Windows Themed Format-athon (WTF?)

When you get a BSOD immediately after login, you know you messed up with some startup service or file. You also know that long and dreary nights of non-fun filled activities involving smuggling your precious data files away from Windows' reaches, formatting and reformating, lie ahead.

Of course, one should not ignore the fact that Windows normally does not act abnormal without due provocation. But the causes sometimes are so varied and takes time to brew that you just can't point at a single software/file. I usually leave my favourite BitTorrent client, Azureus, downloading all night. Recently, due to the less than fit power lines (kudos to the torrents of rain), the torrents of files would stop because of abrupt power-cuts at night. Couple this with a slightly under-rated UPS and WINDOWS, et voila, you've got BSOD.

I also suspect my FlyAKite OS skin that I recently installed. But I am not so sure of that because I logged in via safe mode and tried disabling all services, uninstalling the said skinning software, moved mouse to usb, disconected some usb devices, moved the mouse back to ps/2, tried the "Most recent settings that worked" in the boot menu (though, as I understand, it will only get you to the login screen) to no avail.

Windows was beeping very strongly at me: "REINSTALL!"

So, reinstall I did.

I wanted to make this into a "Newbee Desktop Windows XP User's Guide to Reinstalling Windows Without having to Rebuild Data" (NDWXPUGRWWHRD). So here goes:

First off, it was Safe mode again to backup the "Document and Settings" folder and some python source files.

Before I had my this 320GB worth of HDD space, I used to allocate the bare minimum of space to the Windows partition. Usually lesser than 5GB. Windows XP has a special folder called "Documents and Settings" (D&S) folder to encourage applications to store all their data files like save games, settings, cache, user profiles, etc. I used to rage over this idea. I mean, if I asked a program to install in one folder, why does it store its heavy data files in the windows partition that is already bare on free space? But now, it makes sense, somewhat. When you want to reinstall the program files later when you reinstall Windows, or when your partition that contains the 'runnables' get deleted, you can still reinstall the programs and continue working (or playing, incase of games) as if nothing has interfered. So the lesson of the day is that "Documents and Settings" folder is good. Or is it really? There is a possiblity that your Windows partition hard drive may crash. In this case, _all_ your programs' settings are lost. This is the problem of centralization. But with HDD crashes becoming almost negligible these days, I don't see a significant threat here.

Unfortunately, it was not all smooth sailing for me. It was quite sometime since I last partitioned my HDD and this led to some partition confusions. First of all, I had an Active partition on the second HDD where I keep my Linux OS (which I hardly use). But the Windows partition lies in the first HDD's partiton which I keep as the first boot drive. I wanted to format my old windows partition and also awad the active partition status to C:\. For this I used DOS Partition magic since this was a raid-0 partition and can't be recognized by a dos boot disk. But when I formatted and started the install, my raid array was in disarray: *Who formatted my d: ?* (which was on the same drive as my windows was in) D'oh! That'll teach me to do these things while nodding off at the screen.

Fearing more damage and possible incompatiblity with win98/linux installation, I left changing the Active status for a later time. But now windows won't install. It kept saying

"To install Windows XP on the partition you selected, setup must write some startup files to the disk:
<disk name>
However this disk does not contain a Windows XP compatible partition."

The obvious solution was to make the RAIDed partition as Active. But I had another idea: disable the 'active' hard disk and keep only the RAID HDD. It worked and no more whining from XP that the partition is not XP compatible!

I must mention this little quirk with ASUS raid driver disk. A file called idecoi.dll (IDE Co-Installer) was not getting copied onto the windows folder during install. It seems this file is faulty in the asus's motherboard cd! Since I've installed Windows on my system before(duh!), I knew that this problem exists and that the idecoi.dll's absence don't worry any app. I even renamed a gif as idecoi.dll and copied it onto the system32.dll as place-keeper and later replaced it with one found in the website.

There was a rather pleasant interlude with one Suse, looking captivating in brilliant green. But that is another story!

With Windows XP back in the box and the remaining HDDs re-enabled in the BIOS, it was time to reinstall the applications to register themselves in the registry. But the D:\, where I installed applications, was gone and formatted (all 139GB of it!). So I downloaded and installed some recovery tools. I had more than installed programs in this partition: 3D studio Max files, video and movie files, some audio, some ini files, renders, etc. I tried "PC file Inspecter"(free), "Zero Assumption Recovery"(paid), "Recover My Files"(paid) and, based on a tip-off, "File Scavenger 3.0 (paid)". In the end, it was "File Scavenger" that worked the fastest and best among the others. I would definetly recommend it for NTFS-based recoveries.

Apart from backing-up the D&S folder, I also backed-up some settings using the *Files and settings transfer wizard*. It does more or less the same thing as backing up the D&S folder, but in a MS kind of way. So, soon after I recovered my d: partition, I reinstalled the programs and started this wizard to import back my old settings. But, alas, it goeth:

"The location you specified does not contain stored information" (!)

no matter if I pointed it to the same folder, its immediate parent or it's child folder.

Even my favourite iTunes's recovery system was behaving bad. iTunes has the option of saving the entire music library (including rating, playcount and other plaer-added meta details) to a special "song list.txt" file to be restored later. But on importing this list, I get:

"The file cannot be imported. Unknown error occured (-50)"

Reason: No idea! But since iTunes saved its config and song list in the D&S\My Music folder, I was able to recover it anyways. I just copied this folder over the one in windows as a whole(A mistake as I later realized), and we have normality!

There were no hiccups with the recovery; Firefox, Limewire, Azureus, Gaim, Opera, Mercora, Adobe suite, Macromedia suite and others worked as they used to. Even all the plugins that I installed the last time were there.

So the BIG lesson here is, try and back-up the D&S folder at any cost. Even take periodic backups of it to a hdd or a cd/dvd. Do this even if you are taking an application-provided export feature. Also remember that not all applications store their settings in the D&S folder. Among other things to take back-up of, the ini files in the directory where you installed the application is a good idea too. I did so with my 3D studio max and now it has the same UI and other settings.
(As of my writing, I had already done another reformat and reinstall. Details in next blog post.)