In the past month, I've come across a couple of mysterious and irritating errors in Vista that I managed to solve, so I thought I'd pass them along.
The first one happened a couple of weeks ago. People have sometimes asked me, in the past few years, if I've stumbled across something called the "WPD filesystem problem," and did I have a solution? I'd say that no, I didn't know what they were talking about, did they have some more details, and no one did, so I couldn't help. Well, for good or ill, now I've experienced the "WPD filesystem problem," and have a solution; here's the story.
I have what seems like a hundred little USB sticks that range in size from 256 MB to 1 GB that I keep things on and that I use to transfer files from one computer to another. Once upon a time, I could put all of my "what if" backup stuff on just one 512 MB USB stick -- my PowerPoints, the free PowerPoint viewer and the like -- but I dreamed of carrying around a USB stick that not only had my PowerPoints, but also backups of my VMWare virtual machines for class demonstrations.
So I sent Amazon about a hundred bucks, and soon received a brand-new 64 GB USB stick. (Picture me chortling maniacally as if I were Ming the Merciless and I'd just received my WorldBuster (tm) total-mass-to-energy conversion bomb. And there's no need to email me with the bad news -- I know, the 64GB USB sticks aren't the fastest things in the world. But they are pretty danged small, size-wise and capacious data-wise, so Ming's still happy... heh heh hee hee heh.) I popped it into my trusty T61 laptop...
... and was concerned to see the system announce, "now loading device drivers..." I was even more concerned when it revealed that it lacked a driver, and could I supply one? I mean heck, it's just a USB stick ("... even if it is such a wonderfully large one, heh heh heh...," he said, rubbing his hands together gleefully), why would it need a driver? I closed the "looking for a device driver" dialog box, only to get this message:
Step One in troubleshooting this, of course, was to find another computer running Vista, shove the USB stick into it and see if it would function with the other Vista system, so I found another Vista box and, sure enough, the USB stick worked fine. At this point, I'm sure that many of you are thinking exactly what I was thinking at this point: "ahhh... excellent." I'd established that it wasn't a Vista problem, just a Vista-on-Mark's-laptop problem. Next stop: Device Manager.
Back at my laptop, I looked in Device Manager, under "Disk Drives." I saw a number of recognized devices in the "Disk drives" section, but I did not see a USB stick with a yellow triangle or red circle next to it. Thinking that the whole thing might be a conflict, I started disabling things. What finally did the trick was removing my PCI Express e-SATA interface card, which Device Manager reported as a SCSI device. (Don't let that confuse you when you're smoking out a storage problem in Windows -- basically if it's a disk drive and it's not IDE/internal SATA, it often comes up as some kind of SCSI device.)
With the e-SATA card removed, I popped the USB stick into the laptop, and it --finally! -- showed up in Device Manager as expected: "JetFlash Transcend 64GB USB Device." I'm not 100 percent sure what happened there, but my theory is that the e-SATA interface was the most recently added mass storage interface and -- here's the important part -- there must be some sort of daisy-chaining going on between storage device drivers, and I'm guessing that whoever wrote the e-SATA driver dropped the ball on properly including devices added after it to the chain.
So, I wondered, what happens if I re-insert the e-SATA adapter while the USB stick's still inserted? Closing all files in anticipation of a blue screen, I popped Monster Blue (the USB stick really needed a nickname by now) into a slot on the laptop, held my breath... and everything worked fine. In fact, I've not had another e-SATA/USB stick problem since.
Anyway, the bottom line is that if you find yourself dealing with a WPD filesystem failure, then try to disconnect or disable as many storage devices as possible (again, save all of your work before doing that please), and then try re-inserting whatever caused the error. I hope this helps!
I said that I had the answer to two Vysteries this month, so here's the second. At Windows Connections in Orlando, I did a new presentation on Active Directory in Windows Server 2008 R2. I made it through a few PowerPoint slides without trouble, but then I stopped and talked about a concept for a few minutes (the new PowerShell commands in Active Directory, which are a real paradigm-shifter if you're not currently a command-line or PowerShell junkie but that are worth taking out for a spin), and then tried to advance my PowerPoint presentation... only to find that my laptop had frozen up.
This, of course, was the cause for much merriment amongst the audience, many of whom knew that I run Vista and that I regularly tout Vista as a fairly reliable, robust operating system. I knew what was going on, however, and how to fix it. Ever since Vista came out, I've run it daily on one or two 64-bit laptops, an HP and a Lenovo system. Both run quite reliably, except for this embarrassing lockup that occurs now and then. The cause? Power management on Vista. If I start a presentation with my system's power setting at "Power Saver" rather than "Balanced" or "High Power" and walk away from the computer, then Vista starts trying to save power, and that seems to be where the system locks up.
It's apparently some combination of dimming the screen and running PowerPoint 2007 that causes the system to lock up. The answer seems to be to remember to put Vista in "presentation mode" via the Mobility Center (Windows key + "X"), but I never remember to do that. Anyway, my fix is just remember to leave Vista in either the High Power or Balanced power plan when presenting. (I normally do that, but I'd been taking notes in sessions the day before and the meeting rooms lacked power outlets at the tables, so I was trying to stretch my battery life as far as possible, and forgot to set it back to High Power.)
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