Mystery Drive Q…

After a good deal of head scratch­ing, we were able to fix this issue. In one instance, this prob­lem was caused by the install of Office 2010, if this is what in fact led you to this arti­cle, you’re in for a good deal more head scratch­ing, to the point of a bleed­ing scalp. Another issue we encoun­tered with roots in our Office 2010 install, was that sub­se­quent attempts to install pro­grams, even unre­lated pro­grams, led failed installs. We were able to track this prob­lem to mul­ti­ple reg­istry keys hav­ing per­mis­sion errors. So in essence, this caused the reg­istry keys to become unchange­able in the eyes of the “Trusted Installer Ser­vice”. In one case it even led to the refor­mat­ting of an entire system.

OK, now for you’re sil­ver lin­ing. The good news is, we did suc­ceed in resolv­ing a few of these issues. But relis­ti­cally, if you have reg­istry key per­mis­sion errors, reg­istry dam­age has been done. In which case a sys­tem restore may be your only hope. Hav­ing said that, any com­ments related your efforts with a sim­i­lar repair would be greatly appre­ci­ated by all.

So lets get started. If in fact your issue is Office 2010 related, than the prob­lem most likely relates to “Appli­ca­tion Vir­tu­al­iza­tion” which is a com­po­nent of Office 2010. Specif­i­cally their tool to “Cre­ate a Portable Office 2010 Flash Drive”, which was used to cre­ate a portable 2010 usb drive on one of our machines.

In any case, our first sug­ges­tion would be to down­load and run Ccleaner. Run both the cache cleaner and the reg­istry cleaner in “Ccleaner”. Nor­mally we’re not big fans reg­istry clean­ers, but Cclean­ers pretty tame and very user friendly. And always remem­ber to set a restore point, as well as backup your registry.

Our first attempts at a repair were to delete the keys stored at

1

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup\MountedDevices

As well as var­i­ous other loca­tions. But attempt­ing to man­u­ally delete the related reg­istry keys only remove the drive tem­porar­ily. After a sys­tem restart, the dri­ves would reaper.

Next we installed “Appli­ca­tion Vir­tu­al­iza­tion”. The goal here was to try to over­write bad reg­istry keys, with ones from the installer. Once the pro­grams installed we sug­gest that you restart your machine. After restart­ing the com­puter, remove the pro­gram using “Pro­grams and Fea­tures”. Run Ccleaner again, reg­istry and cache, restart, and let us know if this fixed it.

If that doesn’t work, another method we used was installing Dae­mon Tools. Again with the hopes of over writ­ing bad reg­istry keys. We used DAEMON Tools Lite. There was a point in time when the use of this pro­gram was a hor­ri­ble idea, and was like com­puter sui­cide. But we’ll admit that their prod­uct has come a long way. The installer seemed to do a pretty fair job of clean­ing up after itself, leav­ing very few stray reg­istry keys, and pro­gram fold­ers behind.

If all else fails there’s always the Microsofts Office Removal Tools. This should unin­stall every trace of office from you’re sys­tem, and in most cases is a viable option. Sadly, in the case of the most dam­aged machine we ser­viced, the shear vol­ume of locked reg­istry keys forced us to rein­stall the OS.

After Thought

In our deal­ings with this issue, we came across a few com­put­ers with the same mys­tery drive. Inves­ti­gat­ing these issues fur­ther revealed recent installs of a disc util­i­ties. In one instance a recent failed removal of Ultra­ISO caused the issue. Nor­mally Ultra­ISO is a fan­tas­tic prod­uct, we our­selves use it on a reg­u­lar basis with no prob­lems what­so­ever. In more than one instance, this prob­lem could have been avoided by the user sim­ply uncheak­ing the option to install “UltraISO’s Drive Emu­la­tor”. But more often than not, users neglect to read through a prod­uct installers options. In fact, this is where users tend to install pro­grams labeled as “Adware”. In the case of one machine, a user left the option to install “UltraISO’s Drive Emu­la­tor”. Nor­mally this is a sim­ple thing to dis­able through UltraISO’s options menu, as well as some­thing that’s removed dur­ing an “Unin­stall”. Unfor­tu­nately our clients machine became infected with a virus, and dur­ing our clients efforts at a self-repair, Ultra­ISO became dam­aged to the point that reg­istry entries were orphaned.

So basi­cally, if your hav­ing this issue, review your pro­gram files to be sure some­thing sim­i­lar isn’t whats caus­ing your headaches. A few pro­grams we’ve seen cause sim­i­lar prob­lems are, Dae­mon Tools, Ultra­ISO, MagicDisk/MagicISO, Alco­hol 52%, Cir­cle Vir­tual, to name a few. In most instances the afore­men­tioned pro­grams are extremely safe, and very reli­able, and for the most part safe. But in rare instances, they have been known to cause sys­tem faults such as mys­tery dri­ves, and CD/DVD drive faults.

As always, good luck in you repair efforts. We hope this info was helpful.

Sep 12, 2010 | Computer Repair and Networks, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP | 2 Comments »

PNRPsvc Failed To Start, HomeGroup and Peer Name Resolution service Problems

We recently con­fig­ured a cus­tom sys­tem for a client using Win­dows 7 Home Pre­mium. Every­thing was run­ning great until recently when our client said they were receiv­ing blue screen errors, and hav­ing net­work prob­lems. A quick review of the error logs showed that the prob­lems were all stem­ming from Peer Net­work­ing Ser­vice, PNRPsvc, and other depen­dent ser­vices and there fail­ure to start. After research­ing the issue we found that the prob­lem relates to a file named “idstore.sst”. This file is encrypted, and con­tains infor­ma­tion relat­ing to your Home­group, and Home­group set­tings. In our case, we believe an out dated ver­sion of Syman­tec cor­rupted the file while con­fig­u­ra­tions were being made.

So our solu­tion is as fol­lows. First we updated our anti-virus client, as well as con­fig­ured all related secu­rity ser­vices. We then deleted the fol­low­ing file…

C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData\Roaming\PeerNetworking\idstore.sst

You may need to show your hid­den files and fold­ers in order to nav­i­gate to this loca­tion. Once that was done we restarted the com­puter and again tried to con­fig­ure the Home­group. At this point our issue was resolved. We’re able to make changes in the Home­group con­fig­u­ra­tion, and our error log is clean, clear, and free of errors.

Let us know if this arti­cle was help­ful by leav­ing a com­ment below. Happy computing.

Feb 15, 2010 | Computer Repair and Networks, Windows 7 | 11 Comments »