The culprit was Diskeeper! The reason that the iPod was being accessed all the time was the Diskeeper defragmentation service. Since the iPod shows up as a disk drive in Windows, Diskeeper keeps its fingers in the sucker, and refuses to let it be disconnected. I need to figure out how to disable that, but stopping the service allows undocking.
Woohoo!
Monday, September 17, 2007
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Damn Windows USB
I was having issues with USB flash drives on my laptop. It has been going on for a while, and I had just written it off as crappy drives that weren't happy with my Thinkpad's USB ports. Ok, well, I was delusional. They all worked on my PC, so it was clear that there was something bigger going on.
It turns out there was. The INFCACHE.1 file in my c:\Windows\inf directory was corrupt. Deleting it and letting Windows start from scratch was the key. All better now.
Oh, the symptoms, so searches turn up something useful. Whenever I plugged in a new USB device it would (or at least 90% of the time would) fail to recognize it. Most often this happened for USB flash drives, but only because I wasn't plugging in other stuff that often. Probably the cause of this corruption was the bad RAM I had shortly after purchasing the laptop, but that is truly just a guest. In any event, never fear. Deleting (0r renaming for the weaker sort of Geek) the INFCACHE.1 file should not cause any harm, and will likely help this particular sort of problem.
It turns out there was. The INFCACHE.1 file in my c:\Windows\inf directory was corrupt. Deleting it and letting Windows start from scratch was the key. All better now.
Oh, the symptoms, so searches turn up something useful. Whenever I plugged in a new USB device it would (or at least 90% of the time would) fail to recognize it. Most often this happened for USB flash drives, but only because I wasn't plugging in other stuff that often. Probably the cause of this corruption was the bad RAM I had shortly after purchasing the laptop, but that is truly just a guest. In any event, never fear. Deleting (0r renaming for the weaker sort of Geek) the INFCACHE.1 file should not cause any harm, and will likely help this particular sort of problem.
iPod issues
Already, I have other iPod issues, but I seem to have sorted them out. The first time I connected the little Nano to my laptop, it refused to want to disconnect until I shut down. Whenever I tried to disconnect the thing, iTunes told me that it was in use by another device.
After extensive web research, there was no solution in the offering. As it turns out, I was able to mostly resolve the problem by turning off the option to start iTunes when the iPod is connected. I've still had the issue for a few times, but at least most of the time it has been good about disconnecting. Hope that helps.
After extensive web research, there was no solution in the offering. As it turns out, I was able to mostly resolve the problem by turning off the option to start iTunes when the iPod is connected. I've still had the issue for a few times, but at least most of the time it has been good about disconnecting. Hope that helps.
Sunday, August 5, 2007
BSOD at shutdown
I just finished a few days ago fixing one of the most devious problems I've run into recently. It involved a computer running XP (localized in Norwegian, although that wasn't part of the problem) that was really not performing anywhere close to as well as it should. Sometime shortly after boot it would just start crawling. It seemed like there was some driver that was loading and causing a conflict, although it wasn't clear what that driver was. To top it off, there was a non-helpful BSOD at shutdown, making the whole thing a big pain to reboot.
What was it? After more hours of trial and error than I care to admit, I did figure out and fix the problem. At first I thought it was a conflict between Spyware Doctor and Symantec Anti-Virus. It seemed that when I turned on SD's "Kernel Compatibility Mode" performance got quite a bit better. But the BSOD was still there. And let me just say - having an option called "Kernel Compatibility Mode" seems, um, like poor design. That's a "we know that we will break the kernel, so let's just make it possible to fix it, but leave our poor original design the default" soft of issue. Come on guys. Just make the thing play nice by default!
Finally I found an excellent tool (DebugWiz) that helped me track down the culprit. Turns out that this compter had a Vietnamese AV program installed a while back, and when uninstalled it never removed it's device driver (bkavauto.sys). Now that the system was no longer completely installed, it was conflicting with both SAV and SD, and causing the BSOD on shutdown. Delete the file and its registry entries, and pow! Happy again.
What was it? After more hours of trial and error than I care to admit, I did figure out and fix the problem. At first I thought it was a conflict between Spyware Doctor and Symantec Anti-Virus. It seemed that when I turned on SD's "Kernel Compatibility Mode" performance got quite a bit better. But the BSOD was still there. And let me just say - having an option called "Kernel Compatibility Mode" seems, um, like poor design. That's a "we know that we will break the kernel, so let's just make it possible to fix it, but leave our poor original design the default" soft of issue. Come on guys. Just make the thing play nice by default!
Finally I found an excellent tool (DebugWiz) that helped me track down the culprit. Turns out that this compter had a Vietnamese AV program installed a while back, and when uninstalled it never removed it's device driver (bkavauto.sys). Now that the system was no longer completely installed, it was conflicting with both SAV and SD, and causing the BSOD on shutdown. Delete the file and its registry entries, and pow! Happy again.
My iPod woes
My wife and I just got our first iPod, a little 2GB Nano, 2nd Generation. We are a bit behind the times on this one, but I was finally able to convince her to get one when her old Walkman died.
Anyway, that's not the geeky bit. It seems pathetic to open with something I haven't figured out yet, but I wanted to write down what I've got so far in hopes that my first readers will be able to point me to a solution to my problem.
We have a laptop running XP (and Linux, although that's not relevant for this discussion) that we use to sync the iPod. We each have an account on the laptop, so my geek toys and things don't clutter her desktop also. She's less technically inclined than I am, so we have her account's iTunes instance as the master for the iPod.
Now, it turns out that it is seriously not trivial to share an iTunes library between two separate XP users. It is possible to share the files, which we already do, but I have had no luck tracking down a way to share the library files. Just to make it clear what I already did, we both have our library directories pointing to the same point in our file system. So we have one copy of each music file/podcast/etc. We only use one iTunes Music Store account. So all the music files are actually functional for both of us, and we don't need extra copies of any of them. This is all good. The problem is that the XML files containing the library (really the index, I guess) are duplicated. When one of us imports new music, or gets a new podcast, the other has to manually import it.
I've tried removing iTunes settings in \DaS\wife\[Local Settings]\Application Settings and replacing them with shortcuts to the same directories in my profile directory, but that didn't cut it. It just recreated the real directories and ignored the shortcuts.
It might be possible to that fsutil could work. I haven't yet tried this, but it seems like a hard link could conceivably do the trick where the shortcut didn't. The trouble? Well, it really seems like this is the sort of thing that Apple didn't design iTunes to do, which of course means that doing it is liable to cause problems. Each iPod is only supposed to synchronize with one XML file, I guess, but I'm worried that both of us using the same XML file is going to corrupt the thing somehow, and cause problems that will make it so neither of us can sync. I can't be the only person out there wanting to do this, am I? With luck I'll have another post reporting success or definitive failure soon.
Anyway, that's not the geeky bit. It seems pathetic to open with something I haven't figured out yet, but I wanted to write down what I've got so far in hopes that my first readers will be able to point me to a solution to my problem.
We have a laptop running XP (and Linux, although that's not relevant for this discussion) that we use to sync the iPod. We each have an account on the laptop, so my geek toys and things don't clutter her desktop also. She's less technically inclined than I am, so we have her account's iTunes instance as the master for the iPod.
Now, it turns out that it is seriously not trivial to share an iTunes library between two separate XP users. It is possible to share the files, which we already do, but I have had no luck tracking down a way to share the library files. Just to make it clear what I already did, we both have our library directories pointing to the same point in our file system. So we have one copy of each music file/podcast/etc. We only use one iTunes Music Store account. So all the music files are actually functional for both of us, and we don't need extra copies of any of them. This is all good. The problem is that the XML files containing the library (really the index, I guess) are duplicated. When one of us imports new music, or gets a new podcast, the other has to manually import it.
I've tried removing iTunes settings in \DaS\wife\[Local Settings]\Application Settings and replacing them with shortcuts to the same directories in my profile directory, but that didn't cut it. It just recreated the real directories and ignored the shortcuts.
It might be possible to that fsutil could work. I haven't yet tried this, but it seems like a hard link could conceivably do the trick where the shortcut didn't. The trouble? Well, it really seems like this is the sort of thing that Apple didn't design iTunes to do, which of course means that doing it is liable to cause problems. Each iPod is only supposed to synchronize with one XML file, I guess, but I'm worried that both of us using the same XML file is going to corrupt the thing somehow, and cause problems that will make it so neither of us can sync. I can't be the only person out there wanting to do this, am I? With luck I'll have another post reporting success or definitive failure soon.
Thursday, August 2, 2007
I can't believe I couldn't get BigDaddyGeek
Ok, so I have to rant quickly. BigDaddyGeek.blogspot.com was taken. I looked at it. Come ON! Not a sign of geekery around. That is just not cool. If you are going to call yourself a geek, and be proud of it, then at least BE IT!
Phew. That's taken care of. Now, this blog is going to be the place I put all the cool/random/stupid geeky things that I do. Some of these will be computer related. Ok, who are we kidding, most of them. My goal is to have actual useful stuff, though, like fixes for problems I worked hours to find. I don't like sites that have crappy content and then charge for it. So this won't be one of them.
If you like this content you can support me by checking out the Google ads that I'll turn on soon, or by just reading my columns on Dark Reading. Or hire me to consult for you. I do that, you know.
Phew. That's taken care of. Now, this blog is going to be the place I put all the cool/random/stupid geeky things that I do. Some of these will be computer related. Ok, who are we kidding, most of them. My goal is to have actual useful stuff, though, like fixes for problems I worked hours to find. I don't like sites that have crappy content and then charge for it. So this won't be one of them.
If you like this content you can support me by checking out the Google ads that I'll turn on soon, or by just reading my columns on Dark Reading. Or hire me to consult for you. I do that, you know.
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