The Perceptus Back Story

I was not pleased to see that the new netbook that I mentioned in a previous post, did not come with restore DVD’s.  However, I just realized that since there is no DVD drive, most regular people wouldn’t know what to do with restore DVDs.

Anyway, I decided to make a full disk image backup, in case the drive in the netbook crashes badly.   Hard drives have moving parts, they all die eventually, the only question is if you have retired the computer before it goes.

Without restore DVDs, my next thought was to use  the Windows 7 built-in disk image backup.  I re-discovered that this feature does not back up over  network drives*. You’re supposed to use  an external USB hard drive, which is OK, given the price of external drives. But since I’m not familiar with the Win7 backup tools, and in particular, I can’t figure out if it will backup the hidden partitions that contain the original install files for Windows and the rest of the software bundle, I decided to fall back on my favorite disk image tool, G4L.

I have used G4L (http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l/) for clients and personal use for years, so I strongly prefer to use it. Without a DVD drive, I needed to make a bootable USB thumb drive.  That was surprisingly easy.

To create the bootable USB drive, I  followed the instructions here: http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1224777260/0

As I type this, G4L is busily sending a perfect disk image of the netbook to our on-site FTP server.  It’s not quite a factory image (the netbook has been lightly used),  but it’s close enough.  Plus, the real restore partition is being backed up in case I really need to return it to factory settings.

* There are some tricks to do Windows 7 disk image backups over a network, one using Virtual drives feature of Win7, and another using iSCSI… but I digress.

Today, I learned more about Windows 7 and it’s built in software disk mirroring for hard drives than I ever wanted to know.

It’s virtually impossible to find this listed on an official Microsoft.com page (I can’t find it), but Windows 7 Professional has software disk mirroring enabled. In previous versions of Windows, software disk redundancy was limited to the server class operating systems, e.g. Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2003, and Windows 2008. Although, IIRC, Windows NT4 Workstation had disk mirroring, but I’m too lazy to look that up.

I spent several minutes today trying to find an official page that listed software RAID as a feature… and failed. Then, before starting this post, I tried again, and still failed. There are several 3rd party sites that mention software RAID being enabled in Win7. In the end, I had to set it up myself to be satisfied that it was true.

No, dynamic disk mirrors are not really the same as RAID1, but it’s close enough for me, and better in some ways – it should be possible to move a Windows mirrored drive to a completely different motherboard, for instance.

BTW, be careful with the entry level Dell Vostro 230′s, they don’t include support for Intel Matrix Storage anymore! Yes, that’s how this whole exercise started.

P.S. I just noticed that this is blog post number 101!

I’m playing with massive 20GB-90GB video captures from the TV tuner. You learn a few tricks when you start playing with 50GB files. It’s mind boggling, only a few years ago, the hard drive in my day-to-day computer was not this big!

Anyway, they’re HuffYUV compressed AVI’s. HuffYUV is a neat codec for video capture, it’s lossless, and it’s fast. I am transcoding these files to MPEG4 on the computer downstairs, but, Windows’ explorer.exe kept crashing every time I highlighted the .avi. It was either the massive file size, or something with the AVI. It turned out to be the code, HuffYUV, I think.

Installing ffdshow tryouts, which includes a multitude of codecs for Windows, including HuffYUV, seems to have done the trick! Plus, I’ve probably updated a whole bunch of codecs that were several years old on that computer.

A few weeks back  I discovered the missing menu bar in Explorer in Vista.  All you have to do is press and release the Alt key and the good old “File | Edit | View | Tools | Help” menu pops up.  I find this useful to get to “Map Network Drive” no matter where I am in the computer browser.  Otherwise, the only link was the  context sensitive button that shows up at the “Computer” level.

Only a few more Vista annoyances to go!  OK,  it would have been smarter to post this before Windows 7 launched; however, Vista will be running on this laptop until it dies of old age.

I have this recurring problem at one client’s site.  The setup is a small Windows 2003 Terminal Server environment, with remote POS terminals over the Internet – I don’t like this arrangement for the many single points of failure (a couple ADSL lines, a couple routers, a couple switches, a single server, etc.), but that’s beyond the scope of this post.

This client is happens to be running BBL, AKA WinPOS, AKA, WinBPS, over Terminal Server.  I have no comment on the software itself, it’s the arrangement of using it over Terminal Server over the Internet that makes me nervous – no, I had no input into this setup.

A further complication, is that the printers that the software uses, Zebra, label/ticket printers, have poor drivers that I don’t believe to be TS compatible.  They sometimes get stuck when the remote session is closed.  This eventually screws up the Windows spooler service.

When this system stops working, new Remote Desktop sessions fail to start properly.  After logging into the server, I will check the processor usage in Task Manager.  If the spoolsvc.exe process is using a lot of processor time, this is what I do:

N.B. Follow at Your Own Risk.

Stop the spooler service (no one will be able to print, but they probably can’t already):

net stop spooler

Open RegEdit.exe and browse to this part of the registry:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CURRENTCONTROLSET\CONTROL\PRINT\PRINTERS\

At times, I’ll find dozens of stale Terminal Server printers listed.

Export the registry keys first, to make a backup, just in case.

Then delete the Terminal Server printers from that same part of the registery, do NOT delete the local printers.  These are the ones with the “…on MyComputer … in session…” within the printer name.

Deleting these has worked for this particular server several times to resolve the CPU hogging spooler service (spoolsv.exe)… but sometimes they can’t be deleted in RegEdit.

Grab a copy of RegDelNull by Systernals, it’s free as in beer.

Use RegDelNull.exe to remove some of the entries that would not delete manually – I’m looking at you Mr. Zebra Printer Driver.

Here’s what that looks like (anonymized, of course):

C:\Installs>regdelnull HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Printers -s

RegDelNull v1.10 - Delete Registry keys with embedded Nulls
Copyright (C) 2005 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

Null-embedded key (Nulls are replaced by '*'):

HKLM\SYSTEM\CURRENTCONTROLSET\CONTROL\PRINT\PRINTERS\Zebra101 _
on MyComputer(from MyComputer2) in session 3\PrinterDriverData\Barcodes\(0x1701)*de 93

You get a prompt to fix the Null.  Say “Yes”.

Then go back up a few steps and delete the problematic printer from RegEdit.  With the null value gone, you can delete it.

Then restart the spooler service.

net start spooler

If this works, the spooler will start, it won’t use a suspicious amount of processor cycles, and the RDP connections will start working immediately – no reboots required.

Then go and find updated drivers.

I’d be glad to hear about a better solution… please comment below.