Home | Web Design | Programming | Fairlight CMI | Soap Box | Downloads | Links | Biography | About... | Site Map |
THE SOAP BOX 1998/01/28 |
BACK TO SOAP BOX |
1998/01/28: Crash, Bang - Part 2
Continued from Part 1. Day 9, January 1 1998 I modified the Registry of the temporary drive I: installation of Win95 to point to the C: Win95 directories using RegEdit in Win95. A lot of work. I did this because the Registry always has to "point ahead" to the files, which have to be there already. Once these changes were made I copied the Registry files (*.DAT) to the drive C: Win95. I finally ran the C: version! Got my desktop and menu back, although all of the shortcuts were still wrong. Fixed a few more references to G:/H: in the Registry and altered some LNK/PIF/INI/BAT files to point to C:. Day 10, January 2 1998 Day 11, January 3 1998 Day 12, January 4 1998 Day 13, January 5 1998 Began the laborious task of changing all the LNK files in the Start
menu. I was stunned at the incredible waste of space in
the "Start Menu": 3,486,716 total bytes in 734 files 27,164,672 bytes disk space occupied, 87% slackThis illustrates how wasteful a cluster size of 32KB can be. That waste of space was typical. My old Win95 was 450MB of files which took up about 500MB. Now it takes up 650MB for the same files. Some directories that were made up only of small (less than 8KB) files have quadrupled in size. The net effect is that I don't have anymore free space left than I did before, even with the new drive! At this point, I was able to do the "paying work" that I had postponed. It is not possible for me to get back on schedule. The "data conversion" job has been cancelled until another holiday can be found. The "big$demo" is due tomorrow. I am starting now. Day 15, January 7 1998 WinFax came up blank because it stores paths in proprietary CFG files with no way to change the SEND and RECEIVE paths. Used my TREP utility to change them. Could have had checksums, darn good thing that they didn't. Day 18, January 10 1998 For example, many "uninstall" scripts and logs needed to be modified to point from G:/H: to C: instead. The "Stirling" ones could not be modified as they were in a binary format. Unfortunately, they were created by one of the most popular installers. Thus, "uninstall" will probably not work for those apps (if I ever get around to doing that). Makes me think that there is a big hole in these applications (and Win95) -- how do you move programs when you run out of space on a particular disk? Other programs used private configuration files, which are not in the standard text-based .INI format or in the Registry. These programs failed when they were run. For example, WinFax stored the locations of the SEND and RECEIVE folders in a binary config file. I was unable to accept faxes from a client until I could "hack" the format, which turned out to be too late... The costs kept adding up. I expected to find more of these surprises over the next several months as I used various programs. I probably should have fixed them all at the time, but there were too many to check. Even my Start menu has not been completely dealt with. There were 733 shortcuts in there. I have fixed maybe 50 so far. There is no automatic way of making these corrections, although Win95 does scan the Registry and warn you if you try to change the name of a directory that is referenced there. That is not much to help me. Lessons Learned As you can see, I highly recommend, no I insist, that all PCs be equipped with a duplicate hard drive that mirrors C:. Even my sister, who says that she doesn't really have anything "important" on her PC, would be very surprised how long it would take to get back to where she is now. In fact, she never would. Look at the trouble I had, and I am supposed to know what I am doing! I reckon that this may have cost me around $5000 in lost work work, if my clients (and potential clients) get in a bad mood. I think that $350 for a second hard drive is worth it. Advice to you: Go out now and buy another (identical) hard drive and install it in your machine. Then copy all files from C: to D: on a regular basis, two or three times a day. This is poor-man's "mirroring" - it provides an almost "live" backup, which is the only kind that works. Bill Gates has given us this big stinking OS that has no escape hatch. You have to make your own. Addendum Even one year later, I still have not fixed all of the dangling links. Microsoft now has a tool to correct the LNK files that no longer point to the right location. Their idea of "correct" is to delete the LNK files! Idiots! They should at least try to find the new program.
Previous: 1998/01/14 - Crash, Bang - Part 1 |
Home | Web Design | Programming | Fairlight CMI | Soap Box | Downloads | Links | Biography | About... | Site Map |
Send comments about this site to Greg at
gregh@ghservices.com All pages copyright © 1998-2000 GH Services Created 1998/01/28 Last updated 2000/08/01 All trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners |