Dave-H

Anyone?

Can anyone tell me whether Windows 8/8.1 has a history of not playing nicely with large FAT32 formatted drives? I have a recurring problem, which while it doesn't happen very often, is very annoying and worrying when it does. As you can see from my signature, I have a mult-boot machine. My main Archive drive is a 1TB SATA drive, connected to the motherboard via a SATA add-in card. All my videos, pictures, and documents are on it, but no system files. Although I have the NTFS driver installed on Windows 98, so I can access NTFS drives, I've preferred to keep the Archive drive as FAT32, along with the Windows 98 (of course) and Windows XP system drives. The problem I'm having is that sometimes when I manipulate files on the Archive drive when booted into Windows 8.1, the drive file system gets left in a corrupted state, which I usually don't discover until I boot back into Windows XP, which is still my normal OS. Today was a case in point. I went to 8.1 to do some video editing, which was both reading from the Archive drive and writing the exported file to it. When I had finished exporting, I deleted the source file from the drive, but of course left the new edited file there. On going back to Windows XP, I tried to open the exported file, and got a message that the file system was corrupted and to run Chkdsk. This I did, and it ended up having to repair several files, which it saved in the usual FOUND.000 folder (why those folders have to hidden is quite beyond me BTW!) The original saved video file had completely gone of course, but fortunately it turned out to be one of the files saved under another name by Chkdsk. The other files it reported as damaged were two other video files which I hadn't touched when I went into 8.1. One of them was apparently OK, but the other one, despite having the right name and thumbnail, when played turned out to be a duplicate of the first one! Fortunately the drive was all backed up so I could restore them, but how on earth can this happen?! This has happened several times before, and I can find no reason for it. On at least a couple of occasions I have lost files that were then completely unrecoverable with Chkdsk. One of the symptoms I've seen several times is that I delete files on the drive in Windows 8.1, but then when I go back to XP, Explorer shows them as being still there, although usually corrupted and unusable and Chkdsk has to be run to repair the file system. All very strange! Any advice welcome. Cheers, Dave.

Oh dear, it sounds like your Windows services are in a bit of a mess! Have a search to see if there's any way of restoring and resetting them, short of doing a repair install. You may have to do that though.

Well I'm glad it was that! Looking at the contents of "avast! Emergency Update.job", it looks as if just runs the file "AvastEmUpdate.exe". Maybe try setting up your own task to do the same thing with the same parameters and see if that causes the same problem.

It may be one of the tasks you've got scheduled that is causing the problem. To check that try moving all the files temporarily out of the C:\Windows\Tasks folder, including the hidden sa.dat file. Does the service run then? If it makes no difference just put the files back and nothing should have been lost. To properly access all the files in the Tasks folder you will have to use the Recovery Console, or some other file manager than Explorer, as it is a "special" folder. If you can't do that, remove its attributes and you should then be able to access it like a normal folder.

I've just checked, and everything seems to be OK with the Task Scheduler here.

Did you mean SP3 or SP4? I assume this is the same machine that you had the Print Spooler problem with? Did you mean RPC, not RCP? RPC is the Remote Procedure Call service. Again check in your Services list that it's present and running (again it should be set to Automatic).

Yes, the plural issue is extremely confusing! Do you say something is "in quotation markS" because there's two marks, at the beginning and at the end of the quotation, or because each mark is a double mark (two flipped over (inverted) commas side by side)?! The joys of the English language........

To me, as someone British, <"> is an inverted comma, or quotation mark (normally plural as in prose there's always two of them of course, not just because it's a double mark), and <'> is an apostrophe! I only use <'> as a quotation mark in computer file names (because you can't use <">) and where there is a quote within a quote.

I've just updated the dlls to version 13, and there seems to be no problems. Thanks @jumper!

Is the Print Spooler service running? If not, what happens when you try to start it? It should be in Automatic mode and be running all the time.

Thanks! I saw that update on Windows 7 and 8.1 machines, and was about to go a look for the standalone version to update it on XP. You saved me the trouble!

Hi @xper, did you get anywhere with this, nothing has changed?!

I don't use Firefox as my primary browser, I keep it along with several others to test the websites that I maintain. As such, I actually only use it quite rarely, although I do like to keep it up to date, but I can't say that I've noticed any problems with it up until now.

OK, I found the culprit! I checked in Windows Safe Mode, and Firefox 47 ran fine. To cut a long story short, Firefox is being stopped from running by my online banking protection software, Trusteer Rapport (now part of IBM). If I disable it Firefox 47 runs fine. Firefox 46 runs fine even with it enabled, but not 47. I guess it's a problem with its browser integration, which appears as an icon by the address bar, although unlike in some other browsers it doesn't appear as a listed extension. There's no point in reporting this to Trusteer, as they dropped support for XP some months ago, and they won't want to know! I will report it on the Mozilla forums though and see what they say. So, not a Windows XP problem at all. Please feel free to move this thread elsewhere! Cheers, Dave.

Well that explains why I didn't see it, as I have AdBlock installed! I suggest you do the same @Roffen.

Hi Den! Good to know that it's not an intrinsic problem, I didn't think it could be or others would have shouted by now. As I said, I have already tried with the offline installer, with the same result. It appears to install fine, but when you click OK at the end with the run option ticked, the installer exits but nothing else happens. I'm not quite sure how to completely disable EMET short of completely uninstalling it, but as I said turning its DEP off and removing Firefox from the list of monitored applications makes no difference to the problem.

I just today ran Firefox 46 for the first time in a while, and it prompted me to upgrade to version 47. Firefox updates have never been a problem in the past, but not this time! It went through the normal upgrade motions, then said that the partial upgrade had failed and that it would need to do a full upgrade. This I have seen before, and it's always worked. This time it downloaded and tried to install the full update, and immediately a massive number of continuous DEP violation errors started popping up from EMET, which did not stop until I disabled EMET. When I tried to then run Firefox, nothing happened, and this was the same after a reboot, even with Firefox removed from EMET monitoring, and DEP disabled in EMET. I then tried downloading the full offline installer of Firefox 47, which appeared to install fine, but it still wouldn't actually run. Firefox.exe appears briefly in the task manager, and then vanishes again. I then tried uninstalling Firefox completely, and its folder completely disappeared. A new clean install of 47 did exactly the same thing, apparently installed fine but then would not run. I then replaced the Firefox folder with a backup, and restored a backup of the registry, and I now have 46 back and running fine, with EMET back to its normal settings! Anyone any idea what's happening here? There is no evidence that Firefox 47 doesn't still support XP, and I would expect the installer to tell me that anyway if it was the case, and I don't think that EMET is causing the problem. It has always played nicely with Firefox once I got the settings right. I can't find any reference to any problems like this on the Mozilla forums, and Firefox 47 has been out for quite a while now so if there was a problem surely others would have reported it by now. I don't use Firefox as my default browser, so it's not that big a deal, but this is very puzzling. Any suggestions gratefully received. Cheers, Dave.

That page looks fine here in Firefox 46.0.1 under XP. I don't have SP4 installed though. The only thing I can see where your block of code is between "....from what they hear" and "Story Source:" is a thin grey horizontal line.

Well as I said earlier, the Slimjet developers seem to have managed it!

Glad they arrived! I wouldn't have expected them until now.

I normally don't see the system tray yellow shield until the Wednesday morning after Patch Tuesday, and I don't usually do anything until then. I've just checked Microsoft Update manually, and there are ten updates there, so my system registry settings are fine. I'll wait and see if the shield appears tomorrow morning, I have found it a sod to get rid of sometimes if you do things before it's triggered. Even then it can go away and then reappear wanting to install a couple of updates that are already installed, and I've known it take a few days to go away properly!

Nothing here in England yet either, but I wouldn't expect to see anything here until tomorrow morning.

Slimjet 10 is now using Chromium 50, and still works fine on XP so it can certainly be done! Whether they will be able to use 51 and later versions too remains to be seen, but they are intending to carry on supporting XP and Vista.