Dave-H

Found a problem today when scrolling through my Instagram feed using Supermium. It got to a certain point, and then froze, and the tab crashed, saying it was out of memory! I tried again, looking at the RAM usage, and as I scrolled, it went up and up until it reached 98%, at which point the browser froze. So, not too great on XP 32 bit where you can only have just less that 3GB of RAM available! I would have thought that it would have started paging to the system drive rather than crashing out, but obviously not.

Wise words, I will let well alone!

Thank you so much, that seems to have worked! The sponsored posts seem to now be being hidden automatically. I noticed that there's also a flag called 'Experimental JavaScript'. Do you think that's worth enabling too?

I removed that years ago, it is of course now completely useless.

Thanks, there's nothing there which means anything to me, but it might to you! With this version of Facebook Purity, if it doesn't just work, as it does in recent browsers, you need to click the three dots top right of a sponsored post, and select the 'zap the ads' option. This pops up some 'are you sure' dialogue prompts, and if you say OK, the ads are supposed to be gone when you refresh the page, and that is supposed to last until Facebook change the code again. On 360Chome, nothing happens, and the ads are still there. www.facebook.com-1712413155276.log

I've put this here as I'm still using build 2036. The latest script version of the Facebook Purity extension does not work in 360Chrome. The developer tells me that this is probably due to unsupported JavaScript functions. Is there anything which can be done about this? My Facebook feed is now full of ads again after many years!

My 3TB disk certainly looked as if it would work fine. Unfortunately, any data written to it using XP produced a badly corrupted file system, which was unreadable in Windows 10, and vice versa. And that was without getting anywhere near to having over 2TB of data on the disk.

That's quite a bit of registry corruption, assuming all those ten system files had indeed become unregistered. I never use uninstallers, I don't trust them not to damage the system. If a program won't uninstall using its normal uninstallation mechanism, I uninstall it by hand, manually removing its files and registry entries, VERY carefully! Whatever caused the files to become unregistered, it presumably happened on my other machine too, which makes it even more of a mystery.

Thanks, where would we be without NirSoft! This does beg the question though, how do files get unregistered in the first place?!

Thanks, although being pedantic, I had actually already found that information myself! If I hadn't, I would have been extremely grateful to you, I can assure you! No more annoying pop-ups about unsigned drivers now!

Amazingly, I had already found exactly the same reference! It worked!

It is strange that this situation seems to be there on both my machines. I haven't knowingly done anything to cause it. A reference did come up about the catalogue database being corrupt. I tried a repair using - esentutl /p %systemroot%\System32\catroot2\{F750E6C3-38EE-11D1-85E5-00C04FC295EE}\catdb Made no difference.

I didn't format my 3TB disk at all, it was already formatted when I bought it, and I just used it as it was. It never actually had more than 2TB of data on it.

Thanks @Andalu. I think you're getting close to narrowing down the cause of the problem in XP. Whether it can be fixed is another matter of course!

@jaclaz @Andalu Back again! I've now abandoned trying to use the 3TB disk with XP. If you ever get to the bottom of what was happening there @Andalu I would be very grateful to know! I'm now using a 2TB disk again, which is fine of course. I'm still getting the annoying problem of the driver installation dialogue popping up when I mount the disk though, and it telling me that the driver isn't signed. As I found before, I don't seem to be able to override this warning, and I've done some further investigation on this. It now seems that almost every driver file on my system says it's unsigned if I look at the file details in Device Manager. This includes the Microsoft driver files using original system files, which should be signed of course. I've now started a new thread about this problem.

Just as a matter of interest, I just tried running the File Signature Verifier on the other machine, the one with an apparently intact Catroot folder. To my surprise, once again it said that there were only 227 signed files, and 2265 unsigned files, again including files like disk.sys! So, it isn't really any different to the main machine.

Thanks, but there's no 'Driver Store' folder on XP, only 'DRVStore' which seems to contain files for installed drivers. I think it could be what's used if you roll back a driver in Device Manager.

Like most of the references I found, this actually only seems to apply to the catroot2 folder, which is where Windows Update does its thing, not the catroot folder which is where the catalogue information for local offline installations seems to be stored, such as when Windows is first installed. I deliberately didn't copy the oem*.cat files from the other machine, as I assumed they were generated by third party driver installations, which would not be the same on different hardware of course. I assumed that Windows catalogue files, such as NT5.cat and SP3.cat would be the same on all machines though. Perhaps not.

OK, but if the catalogue files are not there, surely that cannot work. I tried installing the certificate anyway, and it seemed to install OK. D:\Users\Dave>CertUtil -addstore AuthRoot "e:\dump folder\MicrosoftRootCertificateAuthority2011.cer" 402.203.0: 0x80070057 (WIN32: 87): ..CertCli Version Signature matches Public Key Related Certificates: Exact match: Element 217: Serial Number: 3f8bc8b5fc9fb29643b569d66c42e144 Issuer: CN=Microsoft Root Certificate Authority 2011, O=Microsoft Corporation, L=Redmond, S=Washington, C=US Subject: CN=Microsoft Root Certificate Authority 2011, O=Microsoft Corporation, L=Redmond, S=Washington, C=US CA Version: V0.0 Signature matches Public Key Root Certificate: Subject matches Issuer Cert Hash(sha1): 8f 43 28 8a d2 72 f3 10 3b 6f b1 42 84 85 ea 30 14 c0 bc fe Certificate "CN=Microsoft Root Certificate Authority 2011, O=Microsoft Corporation, L=Redmond, S=Washington, C=US" already in store. CertUtil: -addstore command completed successfully. D:\Users\Dave> It made no difference, and unless and until the catalogue files are restored, I don't think it will do. Have you any idea why the catalogue files from the other system don't work? Are they perhaps tied to particular hardware?

Thanks @D.Draker. I'm a bit confused here though (not for the first time!) Isn't that to do with the Root Certificates, which are up-to-date on my machine? Installing that certificate is surely not going to reinstall the missing *.cat files?

@jaclaz @Andalu I'm getting the annoying problem of the driver installation dialogue popping up when I mount a disk, and it telling me that the driver isn't signed. I don't seem to be able to override this warning, and I've done some further investigation on this. It now seems that almost every driver file on my system says it's unsigned if I look at the file details in Device Manager. This includes the Microsoft driver files using original system files, which should be signed of course. I ran the File Signature Verifier SIGVERIF.EXE and it reported only 57 signed files, and 2525 unsigned. This is obviously not as it should be! I looked at previous logs from the program, and many of the files when they were declared to be signed, referenced NT5.cat or SP3.cat. They should be in the System32\Catroot\{F750E6C3-38EE-11D1-85E5-00C04FC295EE} folder. My Catroot folder's {F750E6C3-38EE-11D1-85E5-00C04FC295EE} subfolder has only 6 files in it. The equivalent one on my other XP installation on my netbook has 668 files in it, including NT5.cat and SP3.cat, which are completely missing on the main machine! I guess that's the problem then, I have no idea where the missing files went, the folder has probably been like that for a very long time. Because of that, I have no backup of it which would contain the missing files. I tried copying the files from the other machine, but it made no difference at all, the files are still being declared unsigned. Research indicates that there is no way of fixing this other than by reinstalling Windows from scratch again. I really hope that isn't the case, because I'm definitely not doing that! Any suggestions gratefully received. Thanks, Dave.

OK everyone, take a deep breath and calm down. All new members of MSFN, or any other forum for that matter, should be treated with respect, and not have their initial contributions considered to be ignorant or naive. People come to forums like this to learn. As the strap line says here, "Where People Go To Know". As to whether this forum is 'obscure', I would venture that all technical forums are 'obscure' by their very nature, compared with the mass market options of social media. That does not make them any less valuable for those who choose to use them.

Thanks @Andalu! Before we were so rudely interrupted, I was about to post that I've really given up on this now. I've bought two 2TB disks, and I'm going to use those for my backups, in two enclosures which I can easily swap over. Using a 3TB disk is just not stable or reliable enough to use on my multi-boot system. As we're talking about backups, obviously anything which might make the data on the disks unusable is a complete no-no. I don't think it's anything to do with the workarounds for handling GPT disks on XP. The problem is exactly the same whether using the Paragon driver or using the files from Server 2003. The errors are there even when the disk is connected directly to the motherboard, not via the SATA card. So, I don't think that they can be being caused by working through the card interface. As you are apparently seeing similar issues, I think it's just something to do with the way that XP interacts with disks over 2TB, which even the driver change does not seem to fix. It is apparently working correctly in XP, but generating a file structure which is actually corrupt, which is quickly revealed if you then try to use the disk on Windows 10. Likewise, a transfer done using Windows 10 is seen as corrupt on Windows XP. I really don't know whether that is resolvable.

Thanks for the heads-up!

On behalf of xper, an explanation for MSFN being offline for the last few days. An ingress of water at the location of the server caused damage, fortunately not to the server itself, but to the room's UPS system batteries, which necessitated the removal of power and a physical move of the server to another location. This obviously took some time to do. Hopefully there will now be no further issues relating to this.