Replies

The command to get the product key had an interesting result. This box had Windows 10 Home on it and I (legally) upgraded it to Windows 10 Pro. (Aside, a non-profit can legally do this as an upgrade instead of a new install.) Anyway, the wmic command return the product key for the original Home version. Belarc found both keys, though the Prod key was in the “(Key: ends with XXXXX)” form.

We have lots of folder (and file) names with spaces. They all work fine on all our other computers running Win 10 (and one still on Win 7). It’s only this one computer and one folder that is failing. I think that next week I’m going to just rebuild that computer and be done with it. (And if it keeps failing after that, you’ll probably hear my scream around the world.)

I’ve run sfc but not chkdsk. Good suggestion. I have tried this with two non-admin accounts and two admin accounts. It fails with both non-admin. I went in and deleted the profile of one of the non-admin accounts and then logged in using that account to create a new profile. Made no difference.

Thanks, Paul. Reimaging is the direction I’m heading. Unfortunately we’re a church and I’m most of the volunteer IT department. We don’t have images. We are moving toward making the clients into dumb terminals and running VM’s hosted on the server, but we’re not there yet.

But why is it just the one folder that is going bye-bye? Now let’s make things murkier. If I rename that folder from “AA Current” to “AA-Current” it works just fine. Why?

Brian

Great list. For screen capture you mention SnagIt, a great paid tool. However if free is necessary, take a look at Greenshot. It’s almost as good.

I’m thinking that it is a windows 8 installation image and not a recovery disk.

Brian

Hmmm, no reagent.xml file. For that matter, the file RetiredGeed mentioned, X:sourcesboot.wim doesn’t exist. No sources folder. I wonder if this USE might have the install iso instead of being a recovery drive?

Doing some searching, I see a note that an iso will have the bootmgr.efi file, which my USB does have, and its autorun.inf tells me its for a 64-bit image. But the thread also says there is supposed to be a sources folder which I don’t have. Bother.

There are a couple wim files. One is preloadPART0001base.wim and the other is RecoveryWinREWinRE.wim. The thread says this should return the windows version:

C:WINDOWSsystem32>dism /get-wiminfo /wimfile:”K:RecoveryWinREWinRE.wim”

Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool
Version: 10.0.10586.0

Details for image : K:RecoveryWinREWinRE.wim

Index : 1
Name :
Description :
Size : 1,372,170,394 bytes

The operation completed successfully.

At least for the Toshiba laptop I’ve gotten a solution (with great effort) out of Toshiba support. I was able to duplicate the message my friend didn’t write down. It was from Toshiba Power Saver and said “would you like TOSHIBA power saving technology to turn on the Optical Drive?” It had nothing to do with Avira AV. I did a few hours of searching before I gave up and called back to Toshiba support. Called back several times in fact.

Call #1: “It’s a known problem. Reset to factory.” No warnings about losing data. Forget that, said I.
Call #2: “It’s a known problem. Download the latest driver for the drive.” Nope. Had the problem with the original optical drive. Replaced the drive and still had the problem. Besides which the Toshiba driver wouldn’t install. It’s for the wrong hardware.
Call #3: “It’s a known problem. Reset to factory.” I surrender. First I did a full image backup, a full file backup and Windows Easy Transfer backup. End result? Optical drive is still missing.

What the hell, I called a 4th time. This time I got someone what wasn’t a robot script reader. He actually knew what he was doing! Unfortunately I did not fully catch what he did. I blinked at the wrong time. I do know that he opened the Toshiba Flash Cards app. It puts a bunch of buttons at the top of the screen. You only see them when you move the cursor to the top and leave it there for a few seconds. The leftmost option was “ODD” and had an option to turn on the OD (optical drive). He checked it.

As for the rest, it went by too fast. But I will be able to edit this and add the missing steps as I just learned that the OD has gone missing again!

Is this a Toshiba problem? I’m working on a friends Satellite P775-S7215 laptop running Windows 7 Home Premium, fully patched. It may be a coincidence but after an Avira antivirus update there was a popup message saying something like “Avira has turned off your optical drive” (my friend didn’t write down the message). After that the Blu-ray drive was gone from Win Explorer and Device Manager. It would reappear occasionally after a reboot. We did not try putting the laptop to sleep. After trying several things we decided that the drive had broken and replaced it.

For about a month the drive worked fine. Then Avira gave the same odd message and the drive disappeared again from Win Explorer, Device Manager AND the BIOS! I hadn’t looked in the BIOS previously.

I’m at a total loss. I called Toshiba support and they were real helpful (not). They implied that this is a known issue and that the “solution” was to reset the laptop to the factory image. Of course this loses all the installed sw and required the data be restored from backup (yes I have a full image backup). I tried doing the “repair” in-place Windows upgrade but that didn’t fix anything.

I’ll try resetting it to factory, but I really don’t expect that to fix anything.

I’ll join with Paul and say HELP!!!!

Brian

Thanks for the suggestion. Handy Backup looks interesting, but browsing its site, it states that it can backup a PC to NAS storage. But it is not clearly stated if it can or cannot work the other way. I have all my data on a NAS drive that is mounted and shared to all my PCs. I need to be able to backup that network share to a USB hard drive attached to one of my PCs. Currently there is about 300GB of data on that NAS drive.

Thanks to all who answered. It really does sound like it is a PSU problem. I’ll open it up and take a look for bad capacitors. Then I’ll replace the PSU anyway. That’s a lot cheaper than replacing the whole box. As to what the box is, it is a Dell Inspiron 530.
– Win 7 64-bit
– Intel Core2 Quad
– 8GB RAM (4x2GB)
– TEAC internal 19 in 1 reader
– Seagate HD ST32000641SA
– Sony DRU-865S DVD RW
– HL-DVD+-RW GSA-H73N
– ATI Radeon HD 3600 video
– USB add-on card

Thanks, Paul. Sorry for the formatting. It looked nice before I posted but lost all line breaks. We may be up the creek as the oldest backup we have is from after this mess started. Brian