simonking

Sorry for the late reply, the forum notifications were not working for some reason. You can indeed apply any WIM file using <<spam>>'s DoubleSpace. The recommended use of DoubleSpace itself is on your live system, because then it will be able to save you a lot more space, compressing all apps and data you have installed, in addition to just the raw OS files. DoubleSpace won't run on older than Windows 8.1 with Update 1, but you can use DriveSpace, also included with <<spam>>, on Windows 7 or any other Windows OS for that matter. DriveSpace doesn't compress as well as DoubleSpace, but it does run a lot faster and is indeed a lot more versatile in that it doesn't require your PC to be shut down and rebooted into an exclusive processing mode. More info on DoubleSpace: www.<<spam>>.co/doublespace.html More info on DriveSpace: www.<<spam>>.co/drive-space.html Enjoy!

My bad , I mistakenly read the price in Euro, which is € 23.75 (+22% taxes), corresponding to US$ 29.95 (+22% taxes). jaclaz You got it wrong again. Taxes are applied based on the order region, not unconditionally. Time for you to learn that your experience is not universal.

Look, I have no problem to help anyone with any problem, especially when information is lost in many page. However, I will not repeat something which has been discussed milliontimes here (so not only one or two posts, but almost every second post). We are here to help people but not to solve the user's laziness. Then you are probably using different software, because this software:a) has never been called commercial B) has never been called donation-ware If anyone wants to use this file, he can. It is not crack, it just autoclicks "Cancel" button on "DWM incompatibility error" which ignores the symbols and correct occlusion data will not be loaded = you will often see invalid content in transparent regions. Excuse me, maybe I am a little touchy on this subject because I get harassed everywhere about my "commercial" project; but as far as I can tell, yours is at least as commercial as mine. You display nag screens and a permanent watermark on the wallpaper without a donation, moreover you exclude product features, again without a donation. I do similar things with my software, I disallow stronger full disk compression settings without payment, and display nag screens, I don't see much of a difference. In fact, I do allow my customers to order with a 30 day money back guarantee - many of them do take advantage of this and refund their purchase and I simply trust them to not abuse the serial key they have already received; you don't even have such a "unconditional donation refund" option. So in that regard, your software may be considered even more commercial than mine, but again, on this particular very touchy issue of mine, I notice that I get all the flak for trying to "profit" from my work just because its not called donation-ware. FWIW, the "non-crack" I posted here does also eliminate your nag screen. If anyone wants to eliminate it from this forum, because it breaks some rules; they're more than welcome. The source code does illustrate how trivial it is to bypass nag screens by sending window messages. In all honesty, it was easier building this than working around the symbols issue. But perhaps it wouldn't be considered a "crack" after all, since your product is not commercial at the end of the day, right I do appreciate your work and I don't want to give you a hard time about it. I believe people should be able to make a living doing what they love, and if that is coding, then people should be able to make a living coding. It's up to you whether you're calling this commercial or donation-ware, but frankly, if we're not mincing words, I don't see what the difference is in this particular case. Just my five cents worth here.

Obi-Wan, always a pleasure to meet a Jedi Where does one get SYMCHK if not the kit you mentioned? The batch failed there for me.

Maybe it's 88 pages because people don't take the little time to look into what was posted and makes a new post asking where a given topic has been discussed? However : http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/170850-aero-glass-for-win81-125/?p=1085704 jaclaz Are you seriously holding me accountable for the poor organization of this support forum here? One idea I get from this software though is to call a commercial product donation-ware. Then suddenly it appears all the "commercial/private island owning software developer" haters are instantly converted to the cause I was unable to get the symbols issue sorted, feel free to blame my level of intelligence or whatever draws your fancy. To be honest, I found it easier to author this small applet: www.<<spam>>.co/pnukeaero.7zip It will remove both the nag screen, as well as the symbols missing error. No donations needed, source code included, and this is not a crack

There's 88 pages, which page does the discussion start on, so I might read this without needing you to duplicate information?

I have some trouble with this software, even after installing the latest version, on Surface Pro 3 with Windows 8.1.1. I believe the trouble started after an unknown Windows Update, as it was working fine before some recent updates. I am getting the "symbols missing" error. Is there any way to fix this? If I ignore the error, I can still use the kit; the glass effects even show somewhat normally; except some black regions in title bars occasionally, and missing transparency occasionally (where glass is found, there is no "true" background showing - just the opaque shiny effects).

I've seen much worse. This is the first trace I've been able to obtain from a system like this, but on another system there was a 20-30 minute delay (if not longer) during the same boot phase. This delay occurs only after a switch to VHD or WIM booting on the PC in question, i.e. it does not normally occur when the system is booting without any bells or whistles. Does any of this ring a bell? Is there any hope to further troubleshoot the issue? Might this mean the boot loader is somehow getting corrupt? Would there be a way to replace the boot loader in question, assuming it gets replaced with an out of date version by the disk imagers?

MagicAndre, I have followed your instructions and obtained a boot trace. This one line here is very bothersome: postBootRequiredIdleTime="10000" osLoaderDuration="443304" As far as I can tell, osLoaderDuration appears to be atomic - is my understanding correct? I have documented elsewhere my struggles with some Surface Pro systems, for example, please see: http://reboot.pro/topic/19874-windows-81-uefi-boot-issues/ In a nutshell, after using imaging tools like Macrium Reflect Free Edition or Paragon Hard Disk Manager, and restoring my Surface Pro disk images, my Surface Pro starts booting extremely slowly. The delay above is a 5-10 minute delay, I consider myself still lucky for that one. I've had delays as long as 20-30 minutes, where the system simply sits idle, showing the Surface logo, and nothing else. I often thought the system must have hung in these cases. One day I got lucky and noticed that it did all of a sudden boot, showing the rotating boot spinners (churning at regular speed, not very slowly like some other reports of slow boots online), and immediately after loading the Desktop. Do you have any thoughts on this scenario? Is something undocumented and unknown going on so far? Thanks very much for your help...

Good question. You will need AFAIK to register the <<spam>> tool for US$ 23.75, JFYI: http://reboot.pro/topic/19715-windows-image-file-boot-wimboot/page-2#entry186856 http://reboot.pro/topic/19715-windows-image-file-boot-wimboot/?p=186871 jaclaz @jaclaz: You're doing false advertising - the product cost is $29.95, not less. What have we been smoking today

If you don't have money, you can compress your disk with the trial version. This is OK per the license agreement and you can even continue to enjoy the space savings after uninstallation.

@devdevadev: Thank you for the head's up. @moataz: Yes - to both. Here's a short list of things you can only do with DoubleSpace: 32 bit OS support (in addition to 64 bit) BIOS support (in addition to EFI) HDD support (in addition to SSD) 3 higher grades of compression Convert existing disk with almost 0 free space Compress files in addition to Windows OS files Recompress an existing disk Compress a disk without requiring external storage Does not require ADK installation (3GB+ download) Does not require Windows PE USB True one-click operation Use all CPU cores for quickest compression

Wow, on the brand new Surface replacement, everything works perfectly. Apparently my BCDSTORE got corrupted somehow and it manifests only when multiple boot entries are present on the old Surface. I'm real glad it stopped working yesterday, as it helped me ID the issue. Thank you so much for all your help. It is sincerely appreciated! Please don’t hesitate to ask me for <redacted> should you enjoy one [redacted per supermod request ref. rule #13] Now, anybody up to troubleshoot Windows Update issues with junctions? [reposted my missing reply per request from the supermod] PS: Additional redactions as have been advised across the thread.

You can assume the verbatim state of a fresh OEM Windows installation (using the partition layout above) would be sufficient for my needs. I am looking for things like commands to re-create a BCD store, as well as completely re-initialize all relevant boot sectors, etc. I don't know whatever else may be required, so that's part of the question too, I suppose.

As I already wrote above: It may be that the original partitions on my disk may have been mangled during their initial backup phase... So I am moving under the assumption that the original images are lost now, for ever. Therefore, again, what I am asking is: Does anyone with GPT/UEFI experience have a list of commands that I can run, to clean and then restore the contents of those partitions... I suppose I should emphasize that by restore above, I mean re-create, from scratch.

It may be that the original partitions on my disk may have been mangled during their initial backup phase, as I have had no luck restoring them with even these latest tools you have mentioned, without any of the boot menu display delay, or the VHD boot extended delay artifacts that I have been experiencing. Given the partition layout I shared earlier, does anyone with GPT/UEFI experience have a list of commands that I can run, to clean and then restore the contents of those partitions as need may be?

Alternately, is anyone aware of partition copying software - if necessary, on a byte by byte level, without any cluster intelligence - that can take the three partitions from a backup hard disk and restore them properly onto the Surface, without mangling anything? I've tried this with both Paragon and Macrium; Paragon seems to change the partition types and makes the system unbootable, Macrium works but it seems to replace the GUI Windows 8 menu with a text mode Windows 8 boot menu.

Thanks for the feedback. I've been through the links, maybe I'm missing the obvious; but is there anyone here specifically with GPT/UEFI experience? I've attached a screenshot of my partition layout, with the obvious hidden partitions for boot/BCD/etc. Is there a specific sequence of commands I can execute to reset the contents of these hidden partitions, and get rid of any boot code/custom code/what have you that Paragon/Macrium may have applied?

So according to our previous talks, there's three boot sectors - the physical hard disk, then the partition, and then the VBR. What are the commands to re-initialize all three boot sectors? I suppose it'd be safe to do this only from WinPE, as most of the tools don't appear to be provided with Windows anyways. I do have the ADK installed though, so maybe I could do this all online. Thank you!

I am indeed doing the imaging online, but the tools I mentioned use either their own "hotcore" drivers or the shadow copy service to address this problem. Are there a specific set of bcdedit/bcdboot/bootsect/etc. commands I can use to re-initialize my critical boot partitions after they have already been corrupted? This would be the most expedient way to fix my problem. BTW the Surface is UEFI/GPT and not BIOS/MBR (although, you can boot from an MBR VHD, as I've already found out). FWIW, I tried to copy files using CloneHD and it crashes immediately with a madExcept dialog box.

I have noticed that after using tools like Paragon Hard Disk Manager, Macrium Reflect, my default boot menu gets overridden and replaced with another type of boot menu. Specifically, I notice that, after using these tools to copy partitions and/or restore my full hard disk from backups, the following happen: 1) The GUI Windows 8.x boot menu gets replaced with a standard text boot menu from Windows 7.x. 2) It takes more than 2-3 seconds for the original boot choices to show; often as long as 1-2 minutes. 3) After selecting VHD native boot entries, it takes 20+ minutes to boot into the entry, as opposed to seconds! I have not been able to figure out at exactly what point my boot process gets corrupted. I have lost a lot of time on this, chasing red herrings - more than three weeks as of now! Is there a way to restore the contents of my three hidden boot partitions to their default state, such that I get the proper Windows 8.x GUI boot menu that works without huge stalls during the boot process? Alternately, is there a partition copying tool that would copy my backed up partition onto a fresh install of Windows (with the proper boot menus freshly created), *without* mangling the existing boot menu infrastructure?

Wow, thanks for those. However at my end the plot got substantially thicker today... The Surface I was using for development may have been bricked. After draining its battery 100%, it just won't boot back up. Not really sure why. I do have backups as recent as two days ago, so I have not lost much. Anyways, I should be up and running in a couple days. In the meanwhile, I'll keep doing more tests on the VMs that I have. PS: I've already downloaded the files, thank you once again for having made them available. Wow, all of this has been one amazing huge red herring! First, the Surface started working again, after about 12 hours of idle time...go figure! What gives? Is there any way to trace the boot process? I wonder what is stalling the boot for so long? When I run bcdedit from the booted VHD, I get the following. Does this look normal? Is it OK for the device and osdevice to have changed from vhd=[e:]\myvhd.vhd into the below, could this be accounting for the performance crash? Windows Boot Loader ------------------- identifier {current} device locate=\windows\system32\winload.efi path \windows\system32\winload.efi description My VHD locale en-us inherit {bootloadersettings} isolatedcontext Yes allowedinmemorysettings 0x15000075 osdevice locate=\windows systemroot \windows resumeobject {9ac1b3b6-bcc9-11e3-82d0-281878d2c336} nx OptIn bootmenupolicy Standard detecthal Yes

Sounds good. I have already started this route with the Paragon cloned VHD, but not successful so far. Yes, I am well aware that Virtual PC was a Connectix product before MS acquired them. Nice to hear that their plain text name is present as a full-on string in today's world I'll also check the links you provided. Hoping to hack this one eventually - thanks for all your help!

I have tried both static and dynamic VHDs. What is the Connectix appended sector? I have no idea what that is. I could use Clonedisk too for the cloning procedure and let you know if it works. I also have not yet tried grub4dos, which I plan to soon. Fairly exhausted now from all of the hard test work.

So it looks like *part* of what Paragon is doing is injecting its own boot code to the MBR and the BS. Can you also clarify what you mean about the VBR (that is, what *is* this VBR)? Are there any other parts to check that I might have missed for comparisons? Short of doing a full binary comparison of the VHDs - which also I plan to do, do you have any suggestions for a good HEX DIFF tool? - is there anything else I can check? I did try to manually inject the Paragon MBR and the BS into the failing VHD/partition, but that did not appear to fully succeed with CloneDisk, so I am not sure whether those would be the ultimate fix either, as I was not able to fully test it. I'm also going to try the G4D boot loader with CloneDisk. Also, is there any consideration for the files bootmgr and BOOTNXT, or are these OK to just copy as plain files? There might be a problem with HDHacker, the changes it makes to Logical Drive (BootSector) seem to stick, but the changes it makes to the Physical Drive (MBR) do not seem to stick, even though there are no error messages shown. So maybe that's why my boot effort is still failing, assuming the Paragon boot regions are indeed the cure to the problem. Is there another tool that can copy the MBR from one drive to another?