i'm not backing them up on my external HD's regardless of your state of dress.

This is exactly what it should look like.

Can you boot into Safe Mode on the laptop now by holding down F8 when you boot?

same error msg

Ok LJ,

At this point, I'd plug in an external HD, and pull off whatever data you can.

Remember that C:\users is where the user data is in Vista and 7.

We'll probably need to do a repair install on Windows, or at the worst case a recover/rebuild.

ok...

do I use the command window to do that?

what are the commands for copying files?

I have a 300 GB external that I can attach via USB

LJ,

You can use Windows Explorer. You will need to go to Control Panel -> force Install USB to get the drive mounted, and then copy the files over.

oh...and "last know good" choice in the boot menu is no good?

via the boot cd, i presume?

yes

i don't see how to install this drive through control panel...there is no 'add new hardware' option...., although the device manager sees the drive, and says it works.

as long as it sees the drive
 

As long as it sees the drive you should be good, and be able to copy the data off.

it won't recognize anything but a thumb drive. I have 2 external hard drives one 40G and one 300G. ' My Computer' on the Vaio can't see either of them...nor can any of the other file explorer programs on the boot disc. I have the 8G micro sd from my phone in a usb converter and am shuttling files to my laptop, and then from there onto the 300G drive....I have a 16G thumb drive at work...natch.

what a pain in the ass.

There is a "Force Install USB" setting
 

There is that setting, under Settings I think. Try that :).

Otherwise, it's a lot of unpacking and I apologize.

settings where?

Start -> Settings I think. Not in front of a PC with that CD now.

no such animal, unfortunately.

Plug the drive in and reboot. That should work.

If not, Start >System>HWPnP>"Force Install USB" should.

tried the start>sys> etc option first....

there was 'install USB devices' and Force install devices'

I tried both.... still no good.... rebooting with the drive hooked up now....

...although last time I did that it hung start up....

nothing is easy

goodgodalmighty, restarting it worked.

please to pm me your address so I can mail you some of jinx's oatmeal cookies.

kthx

I posted in this thread, don't i deserve some cookies?

ok, so now how do i get to the restore menu again?

i keep getting this now.

Send your address, I'll make a double batch.
Srsly

am i sure i want to do a restore?

do i do restore C

or restore complete system?
I think I'll wait to hear the answer to that before I do anything hasty.

Cheer up Jim, if the car business goes south you can join the Geek Squad with your newfound knowledge.;)

Restore the complete system. Then get a hold of Windows Vista Service Pack 2 and install it before you install any other patches!

Outstanding! Feel the power of the cellar! Woot!

I posted a joke way back when - does that mean Icanhazoatmealcookies?

In between snoozes this morning, I had a dream that jinx was sending cookies to like 13 different people.

Congratulations guys. What a great example of the power of perseverance.

I've got to differ with mb on this one. If you have everything you wanted off of the machine, I'd completely reformat the drive, do a clean re-install, and run extensive tests on the drive before I'd trust it with anything.

Pete,

The Sony restore utility takes care of that for you from a different partition.

Sony doesn't give restore disks out. That 8GB partition is what he has to restore the system.

The tests we ran indicate that there's no apparent physical issue. CHKDSK would have crapped itself many times over had there been one.

If you want to run physical tests, go ahead.

like....see how many pushups and sit ups it can do?

Ok. That's make my concern moot.

That'd piss me off, though. If I spend hundreds of dollars on a computer, I want the damn install disk.

bought it at best buy

Doesn't change Sony one bit
 

LJ,

Doesn't change Sony one bit at all.

The HD should be OK. NTFS does get corrupt, sometimes due to bad Intel storage drivers. That was the error you received on it. iaastor.sys is the Intel storage driver.

Restoring, which is a reformat, and then applying SP2, which has a newer version of the driver and its supporting framework, should help.

Thanks,

Mitch

Oh, I was just noting that I bought it at Best Buy because I didn't get any discs with it. I don't know if they cut corners like that so that they can be priced competitively in the big box stores. ...but i suspect it.

It was a LOT of computer for $1100 I think in Sep of 08.

Just what you'd expect from Best Buy
 

LJ,

You expect that when there are 3% margins. I highly recommend getting a copy of Symantec Ghost and making a backup copy of that Sony!

That was explained previously. Some permit burning that disk. Most users do not or ignore that option. Having you burn the disk saves them (ie Sony) a few dollars - proabably less.

As you have seen, essential to recovering a system is to have that disk - or something equivalent. Same disk that better manufacturers locate comprehensive hardware diagnostics.

Formatting is popular. Also called nuke'n pave. Does not make a system any more stable - except if the system is contaminated with malware that security software does not locate. Many do that when normal recovery software is never learned. And when discovering (suspecting) the reason for failure is unimportant.

lumberjim appears to have an intermittent problem as indicated by so many files and index pointer changes that normal should never happen or that are automatically corrected by the filesystem.

Reasons for that intermittent failure still have not been identified. Malware is one possible reason. Doubtful. Most likely reason for such massive corruption is hardware failure. In particular, a intermittent failure. That is what the system logs are for. Intermittent failures are stored in those event logs. Windows works around the failure. Characteristics (especially for intermittent failures) are discovered later by examining those logs.

If that laptop has intermittent hardware failures, critical information(how to avoid failures before failures created problems) may be listed in those logs.

Copying data via Ghost is highly recommended. Nothing says the failure was fixed; only the resulting problem was solved.

How do you feel about Mozy?

Hey Jim/Jinx - I'll make molasses cookies if you come and back-up all my pictures?

TW,

The specific error he was getting pointed to a very specific Intel driver, iaastor.sys. Drivers do cause filesystem corruption as well. This particular one is the Windows device driver for the SATA controller on the motherboard.

Microsoft pushed out a second Service Pack for Vista (and Server 2008) that corrected major bugs in the various subsystems, including TCP/IP and storage.

OEM vendors were not required to ship Vista Service Pack 2, as is usually the case with Microsoft. They require their vendors to ship machines with a new service pack within 30-60 days of its release.

In this case, the machine shipped with SP1. SP2 is an optional update, which IMHO is a really stupid decision on the part of MS!

Here's what's fixed in SP2: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=143706

There are at least 3 hotfixes for NTFS alone, 2 of which can cause corruption, not to mention the fact that if a machine blue-screens, it will take NTFS with it and cause filesystem corruption. NTFS may be a sophisticated file system, but if your device drivers are not 100%, and during a crash dump, when they will not flush out your data the right way, you will have a corrupt file system. Remember that this happens on ALL file systems, and that fsck is the same as chkdsk on Mac OS X, Linux, and BSD.

I had that happen on Christmas Eve with a server that our operations staff decided to shut down using the power button instead of normal methods. It took 5 hours to CHKDSK the volume and bring it back.

You forget that this isn't the NT 4.0 days. Device drivers are incredibly complicated, and I have seen higher-end hardware have corrupt file systems specifically because of bad device drivers. This has happened on Windows, Linux, OS X, and many other OSes.

I don't think it was a physical problem. I think that something got corrupt either due to the machine being shut down improperly, a bad device driver, or both.

I've seen file systems get corrupt on million-dollar IBM z9 mainframes, HP Proliants, Dell servers, and other machines that cost as much as a new car. Many times, it had to do with either a power cut or improper shutdown that caused the file system to have errors, and the device drivers didn't know how to deal with the errors caused.

The only difference is that Lumberjim didn't have 3 IBM techs taking care of his filesystem at 5 AM, and my employer did.

I like Mozy.
 

Mozy is good. GE uses them for their employees' home PCs, and I have an acquaintance who uses them.

Highly recommended.

it seems like I'll lose the recovery partition if I do this. are you sure?

No, the recovery partition stays if you use that to recover. Installing a SP will not overwrite it.

ok. here goes. omg omg omg

However, I'd Ghost the system ASAP after installing it!

Or better yet, get a copy of Acronis True Image. Ghost ceased to be relevant the moment they were acquired by Symantec; the great bloater/destroyer of utilities.

• Stand-Alone Version (x86)
• Stand-Alone Version (x64)
• Stand-Alone DVD ISO (x86, x64, ia64)
• Stand-Alone Version (ia64)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/w.../dd262148.aspx


which one?

Yes

For Iastor.sys to trigger a software bug, as mbpark has defined, something unusual had to occur to 'trigger' the defect. Above might be one ‘unusual’ example. Why unusual? Because laptops do not perform an unexpected power off. When the battery gets too low (based upon system settings), the system does a normal power off. That should not 'trigger' some otherwise hard to locate software fault.

And so this question. Why would a system suddenly power off? Why did the system do perform the normal 'battery is too low' warning to do the normal shutdown because battery is too low? Or does Sony not have this standard function in its BIOS?

TW,

You're asking a consumer electronics company that does not have the emphasis on quality that they did 25 years ago to do so. The batteries in laptops don't last as long as they used to. My wife's lasted all of 2 years on her Dell. This machine was a 2008 purchase.

When a laptop battery dies, it's often too quick for the BIOS to even give the warning.

I use Ghost at work
 

Ghost is one of the few products that Symantec hasn't completely screwed up when they bought it.

I will give you Systemworks, Symantec AV (now Endpoint Protection) and PCAnywhere as examples of how they have really screwed things up, but Ghost actually is not that bad. We use it with Altiris to build our images. Ghost and RDeploy make image deployment really quick!

Looks like it's working. I went to bed after getting the SP2 put on, and connecting it to the interwebz. Jinx was resetting her settings and stuff..


thanks a BUNCH, everybody!

and you didn't even get to use the sledgehammer -

Very impressive!

In an earlier post, lumberjim left SpinRite working. Then discovered it was only on batteries - did not shutdown immediately. That would be more than enough time for the normal shutdown function to see low battery and shutdown the machine.

Batteries in laptops were never intended to portable operation. Their purpose is temporary power - just like a UPS.

Laptop battery live expectancy is 300 cycles. A technology challenge that has major attention - was even a cover story article in the IEEE Spectrum. Getting batteries to 500 cycles is the new challenge.

From what I read, those batteries had sufficient life expectancy to operate the machine so that a normal shutdown could occur. It implies why the failure happened - ie the setting were corrupted or do not exist. Or some other reason for the failure exists. Or combination.

I would be looking viewing those normal shutdown settings. And, due to technical numbers is paragraph three, laptops should shutdown before battery drops below 30%.

(Same reason why the Prius does not let NiMHds drop below 50% charge.)

Tom,

Spinrite usually runs on top of DOS, which is instant.

I've seen batteries go from 50% to 0% in one second. No PC can keep up.

A laptop battery can go through 300 cycles in less than 2 years. After that, the batteries start having major issues.

Batteries in laptops these days have their own little "OS" and RAM to report information such as charge and number of cycles. They can get corrupt too.

The battery crapped out, the laptop did not shut down right, and took the file system with it.

1) All which is relevant to the still unanswered question - why did that failure happen and what should be done to avert it? Not just for lumberjim. For all other laptop users.

Conclusions that imply defective battery replacement is critical to protect disk drive data.

2) I did not find that IASTOR.sys update. How old (how long ago) were those four 'bugs' corrections?

3) This laptop battery is seven plus years old because batteries are not used as the main power source. And why that automatic shutdown should be 30% or higher.

I just want to point out that it is jinx's computer. Mine (HP-- the POS model) had a whole different kind of issue much earlier.

It would not be hard for me to not ever let it run on the battery, I almost never do... but should I get a new one?

And I really do want to send you (and Pete!) some cookies. How about those addresses?

(and jims HP really is a POS, he threatens to throw it at least once a week, usually because it's doing some update or another for long periods of time and/or becomes unresponsive. Takes about 10 minutes to restart. Simply refuses to install new software. And he says "wow, that looks so much better on your your screen" frequently.)