Monday
Jul142008
No, really Microsoft - go fuck yourselves
Monday, July 14, 2008 at 10:59PM
So today I needed to fire up Windows real quick to look at something. VMWare is unhappy about something or another, and ultimately it tells me that I'm going to have to reboot the Boot Camp partition. Well I was busy right then, so I ignored it until later in the evening. Started the reboot (man, booting into Windows seems SO SLOW these days) and wandered off to watch some TV. Came back, screen is black. (sigh) I'll skip over the painful diagnostics - something is wrong with Windows. Safe Mode works, but normal boot (as well as the "Last Known Good" configuration, aka "has this ever fucking worked in the entire history of this piece-of-crap OS?") just locks up somewhere before displaying a login screen.
This is where I'm going to gloat about the awesomeness of my backup strategy. Throw in the BartPE disc, boot from it, hit restore, wait about two hours and blam! The Windows partition is back to a "Last Known Good" configuration that actually y'know works! Windows boots up, doesn't even seem to know anything was ever awry.
Whew! Crisis averted.
This is where I'm going to gloat about the awesomeness of my backup strategy. Throw in the BartPE disc, boot from it, hit restore, wait about two hours and blam! The Windows partition is back to a "Last Known Good" configuration that actually y'know works! Windows boots up, doesn't even seem to know anything was ever awry.
Whew! Crisis averted.
tagged Backup, DriveImageXML, Windows in Journal
Backup, DriveImageXML, Windows in Journal 
Reader Comments (11)
BartPE looks really interesting. And you've used it to rescue the Windows installation on your Mac?
I use VMware snapshots to do the same thing on my FED laptop.
I have had multiple opportunities to un-screw my windows partition by reverting to a previously working snapshot......
BartPE isn't the friendliest piece of software on the planet, but what it does if very useful and fairly unique. And yes, I've used it (twice now) to rescue Windows from itself.
I've thought several times about hauling out an old XP Home license for the express purpose of making a VMware virtual machine that I could snapshot. The problem is I have a couple of reasons where I need full-on Windows Boot Camp, so the Boot Camp partition would have to remain.
Ah! I ended up restoring the backup AGAIN this morning, and then I realized - hey nothing on the internet is working. From there I realized my firewall (ZoneAlarm) was quietly blocking everything, which lead me to this: http://download.zonealarm.com/bin/free/pressReleases/2008/LossOfInternetAccessIssue.html which says "Microsoft Update KB951748 is known to cause loss of internet access for ZoneAlarm users on Windows XP/2000. Windows Vista users are not affected."
So in summation, I let Windows install one of it's endless parade of patches last week, and it quietly broke my internet without giving any error messages to indicate so. Somehow that's completely fuxoring my VMWare. How exciting!
Oh look! Windows XP Service Pack 3 released TODAY. Not that this is related to any of my other clusterfucks, oh no.
Again I'd like to reiterate - Microsoft, go fuck yourselves!
(sigh)
Actually, SP3 was released for download a couple of months ago....
Well, Windows Update was listing it yesterday with a date of 7/15/2008. I believed them - silly me! :-D
I have watched several of my coworkers fuss with the Zone Alarm screwup. I think it a plan to convince some XP users to move to Vista.
You know, how do you get the current users on your (somewhat) stable platform to move to the new, more expensive (not so much) stable platform? If you are Microsoft, you break the old one for them.......
Mmm, I don't know. You have to be careful when ascribing malice to something that can be better explained by incompetence. I'm surprised that Microsoft made some sort of security policy change without testing against Zone Alarm because Zone Alarm is a very popular firewall, but I don't think they would deliberately break ZA just in order to push Vista.
Plus I think they know pushing Vista to the sort of user that is still on XP and runs ZoneAlarm is a lost cause. Nowadays the only reason to run ZA install of the Windows firewall is that you don't trust the built-in one. (I like watching when "Windows Genuine Advantage" accesses the internet myself - there are processes in Windows that the built-in firewall won't monitor, regardless of settings.) But that level of mistrust is going to be accompanied with a "I'll switch to Vista when you MAKE me" attitude, not a "I'll switch the next time something breaks".
What if the incompetency is not encapsulated in the actual coding, but in the failure to realize that the demonstrated malice of defeating competitive software packages is simply driving that subset of customers firmly away from Microsoft products?
Well, I think that we should be careful to place the incompetency where it belongs - management and/or testing. I don't blame the coder that accidentally broke Zone Alarm, I blame the manager that didn't consider testing ZA compatibility important or possibily the tester who didn't run the test right.
ZA isn't even competitive software in any meaningful sense either. ZA is software that makes people *more* willing to run the MS product in question, not less.
I still just don't by the basic thesis that MIcrosoft would deliberately "break" XP to drive users to Vista. By this point in time anyone who hasn't upgraded to Vista isn't going to do so. For an example, look at the case in question - mine. I never even for a second said "Maybe I should upgrade to Vista to fix this". I contemplated reinstalling XP from scratch.
I'm not going to say MS is above such malice, but I will say it's been many years since the last proven case (last one I can think of is some goofiness in the Win95 installer regarding DR-DOS. I think it's the sort of thing that happens rarely enough that you go to it only when you have evidence and there's no other explanation. In this case I think Occam's Razor says "Testing screwup", not conspiracy.