Restless C#ding

Oh boy is this one fun... so you like having your VMWare images (virtual machines) on a separate hard drive, so they run faster. You have your PC's OS hard drive on different physical hardware than the VMWare image. Here comes the fun part -- you love the portability of being able to move the hard drive from machine to machine, running the virtual machine on both VMWare Workstation and VMWare player. You suspend your VM when you're done for a while, and resume it later on, sometimes on a different PC. You always safely remove your hardware using the windows OS tools, until one fateful day.

You unplug the harddrive thinking you're done, when you get a windows error message: "Delayed Write Failed". Uh oh.

You've just corrupted your saved state. This is because even though vmware said it was done writing the ram out to disk, it really was still writing... this way you could still work in the background!

OK, you think -- as far as the VM is concerned, the RAM is corrupt (or rather the data stored in virtual RAM is corrupt). How can we get this back?

The easy way is to close your vm software of choice (vmware player or workstation), rename your *.vmem file (a file containing the contents of the virtual ram), and start up the virtual machine again.

It will die. You'll get a message saying the vmem file cannot be found, and there's something corrupt with the saved state... do you want to preserve or discard?

You should select "Discard", and then start up the VM again. This time it'll boot up, just like windows crashed (do you want to enter safe mode? no.). You should still have all of your data (assuming nothing was acting on the data in RAM as you were suspending, in which case you can add data loss to your list of accomplishments for the day.

Working on trying to repair a friend's PC, I've encountered a hard drive so toasted, the file system is unrecognizable. The funny thing is that there's actually no "click of death" coming from the disk, but even a FIXMBR failed to recognize the old school FAT file system ("unrecoverable errors", file names that are all smiley faces (!), and my personal favorite, the reporting of the size as "10,XXX kilobytes" -- ouch!).

So I'm installing a fresh OS on the machine and giving it back as a pristine machine.... sans all saved data, documents, personal information, and settings.

Makes me feel a bit defeated....

Recently, I swapped out the last machine I had on XP, a 5 year old laptop, to Vista. I even got my wife a Vista box, and things went mostly smoothly. Until she came to me one day and said things weren't working.

I dug around for a while, and tried to get into the management console as admin, sure enough a UAC dialog beep sounded, but there was no dialog asking for elevation of privileges. That's when things went crazy -- there was no dialog, but the system was still waiting for input. The screen didn't dim with the protected desktop, and the app that was asking for permission was hung. Alt-Tab worked except for the hung tab -- but no windows/apps could be closed/exited.

I pulled out the standard tricks to combat the situation, all failures, and finally went to safe mode. Even that failed to pull up the dialog. It wasn't drivers, it wasn't registry. Then came the last straw. I restored a backup of the machine from before the problem -- it didn't work!

Gave up for a night, and the next day she mentioned: "Oh, and the date's wrong". So I figure, ok.. i'll just change the date. But you can't because it requires UAC! I was fed up and booted into BIOS to fix the date, laughing -- at least I can fix this, I thought.

The punchline?

Changing the date fixed UAC. The machine was set to a year in the future. The worst part of this is that the PC should not have known it was a year in the future... is Windows phoning home on UAC requests? What's really going on with the time/date settings?