Ergaster

Managing 2 different Vista machines, one a 32 bit and the other x64, both using auto-login and a large-icon Quick Launch toolbar (for seniors). The Quick Launch toolbar keeps collapsing and getting reset to the left under a >> popup menu when the systems are started or waked. Not every time though. Been struggling with this for years, and the only fix I can rely on is having them roll back the OS partition to the last ghost backup, which takes 10 minutes. Data partition with browser and email settings survives a restored OS. My reading of this is that a default setting is being used in error. I've read things about a "race condition" involving auto-login that may have been fixed in some versions of Windows, but no updates have fixed these machines yet. I don't see this problem in XP sp3, but there's no UAC running, so maybe that's it. The toolbars should hold their settings, period. Since this bug will lose any extra toolbars and leave only the default Quick Launch folder toolbar, it makes things very difficult for novice users. Also, possibly related, some desktop icons that were moved to toolbar folders suddenly show up again on the desktop, and the documents folder loses its "by type" sorting. What I'd like to do is find the custom settings for the user account, and copy them over the default settings in the registry, adding a tracer tag so I know when the bug has struck, like making Quick Launch show its title text or something. That way, no matter what, even if this bug is never fixed, the machines will look and work as set. Poking around the registry has turned up some possible locations involving "streams" keys, but I don't know how they work. If you do, point us in the right direction, please.

I got one of those Expresscard/34 power-over-eSATA/USB combo cards that come with a full-connector notebook drive cable: I/O Crest - Syba sy-exp50028 that uses the JMB360 chip The driver install is confusing enough, but I did find the right one. It's supposed to show up as a SCSI controller. There's some other RAID drivers, and Vista/7 have some AHCI driver they want to use, but the driver on the CD is what I use. Thing is, I have not managed to get any significant data across it, on 2 very different laptops, using XPsp3, Vista, and Win7. I can get directories and file properties, but if I try copying anything big, I get a burst that looks real promising, then nothing....and eventually the drive resets with a clank. Also, the card is making the card slot hot, but I popped the case off and ran it, and nothing on the board is that warm. It's like the thing is causing mainboard components to heat up. I looked for solder bridges and damage inside, but nothing obvious. Pass-through USB works, I think. So it's now a $20 aux power jack for the Y cable on my USB2 enclosure. Are the JMB360 boards generally this trouble-prone? Any known-good identical-function Expresscards out there? I liked the idea of just popping a drive on the end of a cable and hot-plugging for temporary high-bandwidth access to it.

If there is free space showing where your drives should be, I'd suspect that there are no partition table entries for their partitions in the Master Boot Record of the physical drive. The drive hiding tool must have used the MBR to manage the partitions. If the partitions are there, and use standard NTFS or FAT32 file systems, you can use any number of tools to find the partition boot sectors, from which the location and size of the partitions can be determined and used to place entries in the MBR, which will make the partitions visible again. If they're encrypted, then you may have additional work to do. I'd suggest downloading testdisk and let it try to find any obvious deleted partitions.

There were 3 boot sectors - two matching ones at either end of the partition, and one at 63 which pointed to an offset that was all FF FF FF FF.... no other $Mft could be found. The de-coupling of the file system and the data means that the new/only $Mft and all of its external attributes are not cluster-aligned with the "original" data storage area, so it has to move. Going with my original plan, did the surgery, the patient survived, and now has a fully intact memory! Here's what was done: - Manually recover/delete a file that was in the way of new $MftMirr & $UpCase copies - Copy the backup boot sector up-1985 sectors & set its "hidden sectors" to 6081 - Copy $MftMirr & $UpCase up-1985 sectors - Copy \System Volume Information\tracking.log up-1985 sectors - Save-out the first 5 GB of the partition starting at boot sector LBA 4096 - Put that chunk back starting at LBA 6081 - Set the boot sector "hidden sectors" to 6081 - Change its MBR start sector to 6081 - Re-mount the drive/partition The new (old) alignment now puts a file header at the start cluster of each file, which is so much more convenient, I must say. And the fragments don't contain parts of other files, which helps. That 5 GB chunk procedure was a time-saver, as it contains all the rest of the metafiles, folders, etc, and luckily no data files near it. It can be put back at 4096 with minimal fuss, but so far it looks good at 6081. MyDefrag is handy for visually locating metafiles in relation to data when planning what to copy and detecting possible overwrite conflicts, keeping in mind that it reports only what the file system has mapped, and that the data files are not inside those boundaries if they're not aligned. But it gives a good overall picture of what's where, with zoom capability. Even if every metafile and log doesn't have to be moved, it's best to keep everything while we shift sector-alignment of the storage area. Since I don't know what can safely be left out, and I don't want the OS to re-create files or write anywhere that isn't already allocated to the file system, the partition should mount as if we had done nothing to it. Once the files are copied off, the drive will be zeroed and re-partitioned with proper alignment under Win7. Technically, the fixed partition is functional as-is, but the drive controller has to do more work serving-up clusters that span the Advanced Format 4k sectors it uses natively. Solve one problem, create another...

Ok, so you're going to read a book. The cover looks fine, the table of contents looks fine, the book has all its pages, and everything is ready to go, so you go to a chapter on the page where it's supposed to start, and the chapter doesn't start there! You're looking at the last several pages of the previous chapter, and have to turn several pages before you find the chapter heading of what you wanted to read. The partition in question is like that, except it uses logical sectors and is fragmented. You have to add 1985 logical sectors to everything to find what you expected to find. But all the fragment runs in a given file will truncate 1985 sectors early. You can run past the truncation with a disk editor and see the rest of the fragment, which is more obvious if there is free space or something very different after it. I went around and randomly checked several dozen files all over the partition, and they're all affected the same way. Nothing is "wrong" with the $MFT from a structural standpoint, so you can check the disk with any program and find no problem. It just points to the wrong places in the user-data. It doesn't point to the wrong places in its own infrastructure, such as folder lists and its own metafiles.

What's the easiest way to "shift the ground" under a mis-aligned NTFS file system? After a bad interaction with Linux partitioning software, a properly aligned NTFS 4k_cluster storage-only partition on an advanced format drive got hosed, and Vista re-built the file system seemingly from scratch. There are scant to no traces of any other valid file system except an abandoned NTFS boot sector at 63 (!) which references a $MFT that is literally all FF'd-up. The valid boot sector is at 4096, and there is no way back to "what-was" within the current file system. The data is all there, the partition checks out perfect, but the references to fragment runs are -all- 1985 sectors early! Obviously, that doesn't line up with the clusters or the files. My first thought is - can I just copy the NTFS boot/backup sector, $MFT/metadata files, and folder files, up 1985 sectors (holding their relative positions) and update the MBR? Is there more to this? There's a bunch of empty space before and after the data in the partition. Only need to copy essential infrastructure to mount and copy partition contents, or not even mount it and use Ghost from DOS to image a properly aligned NTFS. Could change the cluster size to 512 and recalculate every fragment run (hundreds). I have the output of Microsoft's old NFI tool for this partition, giving me logical sector-based runs for every file. Working from that, I can manually offset and concat each fragment of a given file with a disk editor, but that's a last resort. Tips or tools to make this LESS complicated?