Vocal Voices

last week my main computer decided that restarting would produce the BSOD (Blue screen of death). Many reboots with diagnose, one tool which claims to be able to fix the problem and I was still back to square one.

I took my C drive out of the machine and backed it up. My SSD was backing up cripplingly slowly so I bought a new 1TB SSD to replace it with as, clearly, it is faulty.

Still BSOD. I could boot into safe mode, but you can't do much about safe mode.

So I took the backup and started playing with it. I created a new virtual hard drive (fairly easy in W10, just tell it to create one and attach it), then I used Acronis Trueimage to restore the backup of the C drive into the new virtual drive. Then I attached it to VirtualBox (free) and booted the machine. Excellent, it booted. Very, very, slowly.

This was followed by several attempts to take the "booting" drive and copy it back to the new C drive. All resulted in the same situation... BSOD.

However I was getting a bit more diagnostic messages and the message translated to "you have a borked driver". Only one slight problem, you can't uninstall anything in safe mode and you can't do an upgrade install in safe mode.

So I kicked off an upgrade install in VirtualBox and when it rebooted I shut it down and copied the in progress upgrade back to my C drive.

BSOD.

By this time I was getting a bit miffed. I moved the virtual drive to VMWare because VirtualBox is cripplingly slow. I then booted the machine but it was throwing tons of errors because my machine stores most of the stuff on the D drive. So I took the D drive out of the main machine and added it to the virtual machine. By this time my laptop looked like an advert for cables.

Once I had it booted, I went to the control panel and uninstalled everything installed in the last 2 weeks. One particular offender was a Fresco Logic USB VGA adaptor which I had been playing with.

I put the C and D drives back in the main machine, held my breath and started it up.

Success. Now I'm fixing most of what I broke and doing the missing updates.

Next I need to fix the broken printing. Probably with the 2004 update this month.

I know it's a bit technical but if it helps someone get their machine back, then It will have been worth saying. My main reason for this level of effort is my paid up Microsoft TechNet keys are slowly expiring so I try to restrict the number of times I have to use them. I have about £25,000 worth of current value activation keys which have been expiring over time. All legal and all bought from Microsoft, but TechNet is shut down and they are legacy.

I did, during the journey, learn how to set up the post vista BCD and how to boot your OS from a virtual hard drive on your C drive. All very geeky but I don't recommend it for anyone who doesn't have a burning desire to know.

I have a hard drive in a USB caddy that contains the last good working copy of W10.

When 10 updates, as it did a few weeks back, I leave it for a while to sort out bugs .... and there are often ever so many of my personal settings getting changed back to default that I have to undo them.

When I am sure that everything is to my liking I do the whole C drive backup to my caddy drive. I takes hours using USB but it is solid and I know that I have a good working copy to fall back on.

If the laptop drive fries itself I can just do a swap and get a new drive to start the process over again. Mind you, I have to say that the modern drives are so reliable that I have not had to do a swap for years.

My route has been 3.11 - 95 (+NT 4.0) - XP Pro x64 - 7 -10 so I never had Vista, though I have found many Vista x64 drivers that work well with 10 for some of my older hardware that I just cannot let go.

They changed the boot loader in Vista WM. It can cause total havoc with systems and is extremely difficult to clone and repair if you work across multiple disks.

I had a run in with the boot loader when I fixed my nieces Alienware back in Feb. But I had a much deeper dive into it this time.

I am intrigued by the ability to boot from a virtual file. I had a play with that and may try it again some time, the fault was in the system files and not the virtual boot. In this way you don't run a backup program or anything like that. You just boot with a Linux boot disk, attach the usb caddy and copy the single vxdh file to the back up system. Restore is a case of copying the file back. In the event of total failure, you simply build the new drive on a second machine, you can do the boot setup on a virtual machine or with the windows install drive from the recovery command prompt, copy back the vxdh, run the bootcfg commands and everything is back again.

It has been an interesting journey.

BTW, USB3.0 with SSD is not slow and doesn't take ages. My 240gb SSD, when working correctly, clones in 15 minutes. I don't tend to use caddies these days, I have 2x usb adapters that can read SATA, IDE 3.5 and IDE 2.5. I use them most of the time.

On a slightly different note ....

Yesterday I was on the laptop zooming round the internet till just after lunch, then I got bored and went to the TV.

Later I had a nap and then more TV.

In the evening I went back to the laptop and when refreshing the VV tab got the warning: No Internet. The same with all other tabs. A quick look at the system tray showed that the wifi symbol had changed from the radio icon to a circle with cross-hairs and a red dot. OK wifi is down, no problem I'll plug in an Ethernet cable - still no Internet. Hmmmm, that's not right. Going to Network and Internet settings showed no connection either way! What?

So off I go to the Device Manager and there were exclamation marks next to the wireless and Ethernet adaptors and properties showed that they could not be started. Do give me a break .... all I did was watch TV!

I was about to tear what is left of my hair out when I noticed another icon on the system tray - an oblong with a red bit in the bottom left. Hovering over it I was presented with a pop-up asking me to select a restart time. Sod that, says I, you are restarting now.

The shutdown told me that W10 was configuring updates 1% - 2% - 18% - 30% ... till eventually it restarted - v e r y s l o w l y. Once up and running it was all working well and then I knew what the problem was.

I allowed a big update a week or so ago and because of other things going on atm I forgot to change from the default of automatic updates to inform me and let me decide. So, W10 updated and in the process, and for some unknown reason, shut down the adaptors. It couldn't start them live so needed the restart hence No Internet.

It has now changed a whole she load of MY settings back to W10 defaults and so I have more work to do - thanks MSoft! One of the first is to cancel automatic updates!

That is the main reason I restart my machine. I tend to get a feeling for stuff just stopping working and then check to see if W10 has tried to force an update on me. Normally the restart option has Update and restart next to it. So I restart and everything starts working again. It is also the reason my system restore is off, if you don't restart for months, then the circular space saving mode overwrites critical updates and you can, often, never get back. So normally I'm rebooting to fix something an update does.

Well until your SSD says "I'm borked" and corrupts your Windows. I'm still fixing the fallout from that. It started hanging and crashing all the time. I'm now on a 1909 refresh install again. It took a while. Uninstalling stuff with errors in the log etc.

This whole changing the underlying drivers whilst the system is running is a real PITA. Although what I get at work these days is worse; start of a meeting where I am presenting and it says "your PC is going to restart in 45 minutes".... No choice, no way of stopping it, just bang and it is gone.

I get my revenge though. Shutdown /H forces Windows to Hibernate. Even without it set up for hibernating and even with the hibernate options disabled by the self preening system admin who is so happy that S/He was clever enough to stop us doing that. What they don't see is that it can take MONTHS before I ever see their group policy updates which mess me around..... Karma.