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 »

Magento Terms and Conditions Missing

This was an inter­est­ing issue we ran into recently while build­ing an E-commerce site for one of our clients. Typ­i­cally “Terms and Con­di­tions” is eas­ily enable in the admin­is­tra­tive sec­tion by first going to Con­fig­u­ra­tion -> Sys­tem -> Check­out ->Check­out Options and choos­ing yes to enable “Terms and Con­di­tions”. Then going to Sales -> Terms and con­di­tions and typ­ing in your terms. With our setup, we were able to choose yes to enable “Terms and Con­di­tions”, but we were not able to see the option under sales to fill in a list of terms.

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Oct 31, 2009 | Magento, Web Design | 3 Comments »

Enabling HTML in Magento Terms and Conditions

We’ve recently been work­ing with a new E-commerce plat­form called Magento. Its a very pow­er­ful open source prod­uct, with tons of fea­tures, and open source good­ness. We recently ran into an issue where we needed to enable HTML con­tent in the “Terms and Con­di­tions”. The fix was actu­ally quite simple.

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Oct 31, 2009 | Magento, Web Design | 1 Comment »

Can’t uninstall Java 1.6.0.11, Unable to locate jre1.6.0_11-c-l.msi

We’ve come across this issue on quite a few occa­sions. It seems that this issues arises after a botched unin­stall of Java prod­ucts. It seems to leave a reg­istry entry behind that makes it nearly impos­si­ble to rein­stall Java. We’re not exactly sure what the reg­istry entry is at this point, but we have found that run­ning the reg­istry cleaner in Ccleaner removes it. Ccleaner is an excel­lent prod­uct, and its totally free. But we do rec­om­mend mak­ing a dona­tion to them to keep their prod­uct free.

The process is sim­ple. Down­load Ccleaner, run the cleaner first, then run the reg­istry cleaner sec­ond. Restart you’re com­puter, and you should now be able to install the lat­est Java.

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Jun 23, 2009 | Computer Repair and Networks | 3 Comments »

Toshiba Satellite 1800 laptop, the display is blank but works when hooked up to an external monitor.

Here’s a ques­tion we recently received. My Toshiba Satel­lite 1800 lap­top dis­play is blank but it works when hooked up to an exter­nal mon­i­tor. There’s any num­ber of things that could cause this issue. So we’ll try to cover every­thing we think would cause this issue.

1. The first ques­tion we’d ask is, was the oper­at­ing sys­tem recently rein­stalled? If so do you have the cor­rect dri­vers installed for the system?

2. The sec­ond thing we would look at is the dis­play itself. While the screen may be blank it can still be dis­play­ing an image. Take a flash­light and shine it at an angle to the screen. If you can see the “shadow” of your screen, and your mouse mov­ing around, the prob­lem is most likely a LCD back­light prob­lem, or an LCD inverter prob­lem. If the back­light went out sud­denly, its typ­i­cally the inverter. If the light faded over time, its typ­i­cally the actual back­light. See­ing that an exter­nal mon­i­tor works, this is more than likely the answer to your problem.

3. If you can’t see a “shadow” of your dis­play and you haven’t taken your com­puter apart, and you haven’t rein­stalled your OS. Then it’s most likely not a dis­play issue. The next step is to diag­nose the video card. This is a lit­tle more in depth, but in most cases, if a video card is sus­pected to be the prob­lem, it should sim­ply be replaced. This doesn’t apply to all lap­tops. Most lap­top moth­er­boards use inte­grated video cards.

Hope­fully this was help­ful. If you have any fol­low up ques­tions, please feel free to ask.

Jan 11, 2009 | Computer Repair and Networks | Leave A Comment »