Samsung SMX-F34BN Camcorder Software & Accessories: Cluelessness

I bought a Samsung SMX-F34BN camcorder on eBay.  It came without a software or driver CD, cables, or power supply.  This was not quite the condition I had bargained for; but now that I had it, I proceeded to see what I could make of it.  I already had the cables, but it was a hassle to find the powers supply and software.  I decided to record these notes for the aid of anyone else encountering a similar situation.

Power Supply

I figured that the manufacturer would charge a fortune for a replacement power supply.  Their support webpage was hard to find:  their camcorders product page did not link to the SMX-F34BN (indeed, it led only to two standard camcorder models), and a search for SMX-F34BN yielded exactly one hit.  That was a link to the User Manual download webpage.  The User Manual was helpful, but that was the only help I got:  there was no link, on that webpage, to any hardware or accessories information. 

I ran a search on Radio Shack's webpage.  I wasn't able to verify, from the pictures and descriptions, whether they would have what I needed.  The User's Guide said the power requirements were 8.4V, 2.0W, but Radio Shack's pictures didn't make clear whether the plug would fit.  I called their 800 number, but their recording told me that they provided technical guidance only through their individual stores.  I called the nearest Radio Shack, located about nine miles away, but the guy said he couldn't advise without seeing the unit.

I went on eBay and bought a power supply for $14.  I didn't think of running a Google Shopping search for the needed product until I had already made that purchase, but it looked like I would have paid about the same price if I had gone that route.  When the power supply arrived, I plugged it in, and it worked.  End of problem.

Software and Drivers

To find the necessary software, I want back to Samsung's download webpage.  The Support Overview tab on that page yielded a list of questions about SC-X105L and other models unrelated to the SMX-F34BN.  That tab also contained a guide on "How to Edit Video with Intelli-Studio."  The Community Q&A tab on that webpage contained a number of questions, including several about how or where to get a power supply; virtually all of these questions were unanswered.  The FAQs & How-Tos tab did contain links for, among other things, Hardware, Power, and Software/Applications, but none of these led anywhere helpful and, again, many had to do with other models.  This was frustrating because, as one of those FAQs warned,

Before transferring digital images through the USB connection, you must install your camcorder's driver and software onto your computer. The driver and software are on the disc that came with your camcorder.

One FAQ did contain a reference to CyberLink MediaShow 4 software.  I guessed that MediaShow might be included in the software provided with the camcorder.  MediaShow was apparently a media management program, list price around $50.  A search, in response to the foregoing reference to Intell-Studio, suggested that Intelli-Studio was Samsung's own "play-edit" product, and that it did come with the SMX-F34BN.  I already had satisfactory software for these purposes, but didn't have the drivers.  Also, even if I didn't get a free copy of MediaShow out of the deal, at least I would want Intelli-Studio and any other utilities that Samsung could have provided.

On Samsung's download webpage, I clicked the Chat link.  This led to the following exchange:

Please wait for a Samsung Agent to respond. 

You are now chatting with 'Rosemary'. There will be a brief survey at the end of our chat to share feedback on my performance today.

Your Issue ID for this chat is LTK56401073602X

Rosemary: Hi, thanks for reaching out to Samsung tech support. How can I help you today?

Visitor: Hi, Rosemary. I have acquired a Samsung SMX-F34BN camcorder. I didn't get a CD or other software with it. I'm surprised that there's no option to download software from the Support downloads page that has the user's manual. Can you point me toward a download location?

Rosemary: Hello.

Rosemary: I understand that you wish to download the driver or software for the camcorder.

Rosemary: Would you mind holding a few minutes while I gather the required information for your request?

Visitor: OK.

Rosemary: Thank you.

Rosemary: Thanks for holding.

Rosemary: Was that an open box purchase?

Visitor: eBay.

Visitor: Normally, a manufacturer's support page will provide software downloads and, where applicable, updates.

Rosemary: I understand your concern.

Rosemary: But for few camcorders, the software and drivers are not provided on the support page.

Visitor: I don't understand. For camcorders as for other electronic devices, manufacturers normally supply downloads on their support pages. I am surprised that Samsung does not. Regardless, could you please tell me where I can download the software?

Rosemary: I apologize; the only place for the download of the software and driver is the support page. If the downloads are not provided on the support page, it is not possible to download the software online.

Visitor: Then where can I get the software?

Rosemary: Shall I provide the link to purchase the software CD?

Visitor: OK.

Rosemary: Before that could you please confirm if the camcorder is an open box purchase or a sealed purchase?

Visitor: Open box.

Rosemary: Thanks for confirming.

Rosemary: Please click on the link below to order the software CD for your camcorder:

Rosemary: http://www.samsungparts.com/Products/Parts_and_Accessories/PID-AD46-00192A.aspx?model=

Rosemary: You can even order it through phone by contacting J&J parts dealer at 1-800-627-4368. Hours of operation :Mon - Fri from 9:00 A.M to  8:30 P.M EST. They are the genuine Samsung parts dealers.

Rosemary: Are you able to access the above link?

Visitor: Yes. That webpage seems to offer only a CD containing "Mediashow" software. Is that the complete set of software that comes with a new camcorder?

Rosemary: Yes, I see that is the only CD included with a new camcorder,

Visitor: That website indicates that the shipping cost will be $5.75 minimum. $5.75 to mail a CD seems very expensive.

Visitor: I am disappointed that Samsung does not allow users to download the necessary software. This is unusual.

Visitor: That's $5.75 in addition to the purchase price of the CD.

Rosemary: I understand your frustration.

Rosemary: I will forward your concern to the webmaster.

Rosemary: I apologize for all the inconvenience.

Visitor: Thank you for your help, Rosemary. Have a good day.

I wasn't sure why Rosemary asked twice whether it was an open box purchase, when I told her I bought it on eBay.  Maybe she was thinking that there are traditional retail merchants selling unopened products on eBay.  Maybe she would have given me a CD without charge if I had said I had bought from one of those.  I can't say.  At any rate, the website she pointed me toward seemed willing to send me a copy of MediaShow (version 4, not the current version 6) for only $7.60 ($1.85 purchase + $5.75 shipping), plus whatever (if anything) else that might be on that CD.  This was better than other prices I found.  But, as I say, I didn't really need it.

I tried a search to see whether someone else might have the drivers and essential utilities available for download, but found nothing immediately obvious.  I sent an email to the people at the SamsungParts.com webpage to which Rosemary had directed me, asking if they could verify what was on the CD before I spent $7.60 and a week buying and waiting for it.  Their automated reply said I might have to wait a day for a reply, so I called them (800-627-4368).  She wasn't able to confirm exactly what was on the CD, but she said (a) this was not the CD with the user manual, and that was good (I had gathered, from a quick start page included with the camera, that there were actually two CDs, and the user manual CD was not the one containing the drivers), and (b) her company, SamsungParts.com, provided exactly the same accessories as would have been included with a new camera.  So despite their cryptic indication that this was the "MediaShow4" CD, it appeared likely that the CD contained more than just MediaShow.  So I went ahead and tried to buy it.  But now they wanted to charge me $8.25 for USPS Priority Mail.  I had to change from a PO Box to a street address to get it back down to $5.75, still via Priority Mail  Odd.  And then, when the order was nearly complete, here they are -- welcome to New Jersey! -- adding on another $4.15 handling charge.  So now we're up to $11.75 for a CD that cost $1.85.

I killed that and called Samsung (800-726-7864).  I explained to the lady that I didn't need or want a software CD; I just wanted a little driver program.  She confirmed that they could not help me with this -- that I would have to buy the CD and wait for it to be delivered.  I asked to speak to her supervisor.  She put me on hold for what would be, she said, just a minute or two.  That was at 1:33 PM.  The supervisor came on, ten minutes later, and after I explained the situation again, she put me back on hold while she checked it out.  When she came back, she said that it was an old item, which I found, again, to be an odd statement:  my impression was that the camera had come out within the past two to three years.  I appreciated that it was no longer within its brief one-year warranty, but I doubted that most people would buy a camcorder expecting it to last only one year.  That is, people are going to need support for products for several years at least.

She was ultimately unable to help me obtain the driver program.  In fact, she tried to steer me to CyberLink, where she said I could download a trial copy of MediaShow.  I explained again that I didn't need that, or Intelli-Studio either; I just needed the driver.  She apologized that she was unable to help me with this.  I asked to speak with her boss.  She said she would transfer me to the executive customer relations office.  She warned me, however, that this person would give me the same information that she had given me.  That was at 1:54 PM.  A few minutes later, someone else came on and listened as I explained the situation.  This individual said that the camera was plug-and-play and, as such, did not need any drivers.  This contradicted the language quoted above, wherein Samsung's FAQ had warned that it was necessary to install drivers first.  It also meant that, if this guy was right, Samsung's customer service representatives had repeatedly given me incorrect advice, to the effect that I had to buy the CD if I wanted to address the driver problem.

I had wondered if perhaps Windows 7 would detect and install the drivers automatically.  I could have just waited until the power supply arrived, a week or so later, and then I could have plugged in the USB cable and watched to see what happened.  One problem with this approach was that, if it didn't work, I would then have another wait of a week or so, until a CD or some other software source came through at last with the drivers.  Another problem was that users are often warned not to connect USB cables until drivers have already been installed.  There was, in other words, the possibility that waiting and then simply plugging would have made things worse.

I asked this individual if he would kindly pass along a suggestion to their webmaster, so as to include this information on the product webpage, along with FAQs that would relate to this model.  He said he would be submitting a report on this conversation.  At best, we seemed to be in a situation where Samsung would not think of this without someone like me to suggest it.  But anyway, the conversation was finally done at 2:01 PM.  So it took about a half-hour to get to him and get what was, I hoped, the correct information.

The upshot was that the software CD contained only (as this last person put it) editing software.  So if I wanted, I (or anyone else) could obtain MediaShow and Samsung's own Intelli-Studio for only $12, along with whatever else might be on that CD.  But I could not obtain a list of what was on that CD.  I wondered whether I could at least obtain a free copy of Intelli-Studio.  It didn't seem to be available in either CNET or Softpedia.  Posts in a CNET forum pointed me toward webpages from Software Informer and RapidShare, but someone seemed to have problems with the RapidShare approach and I distrusted Software Informer.  Another page -- a Samsung.com webpage, believe it or not -- said that, actually, Intelli-Studio was preloaded on the camera and could be installed onto the PC from there via USB cable.  That webpage pertained to the Samsung MV800, a still camera.  I would apparently not know, until the power supply arrived, whether the SMX-F34BN had the same capability.  There did not seem to be a download location on Samsung's own website for Samsung's own software.  (But let us not think too harshly of the Samsung webmaster.  I did find a Samsung webpage that, in exchange for the opportunity to keep resizing my browser window, was willing to tell me how to prevent Intelli-Studio from installing automatically on an unspecified Samsung camera model.)

When the power supply arrived, I did as advised:  I simply plugged in the USB cable.  It worked.  So the last guy's view was correct:  I didn't need drivers after all.  Unlike the MV800, there didn't seem to be an option to install Intelli-Studio from the camera to the computer; no menu option along those lines came up when I connected the USB cable.  So at this point, almost despite Samsung's best efforts, I was able to get the camera working.

Windows 7: EUBKMON.SYS Error: Driver Unloaded Without Cancelling Pending Operations

I was using Windows 7 Home Premium.  I tried to reboot into Safe Mode.  I got an error message:

A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.
EUBKMON.SYS
DRIVER_UNLOADED_WITHOUT_CANCELLING_PENDING_OPERATIONS

I did a search and got the advice to put the driver (in this case, EUBKMON.SYS) out of action.  The mission was to rename it to be EUBKMON.OLD, so as to keep the file (just in case) but to prevent it from being used.  How to achieve that mission?  The advice in that case involved Windows XP, so they were recommending using the installation CD to get to a recovery prompt and rename it that way.  Another possibility would be to boot Ubuntu or some other Linux variant, or perhaps something like BartPE, and use that to rename EUBKMON.SYS.  Since the machine was willing to boot into Windows 7 Normal Mode, I started with that.  I found EUBKMON.SYS in C:\Windows\System32\drivers.  I was able to rename it in Windows Explorer.  I was not sure whether I would have been able to do so if I had not previously taken ownership of that folder.  While I was there, having just rebooted the computer, I got a dialog:

Windows has recovered from an unexpected shutdown.
Windows can check online for a solution to the problem.

I went with that, but after I clicked on it, it disappeared.  Maybe it found and installed a solution; not sure.  I also went into Control Panel > Windows Updates.  There was only one update, an optional one for Microsoft Security Essentials.  I installed that.  I also ran Glary Registry Repair.  Then I rebooted into Normal Mode, just to see what would happen with EUBKMON.SYS.  After I told Windows to reboot, I noticed that the shutdown screen said "Waiting for EuWatch.  A backup schedule is running!"  That "EuWatch" part got my attention:  it seemed potentially related to EUBKMON.SYS, and the "backup schedule" note reminded me that I had just installed Backup Maker and then had uninstalled it and installed Easeus Todo Backup in its place.  The hard drive was spinning, so I let the thing run; apparently Easeus was in the process of doing a backup before shutdown, for some reason.  A sourceDaddy webpage said that a message like my DRIVER_UNLOADED message (above) could be due to a faulty driver.  While I was waiting, I ran a search for EUBKMON.SYS but got no insight.  The search turned up only eight hits, so it seemed this driver was not a part of Windows 7 itself, adding to the sense that perhaps the problem was caused by one of those two backup programs.  By this time, the computer was prepared to reboot.  It ended up at a black and white screen:

Windows Error Recovery
Windows failed to start.  A recent hardware or software change might be the cause.

It wanted to Launch Startup Repair, so I went with that, but it wanted a Windows installation disc, and I didn't have one.  (I was doing this on an ASUS Eee PC, with Win7 factory-installed.)  The error message status was 0xc000000e and the "Info" statement was, "The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible."  I tried Ctrl-Alt-Del > Start Windows Normally.  But that failed.  I was back at Windows Error Recovery, except the top line was now "Windows Boot Manager."  I ran a search and decided to try Safe Mode (hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del to reboot, and then hitting immediately and repeatedly hitting F8).  That didn't work either, but this time it just went back to Windows Error Recovery; no BSOD.  I wondered if the inability to get back into Win7 was due to the renaming of EUBKMON.SYS to be EUBKMON.OLD.  I thought about re-renaming EUBKMON.OLD to be EUBKMON.SYS again; but if I had a bad driver, that wouldn't solve the problem.

I thought maybe I should copy EUBKMON.SYS over from another computer where I had also installed Easeus Todo Backup.  First, though, I thought I'd better just test whether that was the issue.  To do this, I would need a bootable USB drive of some sort.  I have addressed that issue in another post.  Basically, I used XBoot to boot Ubuntu from the USB drive, and then went into C:\Windows\System32\drivers and renamed EUBKMON.OLD back to EUBKMON.SYS.  I shut down Ubuntu, yanked out the USB drive, and tried to boot Windows -- with, of course, the need to adjust the BIOS settings first.  Sure enough, Windows now booted.  The EUBKMON.SYS file was the whole issue.  Instead of replacing it with a working one from the desktop computer, I decided I didn't really like the idea of having my whole system rendered nonworking because one file for one backup utility was not quite right.  There were other backup alternatives. 

So I uninstalled Easeus Todo Backup.  It wouldn't uninstall easily from Programs and Features; I had to hit Ctrl-Alt-Del, go into Task Manager > Processes tab, and kill EuWatch.exe.  But no, that wasn't enough:  I got the same message and had to go back into Task Manager, where a careful look at the Description column showed me that I would also have to kill Agent.exe, TbService.exe, and TrayNotify.exe.  So now I was able to uninstall Easeus Todo Manager.  I tried to send them feedback on why I was doing that, but their feedback agent required email to be set up on this computer, and Windows Live Mail 2011 was taking a long time to start.  Eventually I just scrapped that.  Anyway, with Easeus uninstalled, after a reboot, I took another look at C:\Windows\System32\drivers.  EUBKMON.SYS was still there.  I renamed it to EUBKMON.OLD again and tried rebooting.  The system started.  So without Easeus Todo Backup, EUBKMON.SYS was apparently no longer essential, but the Easeus uninstallation process did not remove EUBKMON.SYS or the other EU*.* files in C:\Windows\System32\drivers (i.e., eubakup.sys, eudisk.sys, eudskacs.sys, and eufs.sys).  Possibly this situation would have been different if I had used Revo Uninstaller.  I wasn't sure if I could safely delete those other files, so I left them.

So now, with all that sorted out, I tried again to boot into Safe Mode.  It worked.  Problem solved.

Windows 7 Installation - First Try

I decided to install Windows 7.  I had previously written up my preferred Windows XP installation process.  This post updates that previous writeup for Windows 7.  It seemed likely that I would find additional helpful Win7 tweaks after using it for a while, so I considered this my first try.  The version I was installing was Win7 Ultimate.  My efforts as described here were fairly comprehensive -- I worked through lots of issues -- but also pretty disorganized.  The second try, I hoped, would be better.

I decided to get and use a 32-bit version of Win7.  I had tried a 64-bit version of Ubuntu and found that there were quite a few problems.  Even at the time of this writing, I was hearing some indications that reminded me that 64-bit Win7 and other 64-bit operating systems were still not established.  This was from the perspective of someone who usesd the computer for work, and a wide variety of general-purpose work functions at that, and not much for play.  I would have had a different opinion if I had different needs.  Presumably 64-bit had more speed.

I also decided to do a clean installation, completely overwriting the previous Windows XP installation.  Although I didn't look into it, it sounded like there might be some kind of "hard link" alternative.  I didn't explore it, so I was not sure if it was actually much easier than the fresh install option.  For upgrades from Vista, apparently there was an Upgrade Advisor that might have been helpful.

In my case, with my Gigabyte motherboard, the essential first step, before even completing the Win7 installation, was to install two motherboard drivers that were supposed to be installed from floppy disk.  I did not realize this.  A belated search led to one source who claimed that reinstallation was not necessary, but I had only just done the installation, and it had been pretty easy, so I decided it was easier to just reinstall than to follow his directions.

I started by downloading the current drivers from the motherboard manufacturer's website.  Gigabyte's website contained a link to DriverAgent, which did a free scan for missing drivers but then wanted to charge me a fee to download and install them. I decided to just get them from the Gigabyte site. I unzipped them, but to see and actually install their setup files, I had to make adjustments in Windows Explorer (Tools > Folder Options > View > unhide everything). I made other changes to the View tab while I was there. It had not changed much since Windows XP, so I used pretty much the same settings as before. (For details, go to the previous writeup and search for "Windows Explorer.")  The drivers unzipped automatically into separate folders.

It then occurred to me that possibly a complete reinstallation was not necessary.  I left my new but imperfect Windows 7 installation in place for the moment and rebooted from the Windows 7 DVD.  I clicked Next to get past the first Install Windows screen and chose the "Repair your computer" option. In the System Recovery Options dialog, I clicked on the Load Drivers button, inserted the CD containing the drivers, double-clicked on the file that was a "setup information" file type in the folder for the first driver, and clicked Add Drivers. I repeated those steps for the other driver. Evidently these steps loaded the drivers into memory.  Then I clicked Next and proceeded to the System Recovery Options dialog.  I clicked Startup Repair, but it could not detect a problem.  So I gave up on this approach and did the complete reinstallation.

Gigabyte's webpage said that the two drivers that had to be installed during Windows 7 installation would have to be installed from a floppy drive.  I did not have a floppy drive.  I burned the folders containing those drivers onto a CD.  Then I inserted the Windows 7 DVD and rebooted.  When the BIOS was loading, I got an option to press any key to boot from the DVD.  I did that.  This put me at the Install Windows screen.  I clicked Next > Install Now.  I took the custom installation option.  When I saw the question, "Where do you want to install Windows?" I clicked "Load Driver."  But after a minute, it came back with a message:

No device drivers were found. Make sure that the installation media contains the correct drivers, and then click OK.

One of these troublesome drivers was for a RAID array.  I had not actually set one up yet.  I unchecked the option that said, "Hide drivers that are not compatible with hardware on this computer," and then clicked Rescan. I still got the same message.  I wasn't sure what that meant regarding the quality of my download and the relevance of the drivers that Gigabyte's webpage had listed for my motherboard.  It appeared that I would be able to set up software RAID in Windows 7 regardless of my hardware, and that a hardware RAID array would have to be in place before I installed Windows.  As I was thinking this over, I came across a good article on RAID in Windows 7 that made me think that a Win7 software RAID array was actually better for my purposes anyway.  So at this point I bailed out of the attempt at reinstallation and just rebooted the Windows 7 installation that I had already set up.  I describe my actual RAID setup process in a separate post.

The other troublesome driver was for AHCI.  After installing the other drivers and rebooting, I got an option to set the BIOS to boot in AHCI mode.  Or something like that -- it had a short fuse and demanded a decision before I could really read what it was saying.  I went with the Yes option, I think, and that made Windows unable to run.  I had to reboot, hit Del to go into the BIOS, and look around to replace the AHCI option with the Native IDE option.  I then observed that, of course, the BIOS update had wiped out my settings, so I changed some other items while I was there.  Then I rebooted.

The next step was to install antivirus and firewall software.  I had always previously gone with free versions, most recently AVG.  For the moment, I decided to continue with AVG, but also looked into stronger alternatives, and on that basis, I thought I would eventually switch to F-Secure.

Next, updates.  I wanted to download them once and save them, so that I wouldn't have to re-download hundreds of megabytes' worth of updates and service packs every time I re-installed Windows 7.  But I had spent a lot of time taking the manual approach with Windows XP, it was hard to be sure of the right order to install them in, and it was a lot easier to just let the Windows Update site do it automatically.  I had already encountered an opportunity to set the downloads the way I wanted, which was to download but not install.  I preferred that because otherwise Windows XP, at least, would keep insisting on rebooting the system, until at some point that reminder would pop up right while I was in the middle of typing something and, presto! I would hit the wrong key and the system would reboot, taking all my work with it.  Unlike XP, Win7 wasn't showing me an icon in the system tray to indicate that it had downloaded updates and was waiting for a chance to install them.  It also didn't offer to do so when I clicked the Turn Off option to shut down the system.  But I could tell that it had downloaded updates because, when I did go to the Windows Update page, it didn't need to download anything; it just proceeded right into the installation of about 140MB worth of updates (counting those that weren't ready to install until after a reboot).

While updates were installing, I looked into user accounts.  For efficiency reasons, I had been running WinXP as administrator.  Microsoft said the user account would protect my computer by preventing users (me) from making changes that affect everyone who used the computer (me).  In other words, I decided to continue to do my work while logged in as administrator.  So before I installed programs that might configure themselves for individual user accounts, I did a search for how to delete my user account.  The advice I followed led me to the Control Panel, so at this point I decided to go ahead with the full Control Panel tour, which I had postponed until later when installed WinXP.

Ideally, I would have taken care of the accounts at this point.  But I didn't.  So some of the changes described below were made to my own personal account ("Ray"), and therefore had to be redone after I started up the Administrator account and deleted the Ray and Guest accounts.  Another thing that complicated that step of changing accounts was that I did not approach it through Control Panel.  I made the change in a different way, before looking at Control Panel > User Accounts.  So I was not sure what that User Accounts area would have looked like originally.

What actually happened was that I went ahead with the Control Panel tour (below), and toward the end of that process I discovered Ultimate Windows Tweaker (UWT), and used it to make some of the changes that I would have made through Control Panel.  UWT had some options that Control Panel did not have, but it also lacked some options that Control Panel.  It probably did not make much difference which came first, but in my own future installations I felt I would probably go through Control Panel first, and then run UWT, or possibly God Mode (below).

At any rate, I had to go into Control Panel > User Accounts (having switched, at the top right corner of Control Panel, from Category view to small icons), select the Ray account, and then click the "Delete the account" option.  There did not appear to be a way of deleting the Guest account, so I just left it turned off.  Then, to continue preparing for the Control Panel tour, I opened Internet Explorer and opened a separate tab for each webpage that I often checked in Internet Explorer (e.g., Hotmail).  Then, in Intenet Explorer, I went to Tools > Intenet Options > Home Page > Use current.

What I wanted, for this purpose, was to konw how to use the PowerShell ISE to create a set of modules for PowerShell that would do things (e.g., adding features) that otherwise I would have to do manually, by going into this menu and choosing that option, etc.  Why should so many of us spend so much time doing that sort of thing, when it was (in my understanding) entirely possible to use PowerShell commands, already installed in Win7, to share a set of commands that would do it all automatically, in one step?  But apparently I was misunderstanding something about this.  My search suggested that, while there were plenty of websites sharing Win7 tweaks, there were almost none sharing Win7 tweaks contained in PowerShell modules.

Registry edits were an alternative for some such tweaks.  My key sources for guidance, in these tweaks, included the massive collection of SevenForums tutorials and the How-To Geek list of registry hacks.  This was the point at which, in future installations, I would run Win7RegEdit.reg, a text file that I built up during the process of learning how to configure Win7.  Running it at this point, which I did not do, would have affected some of the other instructions shown below.  Before running it, I would need to adjust editing permissions for one branch of the registry.  Steps for that:  go into regedit, navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID, right-click on CLSID, go tinto Permissions, highlight Administrators, click Allow Full Control, go into Advanced, check "Replace all child object permissions with inheritable permissions from this object."

Next, in Control Panel, at the top right corner, I switched from Category view to small icons.  Then, going down the list, I hit a number of other items.  These are shown here in alphabetical order as they appeared in Control Panel, but this order also happened to be important for a few of these items:

• Action Center:  I had already set my Windows Update settings.
• Administrative Tools:  in Computer Management > Storage > Disk Management, right-click on the CD-ROM drive (at the bottom) and change its drive letter to Y.  Then change other drive letters (after rebooting, if necessary) as needed.
• AutoPlay:  turned off for all devices.  Defaults set to "Take no action" for all items except movies and videos.
• Backup and Restore:  I had not had good luck with Windows System Restore.  I preferred Acronis True Image.  So I just verified that this option was turned off.
• Folder Options:  finished setting items I had not already set (above).
• Internet Options:  I went into Tools > General tab > Browsing history > Settings > Move folder to another drive. I also went to Tools > General tab > Tabs > Settings > adjust as desired. I went to Security tab > Custom Level > Scripting section (near the bottom) > Allow programmatic clipboard access > Enable.  Then I navigated to YouTube.com and played a video, so as to trigger the process of installing Adobe Flash Player.
• Notification Area Icons:  Always show all icons and notifications on the taskbar.
• Personalization:  Windows Classic theme.  Window Color > Adjust at least Active Title Bar, Inactive Title Bar, Menu, and Desktop.
• Power Options:  Show additional plans > High performance > Change plan settings > Change advanced power settings > Change settings that are currently unavailable > High performance > change individual items as desired > Apply.
• Programs and Features:  Turn Windows features on or off > Make sure Indexing Service is off.
• System:  Windows Activation > Activate.  System Protection > Hardware tab > Device Manager > verify are no yellow-circle exclamation marks.  Hardware tab > Device Installation Settings > Yes, do this automatically.  Advanced tab > Performance > Settings > Advanced > Change > Uncheck automatically manage paging file size for all drivers; instead, set a paging file of 4000-8000 MB (or more) on each hard drive.  System Protection tab > Configure > adjust Disk Space Usage as needed.
• Taskbar and Start Menu:  Start Menu tab > Customize.  Adjust various items to taste.  Turn on Run command.  Save and close.
• User Accounts:  see above.  When the dust settled, I had only the Administrator account here.
• Windows Defender:  turn on.
• Windows Update:  after installing desired updates, highlight all unwanted updates (e.g., foreign language packs, right-click, and select "Hide updates."  

For purposes of doing these tweaks, UWT (above) was not the only consolidated alternative to Control Panel.  Another was God Mode.  Apparently this was just originally going to be an All Tasks folder in Win7, but Microsoft didn't include it in the final version, and bloggers gave it the God Mode name.  It seems there were actually a number of different subcollections of tweaks which, at brief glance, didn't look like they added much to UWT for my purposes.  What I decided to do with this was to create a Start Menu entry for an All Tasks folder.  The full folder name was long, so I parked it further down in the Programs listing within the Start Menu (below), and just put a shortcut to it at the top level of the Start Menu.  To automate part of that last step, I wrote a command for a DOS batch file. That batch file (Win7NewInstall.bat) eventually came to have other lines as well.

In the past, I had overlooked some Control Panel items that would have been useful.  So in that God Mode (what I called the All Control Panel Options) folder, I hit Ctrl-A (i.e., I selected everything) and then right-clicked and said "Create shortcut."  This put 276 shortcuts on my desktop.  I moved them to a folder, where I could see their full names.  I deleted those that I didn't think I would need.  I moved a bunch of them to a folder for items that I would run only when installing a new system.  I put the rest in other categories, and moved them to relevant places in my Start Menu.  This was an alternative to the approach of removing or hiding unwanted items in Control Panel.  With these steps, I hoped to be able to do without Control Panel, but it was still there unchanged for purposes of following steps advised by others.

I had worked out a customized Start Menu, with several advantages.  Another post describes the process of making that work in Win7.

Something else that I should have done early in the process was to map my network drives.  The problem was, I was simultaneously doing some hardware changes.  I had a Synology Network Attached Storage (NAS) unit, but for performance reasons I wanted to change to some other arrangement.  I needed to get that other arrangement in place first -- actually, before proceeding with this installation -- or at least I needed to know which drives would be where, because of course when I mapped them I would assign them drive letters, and aspects of this installation would be looking for those letters.  So I took a detour, during this installation, to figure out that part of my hardware arrangement. 

The next task was to customize Windows Explorer.  It looked like I was stuck with the new menu bar that Microsoft added at the top, unless I wanted to risk seriously screwing up the system.  I wondered if there was a good alternative to WinExp.  When I started looking around, I saw statements that resonated with my experience regarding WinExp's slowness.  It developed that there were a bunch of alternatives.  I prepared a separate post leading to my conclusions in that area.  Basically, I decided to start with Total Commander and see if I liked it.  Of course, I could still use Windows Explorer regardless.  This somewhat took the fire out of my interest in more Windows Explorer tweaks.

Other Tweaks

Early in the process, I installed Google Chrome.  I had to.  It was impossible to get anything done in Internet Explorer, especially in terms of looking at lots of different webpages providing advice on how to solve problems.  Within Chrome Extensions, I installed Webpage Decorator.  The reason for this extension was to make it easier to see which links in Google searches I had already visited.  Their colors were almost identical in Chrome originally.  After installing it, I clicked its newly installed icon (at the right end of the Chrome search bar) and made the colors of links and visited links more clearly distinct.

I got an uninvited item on the taskbar saying, "Welcome to Windows Media Player."  I went through a custom installation, making it the default player for the time being.  Then I unpinned the icon from the taskbar.

Also, from almost the beginning, Windows Defender would give me an error message at startup:  "Service has stopped.  A problem caused this program's service to stop.  To start the service, click the Start now button or restart your computer."  I searched for a solution and noticed lots of posts on how to uninstall or disable Windows Defender.  I looked into that.  While Windows Defender appeared to be antispyware that ordinarily performed a valid function, it was also no different than other antispyware.  Apparently this problem could be caused by conflicts with other antivirus software (e.g., McAfee).  I originally thought Windows Defender kept being turned off after I turned it on because I had disabled UAC; apparently Windows Defender was related to that.  Ordinarily, to turn it off, I would go to Control Panel > Windows Defender > Turn it on > Tools > Options > Administrator > uncheck > Save.  This would still produce the error, "This program is turned off."  In another approach, I tried running services.msc and selecting Disabled as the Startup type under Windows Defender (right-click > Properties).  But that, too, left me with a reminder to turn on Windows Defender on startup.  Anyway, this approach of trying to shut Windows Defender up was not working.  If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.  I went back to services.msc and set it to Automatic; I went into Control Panel and uninstalled AVG antivirus; and I downloaded and installed Microsoft Security Essentials.  I planned to upgrade to better antivirus software later, but hoped that this would reduce conflicts for the short term.

Epilogue

By this point, it was time to start over again.  The reason was that this installation had somehow acquired a networking problem that I just could not fix. The reinstallation is described in another post.

A Tweaked Windows 7 Installation: Second Try

I was installing Windows 7.  I had spent days exploring various possibilities.  Unfortunately, I had also acquired a networking problem for which a new installation seemed to be the only solution.  This post consolidates what I learned in the first installation attempt, and adds some new items.  As in that previous post, some of these items were recorded after the fact, and may not look or function precisely as described here.  For example, settings may already have been changed by the time they come into focus in the sequence described here.
My first step was to delete all accounts except the Administrator and the Guest.  The changes described here thus had to be made only to the Administrator account.  I also allowed Windows and other updates whenever they seemed to be ready for installation.  In Windows Update, after installing desired updates, I highlighted all unwanted updates (e.g., foreign language packs) > right-click > "Hide updates."

I made some preliminary adjustments in Windows Explorer.  These included Organize > Layout > Details pane, right-click on the menu and turn on Classic Explorer Bar, and also in Windows Explorer, in Tools > Folder Options.  Also, in my early usage of Internet Explorer, I allowed it to turn on AutoComplete (Tools > Content > Settings).  (This did not fix the perennial problem of IE not remembering passwords, by the way.)

During the first installation, I organized programs that I was installing (including drivers, batch files, and other materials) into folders.  I numbered the folders (01, 02, 03 ...) so that they would appear in the correct sequential order in Windows Explorer.  The contents of all of these folders had to be checked to make sure that I was using programs and other materials designed for Windows 7.  Some but not all of my Windows XP programs fit that description.  The first several folders, at this point, had these names:

01 Motherboard Drivers and Utilities
02 Programs Needed at Start
03 Other Installation & Tweaking Programs
04 Broadly Useful Programs
05 Experimental and New Programs

The contents of folder 05 are addressed in later posts.  This post goes up through folder 04.  In other words, this post describes what I installed, and how I adjusted it, to set up a general-purpose system, mostly using software that I had used previously.

Folder 01 contained several subfolders, likewise numbered sequentially.  The first contained drivers that I would need to load during the Windows 7 installation process if I wished to install Win7 in a RAID array.  I had decided against that.  The second subfolder contained drivers to be installed after the basic Windows 7 installation.  I installed these, and continued on to install motherboard utilities.

Folder 02 contained a few items that I found very useful during the installation and setup process:

• Antivirus.  I was currently using just Microsoft Security Essentials and Windows Defender, for convenience during installation.
• AvaFind Professional.  A program that quickly finds filenames.  Some program of this sort was invaluable for locating files needed for various purposes during installation and tweaking.
• 7-Zip.  Programs to be installed, that had to be downloaded, often came in zipped format.  Windows provided an unzipping feature, but this one was more versatile.
• Google Chrome.  I found it easier to use Chrome, rather than Internet Explorer, to search for installation-related information.  Turning on Chrome's sync feature minimized the time needed to configure this tool.  Basically, my list of favored extensions was available as soon as I installed Chrome.
• Bullzip PDF Printer.  There were a few items that I wanted to save as PDF during this process.
• Router driver and utilities.

Folder 03 contained hardware drivers, registry edit (.reg) and batch (.bat) files used to configure the system, and other programs needed for the basic installation and tweaking process.  The previous post describes most of the materials in this folder.  I have added links in the following list to those that are not mentioned in that previous post.  For the most part, I ran straight through these materials, installing them all after the initial Windows installation.  I installed the programs before turning to the manual tweaking tasks (below) because these programs would take care of some of those tasks automatically.  The programs I installed at this point, in approximately this order, were as follows:

• Printer drivers and utility software.
• Win7NewInstall.bat and Win7RegTweaks.reg.  These contained a collection of registry tweaks and other adjustments and customizations.
• Classic Shell, to change the look and some functions of the Windows 7 Start Menu and Windows Explorer to what I considered the more efficient form of Windows XP.  I went ahead and configured these items at this point.
• Somehow Windows Live Essentials came up, asking how much of Live Essentials I wanted to install.  I chose Messenger, Movie Maker, and Windows Live Mesh.
• The first time I tried to play an audio file, Windows Media Player popped up and had to be configured.
• IOBit Smart Defrag.  I had used this defragmenter for several years and had no problems with it.
• LockHunter.  This was experimental, for me -- a replacement for Unlocker.  Preliminarily, it appeared less functional.  I wanted integration with the Windows Explorer context menu.  I hoped for a Win7-compatible update of Unlocker.
• QuickTime.  It appeared that several other programs depended upon this program being installed.

After installing those necessary programs, I changed the following items from the default in Ultimate Windows Tweaker (clicking Apply after each bullet point):

• Personalization:  Hide detail pane.
• User Accounts & UAC:  Enable admin approval mode for the built-in administrator account.
• System Performance:  Enable support for 4GB of RAM on 32-bit Windows OS.  Disable Tablet PC Input service.
• Network Tweaks:  Disable auto-discovery of media contents in shared network by Windows Media Player.
• Internet Explorer:  Uncheck "Open first home page when IE starts."  Uncheck "Disable IE check for updates."  Uncheck "Notify when download completes."
• Additional Tweaks:  Uncheck "Show 'Search ...'"  Show "Move To Folder..."  Remove "-Shortcut" suffix for new shortcuts.
• It appeared, in some cases, that Ultimate Windows Tweaker was not always effective.  I installed TweakNow PowerPack 2010 and used it to deselect drives not to be displayed in Windows Explorer (in my case, floppy drive A). This setting was in Windows Secret > Windows Explorer.

After restarting the machine, I made changes in Control Panel.  These, too, follow but also modify the steps described in the previous post.  Some (Action Center, Administrative Tools) had already been done in previous steps (e.g., while installing updates or resizing partitions)  Auto-Play was already set the way I wanted, which was suspicious:  had I made more changes to the two-week-old image on which I was doing these tweaks than I had recorded?  Likewise for Personalization (Windows Classic theme. Window Color > Adjust at least Active Title Bar, Inactive Title Bar, Menu, and Desktop).  Regarding Backup and Restore, I was still using Acronis as a fail-safe, but was also using the Win7 system image option.  I would make both after completing some more tweaks.  For regular data backup, I was still using Beyond Compare, which I found was pretty good at showing me when I had nested files too deep. 

Control Panel options still requiring attention were as follows:

• Internet Options: I went into General tab > Tabs > Settings > adjust as desired. I went to Security tab > Custom Level > Scripting section (near the bottom) > Allow programmatic clipboard access > Enable. I saved and closed those.  I went into Content tab > Autocomplete Settings > turn on.  Then I navigated to YouTube.com and played a video, so as to trigger the process of installing Adobe Flash Player.
• Power Options: Show additional plans > High performance > Change plan settings > Change advanced power settings > Change settings that are currently unavailable > High performance > change individual items as desired > Apply.
• Programs and Features: Turn Windows features on or off > Make sure Indexing Service is off.
• System: Windows Activation > Activate. System Protection > Hardware tab > Device Manager > verify no yellow-circle exclamation marks. Hardware tab > Device Installation Settings > Yes, do this automatically. Advanced tab > Performance > Settings > Advanced > Change > Uncheck automatically manage paging file size for all drivers; instead, set a paging file of 4000-8000 MB (or more) on each hard drive (not on each partition). System Protection tab > Configure > adjust Disk Space Usage as needed.
• Taskbar and Start Menu: Start Menu tab > Customize. Adjust various items to taste. Turn on Run command. Save and close.

Additional tweaks:

•  I now had a more or less complete approach for developing a custom-organized Start Menu on a drive other than drive C, where it could be shared with other computers and would survive a Windows crash and reinstallation.  As described in the previous post, Win7NewInstall.bat, used in the previous installation, had created a so-called God Mode folder on this Start Menu.  That folder was still there, so I did not need to recreate it.  I just needed to get around to distributing, across my Start Menu, the shortcuts to every Windows function that I had created via the God Mode folder.
• As advised, I used Resource Hacker to open C:\Windows\System32\Shellstyle.dll.  There, I went into UIFILE > 1 > 1033.  I searched (Ctrl-F) for the line that said, <style resid="FolderBandStyle">.  I inserted this code after that line:  <if mousefocused="false" mousewithin="false"><Element padding="rect(0rp,0rp,0rp,-28rp)"/></if>.  I left it conditional, able to come up on a mouseover, because I wasn't sure if I might need it in the future.  Later, if possible, I would make this change permanent, without the mouseover option, by inserting only the "Element padding" portion of the line.  With this change made, I clicked on the Compile Script button, there in Resource Hacker. Then I saved the file as Shellstyle.dll in a backup location, so I would not have to do this again.  I right-clicked on C:\Windows\System32\Shellstyle.dll and took ownership, using one of the tweaks installed above.  I copied that backup Shellstyle.dll to C:\Windows\System32, overwriting the existing Shellstyle.dll there.  Then I logged off and back on to see the change.
• Shut off an annoying question. On the Desktop, right-click Recycle Bin > Propeties > deselect "Display delete confirmation dialog."
• To make Windows remember size and position of a window, I found two solutions mentioned near the end of a very long thread on the subject.  What worked for me:  right-click on the title (top) bar of a Window.  Choose "Size."  Drag the window and its edges around.  Even if it's exactly where you want it, move it somewhere else and then back, all in one motion.  Then click on the top right X to close the window.  If that technique hadn't worked, I would have gone on to try ShellFolderFix.
• Every time I started the system, Windows Defender would give me the message, "This program is turned off."  Someone said Windows Defender was unnecessary if I was running Microsoft Security Essentials.  Posts in that thread suggested many remedies, almost none of which worked for the original poster.  A post about two-thirds of the way down that thread offered a solution that worked for me.  I added that solution to Win7NewInstall.bat.
• Somehow, a Boot folder wound up on drive D.  A thread suggested that (as administrator) I type "bcd c:\Windows /s C:" to get that folder onto drive C with the other system folders.  Before doing that, I made a System Restore point.  To do that, I went into Control Panel > System > Advanced system settings > System Protection tab > Create a restore point.  Then I went ahead with that bcdboot command.  It said, "Boot files successfully created."  I looked at C and, sure enough, there was now a Boot folder there too.  (Maybe there had been before; I hadn't thought to look.)  Now, as advised, to delete that hopefully unnecessary Boot folder, I tried steps through the user interface (taking ownership of the folder), but those did not work.  Using another approach, I went to Start > "cmd" and typed these commands (running as Administrator):

Finally, folder 04.  These were the programs, mostly familiar but some new, that I installed to set up a complete system.  These were as follows:

• Adobe Acrobat.  I already had a copy, else I would have considered checking out some of the steadily more competent freeware alternatives.
• Adobe Premiere Elements.  I found that a basic ability to do some video editing was valuable for many purposes.
• CamStudio.  I was not yet finding good freeware alternatives.  CamStudio, at this point, still did not have a Windows 7 compatible version, so this was a tentative solution.  I was considering buying a copy of Debut, which had done screen video capture pretty well during my trial use of it.  I also installed Jing as an alternative, though it seemed to me that I had already tried and rejected it once if not twice.  When I rebooted, there was suddenly an unexplained, virus-looking dialog offering to let me "Enter or Create a Screencast Account."  When I figured out that this was Jing's doing, I went ahead and created the account.
• CoolEdit.  An old audio-editing program that still had capabilities and familiarity.
• Copernic Desktop Search.  My search had led to this as the best desktop search option, much more useful than Google Desktop Search had been.
• Gadgets.  These were new in Vista and Win7.  Mine were not currently arranging properly on the desktop.  I was not sure how much I would use them.
• Microsoft Office 2003.  I had OpenOffice Portable already in place as an alternative.
• Shortcuts to copy into C:\Windows.  As noted in a comment following a previous post, I had discovered that putting shortcuts to programs would make them available for easy reference in batch files.
• Aqua Deskperience.  I had bought this for capturing text from a region onscreen.  There were freeware alternatives that did the same thing now.
• EditPadLite.  A Notepad alternative.  After installing this, I decided to rely on Notepad++ instead.
• File Checksum Integrity Verifier.
• Firefox.  The portable version had not been reliable for me.
• Freeware PDF Unlocker.  Drag a PDF onto this desktop icon to make a non-locked copy, so that you can add highlights and comments.
• Glary Registry Repair.  My Windows 7 replacement for Advanced WindowsCare V2 Personal.  A registry cleaner that I planned to run each time the system started.  I put a shortcut to it in the Start Menu's Startup folder.
• Google Earth.
• Handbrake.  For video conversions.
• iRotate.  Turn the monitor on its side for improved screen captures in some cases.
• Oxelon Media Converter.  Valuable context-menu addition for all sorts of conversions (e.g., getting audio out of a video file).
• Paradox dBase Viewer.  For extracting data from old Paradox for DOS files.
• Skype.
• TClockEx.  For giving me date and time in the system tray.  I didn't have those because I was using Win7's classic desktop skin.
• Thunderbird.  For email.  Again, the portable version wasn't up to the job.
• Total Commander (above).  I wasn't actually using it much, though.  I had largely managed, by this point, to tweak Windows Explorer to suit me.

Note that these were in addition to portable (i.e., standalone) applications that I already had in place and was using for many purposes.  Those were incorporated into my customized Start Menu (above) and therefore did not need to be reinstalled, or even relinked in my Start Menu, at this point.

This gave me a complete working Windows 7 installation.  It represented a great improvement over the previous try.  I was sure there would be further ways to streamline it in future installations.

takeown /f D:\Boot /r /d y
icacls D:\Boot /grant administrators:F /T

Acronis True Image Home 2011: Restoring Windows 7 to RAID 0: FAIL

I had installed Windows 7 on a regular hard drive -- what Win7 calls a "basic" drive.  I had made an image using Acronis True Image Home 2011 (ATIH).  Now I was trying to restore that image -- using the ATIH Universal Restore feature installed by the Acronis Plus Pack -- to a new, empty software RAID0 array that I had just created in Windows 7.  This post describes my efforts.

For perspective, I could perhaps restore an image of a Windows 7 installation onto a hardware RAID0 array, and I might be able to restore an Acronis image of a RAID0 array to a non-RAID partition.  Acronis promised that the Plus Pack would enable me to restore to a striped software RAID0 array.  But now that I had made the purchase, a search led to a thread suggesting that the promise was false.

Here's how the effort unfolded.  After booting the ATIH CD, I went into Recover My Disks > Browse (wait) > select the .tib file to restore (or, in my case, the first of the five DVD-sized files comprising the backup).  I went on, OK, Next, and came to "Recover whole disks and partitions" and "Use Acronis Universal Restore."  It gave me the option of adding device drivers.  On the assumption, at that point, that drivers were not necessary in a software array, I clicked Next.  I indicated the partition I wanted to recover, and specified New Location as the dynamic volume that I had created for this purpose.  (Dynamic volumes were listed at the bottom of the screen -- I had to scroll to see them all.)  I clicked Next, and here is the message I got:

You are about to recover a partition containing OS files.  If the recovery destination is an existing non-active dynamic volume, then the system will be unbootable because activation of dynamic volumes is not supported.  Are you sure you want to continue?

I searched and found only a few links containing that statement about activation.  A post by an Acronis employee in an Acronis forum said, "The issue will be resolved in a future update of our software."  To see if the most recent update had resolved it, I went to the Acronis site and downloaded the latest build of ATIH.  I was doing this from an Ubuntu live CD, so I had to save the download (an .exe file) to a USB drive and jump it over to my laptop, running Vista, to install the .exe so I could burn an updated CD that would hopefully have better news for me in terms of restoring to a Win7 RAID0 array.  This was a lot of fooling around.

While that was happening, I went ahead with the next step, using my present copy of ATIH.  Alas, a new error:

There may not be enough free space on the system partition to boot up your operating system after recovery.

This was an odd message.  I had two 50GB partitions in my new RAID0 array.  The backup I had made was from just one partition of either 40GB or 50GB.  I clicked OK there and Acronis stopped.  It didn't try to see whether the restore would fit.  Evidently it was not set up to think in terms of RAID0 arrays.

I guessed that even the updated ATIH would not try to fix this.  But it was going to be a while before I could find out for sure.  The installation on the laptop was taking its sweet time.  After seemingly completing most of the installation, it aborted with this message:

Installation Incomplete

The installation was interrupted before Acronis True Image Home 2011 could be installed.

I didn't know who or what interrupted it.  The laptop was just sitting off to the side, doing its own thing.  I wasn't touching it.  I tried again.  Now I got a new error message:

The error was encountered while the installation.

That's really it.  That was what the message said.  It provided technical details that I didn't understand.  Toward the bottom, it said, "A possible reason might be that you do not have enough privileges."  OK, Vista.  Even though I was running as Administrator on the laptop, that was not enough, and possibly the good people at ATIH couldn't have noticed that until we were at the end of the installation process.  I was unfortunately not knowledgeable enough about the solution and was quite tired and not very patient with the idea of researching that question in order to resolve this tangent from a tangent.

I gave up on that Vista errand and just installed the upgraded ATIH on a Windows XP machine.  No permissions issues.  The upgrade took a while, but then it was successful.  Now I needed to remember how to install the Plus Pack.  My previous post about Plus Pack led me to an Acronis instructions webpage.  The basic process seemed to be to install ATIH, install the Plus Pack, and then go into the new Start Menu entry for Plus Pack and click on Acronis WinPE ISO Builder.  That required me to "Specify a path to the folder with the WinPE files."  A search for that exact statement yielded only a post where someone was trying to combine ATIH and Acronis Disk Director on one CD.  A different search led to an Acronis page instructing me to download the Windows 7 Automated Installation Kit (AIK) from Microsoft.  This was a 1.7GB download.  Was this really what people had to do if they wanted to use Acronis Universal Restore?

I went back to the search and tried a different Acronis page.  This page said that Plus Pack had three benefits, and it pointed me to three separate webpages describing those benefits:  it would support dynamic drives and GUID partition tables (GPT); it would facilitate Universal Restore between dissimilar hardware, including virtual machines; and the WinPE part would create bootable rescue media.  The page on dynamic drives led to a page on RAID support, cited above, that led in turn to a table, summarizing the kinds of RAID support provided by various versions of Windows.  It said that ATIH Plus Pack supported restoring to RAID0.

The page regarding Universal Restore said that it would work only if "You have created Acronis Bootable Media (standard, WinPE, or BartPE) after the installation of Acronis True Image Home 2011 Plus Pack."  So apparently there were three different kinds of Acronis bootable media.  To see more about that, I went back into the Start Menu, on the XP machine where I had just installed ATIH, and chose the option to start up ATIH.  In its main screen, I went to "Create bootable media."  So this was going to give me the standard variety.  I burned it to a CD.  Much easier than creating WinPE media.

With that CD, I was ready for the next step.  Acronis said that I would need drivers for the hard drive controller or the chipset, in .inf, .sys, or .oem forms -- extracted, if necessary, from .exe, .cab, or .zip files.  The last time I had played with Acronis Universal Restore, I hadn't understood this driver situation and, as I dimly recalled, part of the problem was that I didn't know which drivers I should get and how I should extract them.  It was clearer to me, now, that there was no getting around it:  I had to have exactly the right drivers.  I have written up that pursuit in a separate post, for those whom it puzzles as it puzzled me.

Not to say that I came to a clear understanding.  I just made a stab at it.

With the drivers collected in a folder, I booted the Universal Restore CD.  When I got to the Drivers Manager step, I clicked Add Search Path and pointed to that folder.  Oddly, when I did, Acronis reported, "No items to display," even though I had just put 16 driver files in there.  I guessed that this meant it had not refreshed its view at that point.  It did not have an option to do so.  I proceeded to designate what I wanted to restore and where I wanted to restore it.  Once again, sadly, I got that error message indicating that "activation of dynamic volumes is not supported," followed by that error indicating that there might not be enough space to boot the operating system after recovery, and once again that was the end.

The working conclusion, at this point, was that ATIH did not support Windows 7 programs partitions in RAID0.  I could install Win7 manually in that kind of partition, and perhaps I could use ATIH to back up a manual installation, but I could not use ATIH to restore any such backup to that location.

I clicked on the Help button in Acronis and browsed its contents, to see if I could get a clearer idea about all this.  They didn't seem to have any information on it.  I posted a question about this on an Acronis forum.  Responses to that question tentatively supported the working conclusion that ATIH does not restore images to Win7 software RAID0 arrays.

Acronis Universal Restore: Getting the Drivers

As shown in another post in this blog, I was in the process of using the Universal Restore feature of Acronis True Image Home 2011 (ATIH) to restore an Acronis drive image from one drive to another.  For this purpose, Acronis made clear that I would need certain motherboard drivers to succeed:

You [must] have drivers for the hard disk drive controller or chipset drivers for the new computer. These drivers are critical for booting the operating system. You can download the drivers for your motherboard on the Vendor's web-site. Please note, if you downloaded the drivers in *.exe, *.cab, *.zip format, you should extract them first. The driver files should have the *.inf, *.sys or *.oem extensions.

My motherboard was a Gigabyte GA-MA785GM-US2H.  I went to Gigabyte's download webpage and indicated that I wanted drivers for 32-bit Windows 7.  They offered me several kinds of drivers:  audio, chipset/VGA, LAN, and SATA RAID.  Plainly, Acronis was not telling me to get the audio or LAN drivers.  I definitely needed the chipset/VGA driver.  How about the SATA RAID driver?  I wasn't using hardware RAID.  I was relying on Windows 7 software RAID, and it did not require the floppy-based pre-Windows installation procedure that those SATA RAID drivers required.  The description of the chipset driver said "AMD Chipset Driver (include chipset\sata raid\vga driver)."  That sounded like the all-purpose thing Acronis wanted.  So I guessed that I probably needed only the chipset/VGA driver.

The chipset driver was a 62MB download called motherboard_driver_chipset_amd_7series-v2.0_win7-32.exe.  My first question was, how do I extract drivers from an .exe file?  I tried running it.  Fortunately, it unzipped itself.  Apparently it was packaged as an executable whose purpose in executing was just to let itself breathe.  Next, how to find the .inf, .sys, or .oem file(s) needed?  I focused Windows Explorer on the unzipped folder and typed *.inf in the search bar at the top right-hand corner of the Windows Explorer screen.  I hit Ctrl-A to select everything that the search produced, Ctrl-C to copy them all, and then went off and created a new folder (not on drive C) and hit Ctrl-V to paste these copies into there.  I did the same thing for .sys and .oem.  There weren't any .oem files, but I came up with 16 of the other two kinds.

Those may or may not have been the right drivers.  I hoped that ATIH would look at the folder, when doing its Universal Restore, and would see what it wanted in there.  Unfortunately, as described in another post in this blog under the title, "Acronis True Image Home 2011:  Restoring Windows 7 to RAID 0," this was pretty much where the matter died.  The responses to a question I had posed in Acronis's support forum were indicating that I could not restore to a Win7 software RAID0 array.

Downloading Video from Canon ZR800 MiniDV Camcorder

I got a great deal on a used Canon ZR800 video camera. I went out and shot some video, and then came home and tried to download it to the computer. That's where the fun began.

Canon provided no drivers or other software downloads to use with the camera.  The manual (p. 46) provided very little information in its "Connecting to a Computer" section.  It said you would need a Firewire cable and a Firewire (IEEE1394) connection on your computer, as well as video editing software and "the appropriate driver."  The manual said, "A driver is preinstalled on Windows operating systems later than Windows 98 Second Edition and Mac operating systems later than Mac OS 9, and will be installed automatically."  It also said, more disturbingly, "The video transfer may not work correctly depending on the software and the specifications of your computer."

The camera had a Firewire port, but Canon did not include a Firewire cable in the box.  That would have cost around $10, but I already had one.  I had used it with my previous camcorder, so I knew the cable and the computer connection worked.  The camera did not have a USB port, so the only other way of getting data from the tape inside the camcorder to the computer (other than buying or borrowing (from a friend or library) some other camcorder or tape drive) would have been to connect the camera to the computer with the supplied video and audio analog cables (for TV connection).  That would have given me a lower-quality analog copy, and would have done so at 1x speed, i.e., with the tape playing in the camcorder while the computer copied what it was receiving.  So it would have taken an hour to download an hour's worth of recording.

I had previously found Firewire connections to be rather flaky.  I realized that Firewire would transfer data much faster than USB 2.0, and that this was probably necessary for people who wanted to use the camcorder for live streaming video.  But since most people use a camcorder to go out and shoot video of places and events, a USB connection seemed like a good idea.  To me, that is.  Not to Canon.

I plugged in the camcorder's power cable, so that it would not have to rely on its battery for whatever came next.  I put the camcorder into Play mode, pulled off the plastic plug covering the several jacks along the side of the unit, and plugged the Firewire cable into the Firewire port under that cover.  I looked at the LCD display on the camcorder.  In the top center, it was flashing the letters "DV-IN."  The manual provided no indication of what this flashing might mean.

On the computer, using Windows XP SP3, I started Windows Movie Maker and clicked on "Capture from video device."  I got an error:  "A video capture device was not detected."  I tried again in Adobe Premiere Elements 7.  It said, "No DV camera detected."  I looked at Windows Explorer.  It did not show the presence of any new disk drive or partition.  In classic view, Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager reported no problems for the IEEE 1394 Bus Host Controller.

There seemed to be a lot of people who had had problems getting their video from the ZR800 to the computer, and a lot of different possible solutions.  Cari suggested making sure that I had installed the Firewire drivers when I installed the computer's motherboard.  Unlike Hugo, though, in my case the camcorder was not listed under Imaging Devices in Device Manager.  I tried 3banana's suggestion of uninstalling the 1394 device in Device Manager (with a right-click) and then plugging in the Firewire cable and (still in Device Manager) choosing Action > Scan for hardware changes.  It added back the 1394 controller and also added a 1394 adapter under Network Adapters.  But unlike 3banana's outcome, mine still didn't detect the video camera.  Attempting to apply his/her suggestion nonetheless, I right-clicked on the 1394 controller and chose Update Driver > Install from a list or specific location > Next > Include this location:  C:\Windows.  But it wouldn't accept that location.  GavHendo recommended using a VGA to USB adapter, but that seemed unnecessary if not impossible.  Someone pointed toward a Microsoft webpage that said a Vista update solved the problem; but I wasn't using Vista.  AtomicProductionsNZ recommended a registry edit for those who were using 64-bit Vista.  Sharkbyte had a non-registry solution that involved copying files named 1394 from WinXP to Vista.

In a post that sounded like it might apply to my WinXP situation, CMahendra observed that his/her Sony Handycam's manual instructed the user to use only a 4-pin to 4-pin Firewire cable.  I hadn't known there was more than one kind.  Checking the jacks and the cable ends, I confirmed that my pins were not bent (unlike those of Brainstrain).  But -- surprise, surprise! -- my cable did have four tiny pins on the camera end, as needed to fit the camera, but it had six contacts, three on each side, on the computer end.  And that's what my computer's motherboard's Firewire connected needed.  So if the Sony and Canon were using the same Chinese manufacturer of Firewire-related hardware, then possibly a more helpful Canon manual would have said what Sony's manual said about using four pins on both ends.  I didn't have a 4-to-4 Firewire cable or jack.  A search for that kind of cable confirmed that it existed and could probably be had for about $7-10 total.  It would have the same kind of small male plug on both ends.  Another possibility was just to buy a 6-to-4 adapter.  I decided that adapters, sticking out, can sometimes serve as a lever to break a jack, and also that sometimes adapters introduce new issues, so I thought the cable would be the better way to go.  For the four-pin jack on the computer end of the cable, I already had a Rosewill RC-501 adapter sitting around, and it had both the larger 6-pin and the smaller 4-pin jacks.  So all I really needed was the cable.  But Battman540 said that the four-pin approach did not solve the problem for him.  In an approach that wouldn't work for me (because my Firewire connector was on my motherboard), Reedvideo said s/he removed the Firewire card, restarted the computer, uninstalled the controller from Device Manager, shut down again, reinstalled the fireware card, and start back up, and then it worked.

In my playing around with it, I noticed something else.  When I connected Firewire to the WinXP desktop, I got the DV-IN indicator flashing at the top of the camera's LCD viewscreen.  But when I connected Firewire to a Ubuntu (Linux) desktop (also to a motherboard Firewire port), it wasn't flashing; it was solid on.  I dusted off a two-year-old post I had written when I was first discovering dvgrab in Ubuntu.  Following its advice, in Ubuntu's Applications > Accessories > Terminal, I typed "sudo chmod 666 /dev/raw1394" and then "dvgrab."  And just like before, it started capturing video right then and there.  I killed Terminal, used the controls on the camera to rewind the tape to the start, and tried it again.  As it had done two years earlier, dvgrab saved the camera's output into a set of 1000MB files, each not quite five minutes (4:51) long, named dvgrab-001.dv, dvgrab-002.dv, etc., in my Ubuntu home folder.  It hadn't previously occurred to me to check out dvgrab's options, but now typing "man dvgrab" in a separate Terminal session revealed that I could have told dvgrab to start a new file whenever a new recording started.  It looked like I could also have specified the length of the files as well as their format (avi, mpeg2, etc.).  There was a boatload of options, actually.  (Those without an Ubuntu installation might be able to do this with an Ubuntu Live CD.)

Anyway, as suggested in another two-year-old post, I didn't bother investigating the current state of Ubuntu video editing tools at this point; instead, I moved the .dv files over to the Windows machine, converted them to .avi with VideoDub, and combined and edited them in Adobe Premiere Elements.  So Ubuntu's dvgrab was the answer for the moment; it worked with my 4-to-6-pin cable where Windows XP would not.  This posed the question of whether there would have been a way to use dvgrab on a Windows machine, if I hadn't had an Ubuntu machine.  I discussed that question in a separate post.