Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Mon Apr 06, 2009 10:00 pm

I could write another Blog article about this, but I'm too pissed.

Vista crashed today. Some sort of lockup that required me to power-down the computer. When I restarted, Vista didn't load my user profile. Instead, it gave the infamous "A Temporary Profile has been created..." nonsense. When making a backup of my previous user profile, it gave an I/O error when trying to copy the previous ntuser.dat file. I copied everything except this file, then recreated my user profile, and then restored the files.

It's a really good thing that I actually *copied* all of my existing /users/myuser files. Because I also renamed the old /users/myuser directory to /users/myuser_bak. But when I rebooted Vista and let it recreate my user profile, it didn't just create a *new* directory named /users/myuser...it actually renamed and OVERWROTE the /users/myuser_bak file. Probably had some hard link to the directory instead of just using the directory name itself. If I hadn't made a backup copy of the files in this directory, I would have lost EVERYTHING (and been even more pissed).

However, the ntuser.dat file is VERY important. None of the sites that talk about recovering your user profile seem to mention the fact that this file (which you never copy when recovering a profile) contains all of your user-specific system preferences. When you recreate your user profile, you lose ALL of your user-specific settings!!!! And since Vista overwrote the /users/myuser_bak, I can't even try to access the old ntuser.dat file to try and recover part of it.

OK, stuff like desktop background etc I can deal with. But here's the bad part...ALL of the Delphi preferences (like what 3rd party components are installed, etc) are stored in this user-specific registry file.

This is EXACTLY WHY I HATE THE WINDOWS REGISTRY!!!! If software was allowed to store user preferences in application-specific *.INI files, like the old days, then we wouldn't have the problem of putting EVERYTHING into the damn system registry. Microsoft claims that they use transactions for modifying this database so that it can't get corrupted. That's *bull*. Powering off the computer when Windows is hung shouldn't cause the registry to get corrupted like this...EVER.

The only way I seem to be able to recover from this is to open a previous version of NTUSER.DAT with RegEdit and then export the keys that I need for various software, and then try to import that into the new user profile registry. You can't just copy the backup of NTUSER.DAT to the current profile...Vista refuses to load it and again creates a temporary user profile. It says the old profile is "corrupted", but it really just means that it is "inconsistent".

I have no idea how long this is going to take to fix. It was really the last straw. I'm so stressed these days that I just want to throw all of our computers out the window and move somewhere where they have never heard of computers.

Posted: Mon Apr 06, 2009 10:58 pm

I feel for you Zugg.
I'ld say I don't know why companies/programmers buy into the Microsoft way but i think we know why they do.

These days user settings is actually a pretty stupid idea imho. It's computers to user ratio not users to computer, and everyone uses same computer 99% of the time. .ini or .xml config/settings files would be much easier to backup and transfer.

Unfortunately, i understand the need for a centralized library of where what is in the case of COM and a good number of windows settings. That said, windows registry sucks for most any reason you can pick.

Adept Joined: 18 Dec 2005 Posts: 246

I know nothing about the registry problems, but "somewhere where they have never heard of computers." would be here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYJKd0rkKss I suggest renting it "Alone In The Wilderness".

Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2009 5:07 am

If Windows has already crashed, powering down wouldn't affect anything.

I'm surprised a software vendor like yourself hasn't come up with a decent backup solution either, without being able to vouch for quality there are heaps on the market to play with - both free and paid for. Something must strike you as being worthwhile, surely? (Infrequent reader, I don't game as much as I used to since I entered the game design world)

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

I had that happen to me once but can't remember what I did to fix it now. It was very scary at the time, I thought I would be reformatting my entire system. I did manage to get it all back somehow, I should have saved that web page just in case it happened again... it turned out to be a simple fix, but I can't remember what steps I had to take, sorry.

With .NET, XML config files are coming back in a big way - it's the preferred way of saving settings these days, although you can still use the registry if you write your own code rather than using the automatically generated XML files. Doesn't help for not .NET apps, but it could be considered a step in the right direction.

Still, that does leave pretty much all native apps using the registry which is annoying.

Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2009 9:56 am

Seamer: he does mention making a backup of the user data, it gives an I/O error. And even if it had, it looks like Vista won't import an old ntuser.dat anyway.

Magician Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 459 Location: USA

Wizard Joined: 22 Mar 2007 Posts: 2320

But Pennsic is only 2 weeks a year. We need an entire country called Pennsic.

Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2009 2:14 pm

To combat things such as this I take an image of my programs drive when I have everything setup. Data is kept on a separate drive. If anything ever happens to the system drive I just restore it from the backup. Since data is on a separate partition it is unaffected by a program drive restore.

Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2009 3:15 pm

Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2009 5:03 pm

Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2009 6:12 pm

I never said you were an idiot, I only expressed curiosity at so much effort in the user profile being lost so easily. I'm one of those Vista users who've had the same installation since Vista was released, without needing to do any repairs/reinstallations or whatever else to fix the OS.

At the same time, after using 98ME and its predecessors I've also gained the habit of not being too tied to my user profile (XP was more stable, but not as much as Vista so far). If I lost delphi configs the way you did, I'd just tell delphi to piss off and look for an alternative. That wouldn't work in your case, but since you're using Acronis and still having image backup/restore issues I'd also either bug them to fix it or look for an alternative. There are some solutions that power down to a restart+dos box and backup from there so all files are available without the OS saying 'haha no, its locked sucker'.

Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2009 6:32 pm

Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2009 8:55 pm

I think you overlooked what I said about finding an alternative to Delphi - I do believe I said in your case it's unfeasible.

Software can be frustrating, and text does not convey the intent behind the questions I've asked. I can sit here and say 'crap, Z lost time on the cmud build' or I can say 'what can we do to prevent this happening again?'.

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

I found the blog post that helped me back in the day -- http://cherrybyte.blogspot.com/2007/07/fixing-user-profiles-in-vista.html

I'm pretty sure it was just a matter of setting that refcount and state to 0, then windows thought the profile was OK again and resumed working. Not sure if that will help in your instance, apparently that hasn't fixed some folkses problems.

Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2009 3:32 am

Yep Rainchild, I actually found that link in my searching about profile corruption. And yes, I did need to run RegEdit and remove the .bak from the profile name.

Today we were out interviewing various new cats. But on Tuesday, I did get most of my user settings restored. At least for Delphi, Dreamweaver, and my PhpEd program. The PhpEd program actually lost it's entire license key data and I had to get a new license key for it, but it's working again. Dreamweaver lost all of it's "site profiles" and various user settings. But I got those all restored.

As mentioned, I just did one program at a time by exporting from the old ntuser.dat and importing into the new file. I didn't touch anything in the "Microsoft" registry tree, so I ended up setting all my Outlook preferences again manually (fortunately it just connects to our IMAP email server and doesn't do anything local). I'm sure there are settings in Microsoft Word that I'll have to change again manually (like turning off various auto-reformat options). But I can do those as needed.

Delphi was the most complicated, but I've got CMUD compiling again, and I verified that my Armadillo and NSIS Install programs all work again. I'll be bug fixing Thursday and Friday but I'm not going to try to rush any release.