NIC to be removed... which requires the PC to be powered down... then requires the BIOS to be adjusted again... and the network cable to be reinserted into the original jack... and then rebooting from the Ghost CD... then restoring the backup which takes 1.5 hrs... etc. It is very taxing. When Vista is working, it runs great. But I hate how it can get screwed up. This has been a very long two weeks. Oh, and the D: drive... I am not using Ghost to back up our personal files. I am using XXCopy to make a duplicate image of the file structure on my 1 TB TeraStation, using the command

xxcopy d:\*.* \\ts1\data\Backups\ComputerName /D /M /E /C /F /H /I
/R /K /Y /ZY /YY /EX:c:\Misc\D_Excludes.txt

I have this in a batch file, and the D_Excludes.txt file is empty at the moment. This command will compare the source and destinations for new or deleted files, and will also copy files up that have the Archive file attribute set (the a bit), and will clear the a bit after copying the file. I like this because I have an exact duplicate of the files up on the network storage, whereas Ghost file backups are stored in a proprietary format. Right now, I have 50,122 personal files in 3,530 directories, and with Vista file indexing, it only takes 1:40 for the command to run if there are no files to back up.

A Painful Lesson

Well, I had an interesting last couple of days with Vista. I learned about how screwed up Vista can get with borked ACL's. It all started Friday morning, when a Windows update alerted me that there was an update for Windows Defender. These are usually lightweight updates that never seem to have any adverse effects. But... I also have an old flaky cable modem, a Linksys BEFCMU10, which is no longer on our ISP's list of supported modems. I have been researching getting this replaced, but haven't made a decision about which modem to go with yet. Anyhoo, I was working at the computer on Fri. morning, when WU asked to install the Defender update, and I told it to go ahead. After it installed, I noticed that my internet quit working and my Norton Ghost icon changed, indicating that it could no longer communicate with the Ghost service. I fiddled with it awhile and concluded that the WU had damaged something that used to work, though I didn't know what. So I decided to just undo the WU by using Windows' ability to Restore from a Restore Point, which the WU created as it was installing. Reboot, and no problem, right? Wrong. After the computer rebooted, the internet still didn't work, Ghost was still unhappy, and not only that, I found that my VPN network icon no longer worked, giving Access Denied when I clicked on it. I had just been using the VPN prior to the WU. Not good. Digging deeper, I learned that the Event Log service was not running, and would fail immediately when I would try to start it. That is very bad, as the Event Log is where error information is supposed to go. What to do? I googled the error message I was getting from trying to start the Event Log service, which was

Error 4201: The instance name passed was not recognized as valid by a WMI data provider

Forum threads such as this Microsoft Technet one indicated that it was a permissions problem on certain folders or files, or else it was an ACL problem. I tried a few things with permissions, but nothing was helping. The suggested ACL fixes are complicated and may not have worked anyway. So, I decided to just restore that whole computer from a backup. I just happened to have a 2-day old Ghost backup image of the drive, so that was good to restore from. Trouble is, it is on my Buffalo Terastation NAS drive, and I only have a 100 mbit NIC in this computer. When I booted up from the Ghost CD, it started to do a verify of the image before the restore. It estimated 15 hours... yowzer. Well, we were leaving for the 4th of July weekend anyway, so I just turned off the monitor and left for vacation. There is a checkbox in Ghost to tell it to reboot when it is done restoring, and I told it to go ahead, expecting that when I returned, I would see the usual login screen and everything would be fixed. But guess what? When I got back late last not, the problem was STILL THERE. WHAT?!!! This problem was NOT there when I made the backup on Wednesday. What's going on? Oh... did I mention that I also have a RAMDisk, and I have all of our temp directories pointed there, along with all of the browser cache files going there? When I upgraded to Vista 64, Superspeed required that I get a new license for Vista. It is not a license that you can get immediately. You have to send them an email, then they respond back with the key. In the meantime, you can run the software in trial mode for 30 days, at which time it expires and quits working. Here is the genesis of my trouble: I neglected to update the license key for the RAMDisk and it quit working right at the end of June. Therefore, the temp file locations were no longer valid because the drive was no longer there. Now here is the 1st lesson that I learned about Vista: If you boot up your computer with the temp file location unavailable, the Event Log service will not start up, and all sorts of other nasty inexplicable problems crop up. I noticed that this was a problem, but unfortunately, the Ghost image was not created with the RAMDisk license info installed. What I decided to try, and really hoped would work, was to predate the computer to mid-June, before restoring the backup. That way, when the computer booted up, it will think it was June and the RAMDisk would be active, thus having a valid temp file location. I also disconnected the computer from the internet, in case Vista would try to fix the time using a time server. To speed things up, I copied the network Ghost image to the D: drive on the computer, and restored from there. Then crossed my fingers. I was happy to find that this worked perfectly, and I now have a fully functioning Vista again. Oh... and the original internet problem... It was not WU at all, it was the stupid cable modem, and only needed to reset it to make it work again. The 2nd thing I learned was: Don't procrastinate on entering license keys. The 3rd thing: Norton Ghost is worth its price in times like this.

Made the Move to Vista 64

I recently upgraded our home computer from Windows XP to Vista 64 Home Premium. I had been waiting for about 2 years, I suppose, to make the switch. A few years ago when I bought our computer, I chose an Athlon, hoping that someday I would actually get a 64-bit OS. Recently, I decided with all the buzz about Windows 7 it was time to get going on it. So I went out on eBay and got an OEM copy of Vista for $100. The OEM version will not do an upgrade of an existing Windows installation. I thought that the install would perhaps format the drive, but actually it just layed the bits down on what was already there. I had a spare drive that I used for the OS, and I removed the original XP drive for safe-keeping, just in case something went terribly wrong. Before the switch I exported all of our Live Mail and contacts to a NAS drive, then imported them later. I had no problems whatsoever, except that I forgot about all of my Message Rules. I have to say that I am very happy with the OS so far. We have had Vista 32 on a laptop for a couple of years now and it is awful - just too darned slow. But for all of the negative press Vista has gotten about being slow, the 64-bit OS is noticeably faster than 32-bit XP on this same hardware. I did not even consider installing the Win7 RC because there is no official upgrade path from the RC to the RTM. Microsoft really scr*wed people with the .NET 1.0 Framework RC when it went RTM back in 2002. The only officially supported upgrade to the RTM was to reformat the harddrive. Didn't want that with Win7! There were two problems that I have been dealing with, one of which I've resolved, the other not yet. After I upgraded, I had used the DVD drive to install MS Office. That was about a week ago. The night before last I went to rip a CD and I noticed that Vista wasn't showing my LiteOn DVD or CDROM drives. I hadn't used them since then, so I don't know when the problem first happened. I went into Device Mgr. and there were yellow warning triangles for these devices. I uninstalled the two drives and reinstalled them, but they did not repair. After googling the problem, I found that iTunes and some DVD burning software may install some drivers that break Vista. I was happy to find that upgraded GEAR Drivers fixed my problem. The install works for both 32 and 64-bit versions of XP and Vista. My second problem is that our Brother MFC-6800 printer has no Vista printer driver. It absolutely will not print from Vista, and if I try, not only will it not print, but no other print jobs from our other computers will print either until we turn the printer off and back on again. Other than this last glitch the upgrade has been great. Last night I installed Vista SP2. The upgrade went without problem, though it took about 45 min. to run.