Software

Steam has this reputation of games re-installing 3rd party prerequisites on every single time you launch a game. Stupid, huh? Find discussion about that on Steam's forums.

The official Steam explanation is that there are so many versions of D3DX-library. Well, in my mind that really doesn't answer the question why there is a re-install on every game launch. You'd think that the library needs to be installed only once. Luckily somebody found out a fix for that. The trick is to edit/delete the .VDF-file which is pretty much the install script for a game.

Here is an example 34870_install.vdf:

"InstallScript"
{
    "Run Process"
    {
        "DirectX"
        {
            "process 1"        "%INSTALLDIR%\\Redist\\dxwebsetup.exe"
            "Description"      "Microsoft DirectX Redist Package"
            "NoCleanUp"        "1"
        }
    }
    "Run Process"
    {
        "VCRedist"
        {
            "process 1"        "%INSTALLDIR%\\Redist\\vcredist_x86_2010_sp1.exe"
            "Description"      "Microsoft VC Redist Package"
            "NoCleanUp"        "1"
        }
    }
}

It pretty much states that both DirectX and VisualC redistributable packages are installed every single time the game launches. A simple rename/delete for the file will fix the problem. Game will start without problems and won't do anything stupid.

The issue has been reported by multiple people for the past 3 years. Shame on you Steam!

For some unknown reason a customer's backup job hung. A ps axuww looked like this after a failed kill 3150 attempt:

3150 ?        Z      0:00 [mysqldump] <defunct>

There was no other way of getting rid of that other than a reboot. It didn't help, though. It automatically re-started the backup job and did the same thing again.

All customer's services were disabled, there was Suspend domain until backup task is completed -setting enabled. At that point I was really screwed. The backup job turned undead and all customer's services were out of action. Nice going! The message that was given from Parallels Panel at control panel was: "The subscription is temporarily suspended until the backup or restore process is complete".

Parallels forums had an article about unsuspending a domain. I did the same thing for a subscription. Apparently at the time of writing in Plesk 9, there were no subscriptions. So I ran this:

/usr/local/psa/bin/subscription -u customer's domain name here.com  -status enabled

It helped! It un-suspended the services. The backup is not working yet, but the services were running again. I need to further investigate the backup issue and get back about that.

My choice for creating PDFs is PDF creator from pdfforge.org. The price is right (free), all the functionality I need is there, operation is robust and source code is available.

However, something weird happens occasionally after a new version is updated. Printing fails with an error stating that MSCOMCTL.OCX has failed. The failure is strange, as it is simply about ActiveX-component registration that has been lost. Also fix is simple, run following commands as administrator:

cd C:\Windows\SysWOW64
regsvr32 MSCOMCTL.OCX
regsvr32 MSCOMCT2.OCX

Then operations continue as expected.

Note that the directory is 32-bit on 64-bit Windows.

This is a follow up for my earlier post about Acronis experiences.

So, I decided to get a new motherboard/CPU/memory -triplet. I did what I usually do, except this time I was using Acronis and this time my computer had fake RAID-1 drive from ICH10R-chip. At the time I didn't think none of this matters, I just went forward with the hardware upgrade. New components booted the first time without any real issues. I re-configured the existing drives with the RAID-1 and booted to the Windows for the first time.

My boot drive is SSD, and I have large RAID-1 array for files. I got into Windows, logged in, plenty of grievance as expected. Lots of new devices found, RAID-missing, etc. no real surprises there. I re-partitioned the RAID-1 drive and started Acronis. The idea was to do a restore of my previous data and go forward with configuring the new parts. To my surprise, Acronis announced that it cannot do a restore into my D:-drive. Initially I didn't think much of it, since Acronis said, that it needs to reboot and restore will continue. Sounds good to me.

After the reboot I was in a Linux-environment with Acronis pretty much automatically doing everything. The only choice was to abort the restore and two checkboxes. Shutdown after restore or reboot after restore. There was 800 GiB of data and estimate was 7 hours. I checked the shutdown and left.

Next day I came back to see what happened. PC was shut down. Most likely the restore succeeded and shut down after completion. I booted into Windows to see that there was no D:-drive. The partition was gone too. WTF?!

During following days I repeated the process 3 more times with varying parameters from restore. No results. Windows saw my RAID-1 mirror as a raw partition each time. No files, no resonable results. It would be fair to say that I was pissed. What a piece of crap backup software! The value of backup is in the possibility of doing a restore of it. This "fine" product didn't deliver. Unbelievable!

Next I got a Fedora Linux 18 Live DVD to see how my drives were visible there. Then the idea hit me! In out-of-the-box Linux, a fake RAID ICH10R mirror is seen as two physical drives. Not as single RAID-1 volume. Sure, the volume can be configured into Linux too, but out-of-the-box it didn't do that. What are the chances Acronis' restore Linux does the same? I'd bet serious money on that.

So, apparently in ICH10R there is offset in the drive if it is configured as RAID-drive. Many real RAID-controllers don't do that. A RAID-mirror is two physical drives mirrored and you can take either one of those and it will work as JBOD.

Acronis' knowledge base recommended doing the restore in Windows (sorry, I lost the articlea already). So, The next thing I did was to purchase a True Image 2013 Plus Pack. I got Windows 7 AIK, installed it, installed the newly purchased Plus Pack and started to create a Windows restore image. The image maker did something for a while and then "Error occurred while creating the image". Nothing more. No details. No log-file. No nothing. Completely useless piece of crap!

So, I spent around 9 days while trying to get my data back. I had purchased even more crappy software from Acronis, and had no joy from my new parts.

I went back to square one. Why doesn't the partition restore start in Windows? Why does it say, that it needs to reboot and go to Linux? WTF?! I investigated more and realized that whenever I create a D:-drive, it gets locked by operating system right after it get's ready. That must be the reason for Acronis to want a reboot.

SOLUTION:
I created the RAID-1 array, quick-formatted it as NTFS, but assigned it as H:-drive. Now Windows didn't want to lock that. Apparently my yet-to-be-restored data had something the OS wanted. The data wasn't available, but OS happily locked the drive while hoping for the data to appear. I did a restore to the H:-drive. This time it took 10 hours. Apparently Linux restore is much faster (or they both took 10 hours, I don't know).

After the restore completed, I just re-arranged the drive letters so that my succesfully restored RAID-1 mirror got the D:-letter again. A reboot and everything was fine! Uuu-jeah! Oh happy, oh joy!

PS. If anyone is interested. There are 3D Mark 20111 results from my box publicly available.