Friday, April 4, 2008
After starting Fusion into Win XP today, Win XP started behaving very slowly and eventually hung. I let it sit for several minutes but it was stuck good. I force quit Fusion and then restarted Fusion immediately. Now it lists 2 boot camp partitions when before I only had one. When I tried to open one, it said something about this will take a minute to prepare but I let it sit for many minutes and nothing happened so I force quit again. Restarted Fusion. Tried opening the other boot camp partition and got an error message: "Cannot open the disk '/Users /[username] /Library /Application Support /Vmware Fusion /Virtual Machines /Boot Camp /%2Fdev%2Fdisk1 /Boot Camp partition.vmwarevm /Boot Camp partition.vmdk' or one of the snapshot disks it depends on. Reason: Resource busy. (OK)" Quit Fusion. Restored the Virtual Machines folder from last night's backup tape. Restarted Fusion and tried opening the Boot Camp VM—same problem. Deleted VMWare preferences file. Restarted Fusion and tried opening the Boot Camp VM—same problem. Ran Disk Utility disk verify—disk is okay. Restarted the Mac. Reinstalled Fusion (I think this is 1.1.1) and tried opening the Boot Camp VM (#1 not #0) and it worked! Whew! Upon logging in to Windows, Outlook reported that it knew it had a problem last time so did I want to start Outlook in Safe Mode? I said yes. All seems normal with Fusion for now but it was a scary few hours there. Student reports the following error message after browsing the web: "LoginUI.exe - Corrupt File: The file or directory C:\PROGRA~1\Google is corrupt and unreadable. Please run the Chkdsk utility. (OK)." Error message now appears frequently, even after restarting Windows Vista anew the error dialog appears multiple times (repeated) over the login screen. Got properties on the C: drive and requested a disk check checking both checkboxes, but upon restart the disk check did not start—same errors and normal login screen. I restarted in Safe Mode and again requested a disk check. Restarted but selected "Fix your computer" from the F8 menu and it gave me a choice to repair the disk. It ran through a scan for several minutes and then reported "system volume on disk is corrupt" and it also said that upon restart things might be fixed or might not be fixed. Upon restart, the login screen appeared with no error messages—good. I logged in successfully—still no errors. Again requested a disk check, then restarted normally. Again the disk check failed to start as expected. Ran a full scan in Windows Defender—no problems. Restarted in Safe Mode Command Prompt. Requested chkdsk /f /r. Restarted in Safe Mode Command Prompt but again chkdsk would not start. Requested sfc /scannow which ran and reported: "Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files but was unable to fix some of them. Details are included in the CBS.Log windir\Logs\CBS\CBS.log. For example C:\Windows\Logs\CBS\CBS.log." I look in the CBS folder and CBS.log is 27 megabytes! Transferred CBS.log to my computer for evaluation. First line that had the string "cannot repair" looked like this: '2008-04-04 13:52:46, Info CSI 00000025 [SR] Cannot repair member file [l:22{11}]"autochk.exe" of Microsoft-Windows-Autochk, Version = 6.0.6000.16386, pA = PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE_INTEL (0), Culture neutral, VersionScope = 1 nonSxS, PublicKeyToken = {l:8 b:31bf3856ad364e35}, Type neutral, TypeName neutral, PublicKey neutral in the store, hash mismatch.' So this seems to be why chkdsk was not starting as expected. I did a system restore to the previous morning. Restarted in safe mode with command prompt. Requested chkdsk /f /r, restarted in safe mode with command prompt—chkdsk still would not run. Corrupt files specified by CBS.log: autochk.exe, tcpmon.ini. Found "How to Fix Chkdsk will Not Run at Startup in Vista" on vistax64.com which provided great instructions. It seems that 6.0.6001.18000 is the 64-bit version and 6.0.6000.16386 is the 32-bit version but I'm only guessing here. After I copied in 6.0.6000.16386 (and changing permissions on the Security tab) the computer successfully ran chkdsk upon restart—woo! Chkdsk reports: "Deleting index entry sqmapi.dll in index $I30 of file 137" followed by "CHKDSK is recovering lost files" and "Recovering orphaned file sqmapi.dll (7294) into directory file 137." Battery died at 70% on part 5, but laptop should be okay. Visual check of tcpmon.ini—looks okay. Tried unsuccessfully to find a way to search a network drive with Spotlight in Mac OS 10.5.2 Leopard—I believe this is not possible but nothing I could find confirms it officially. This is problematic because we store users' home folders on the RAIDed server which happens in this case to be Windows Server 2003 and it would be very useful to have Spotlight search where my documents are rather than where they aren't. Retrospect 6.5 for Windows error: "Can't compress Catalog File for Backup Set seagate 500, error -625 (not enough memory)—TMemory::mhalloc: VirtualAlloc(224.5 M, MEM_RESERVE) failed, error 8." I do not yet know how to fix this problem. Helped student NN with password change issues. Finished surgery on Chris's laptop. Prepared new homepage images for review for Susie. When I got home today Patrick was in bed nursing his allergy symptoms and watching Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle. Lunch was leftovers. I had had a sandwich late in the day so instead of having dinner right when I get home like we usually do, I got in bed with him, and we watched the movie. Afterwards I cooked a frozen pizza for both of us, but in only 15 minutes Patrick was already in a deep sleep, and I figured he needed the sleep so I ate without him. Hand-migrated 7 address book entries from my custom address book database in Microsoft Access to Apple Address Book. Apple Mail seems to be working properly for my home e-mail accounts, so I removed my home e-mail accounts from Entourage. Since December I've been using only IMAP instead of POP to simplify migrations and retain flexibility in using different e-mail clients. I'm not fond of IMAP's slow response times and often-quirky behavior, but the ability to switch e-mail apps instantly and relatively painlessly is well worth it to me. Recently I finished reading Garth Nix's Sabriel which sneeper let us borrow. I enjoyed the story very much, and I think the praise for Garth Nix is well-deserved. May the Force—I mean the Charter—be with you! Thanks again, sneeper! Patrick finished reading Pullman's The Amber Spyglass while we were in San Diego, so I'm starting on that now but I seem to have forgotten the last 100 pages or so of The Subtle Knife. I found a summary on the web, but that ending was just not something that stuck in my head, so I'll have to ask Chris and Nate for Book 2 again.