Windows 7: Overlapping Partitions, Entire Drive Is Unallocated, Has No Brain, Still Feels Great

I was using Windows 7.  I had a hard drive containing multiple partitions.  I was in the habit of booting with an Ubuntu Live CD, now and then, to get a GParted view of the drive's condition.  GParted would quickly show me problems with partitions, in a way that seemed superior to what I could get in Windows.

(I was new to Ubuntu 11.10.  Unlike earlier versions, there was no longer an option to start GParted via an easy menu pick, which as I recalled was System > Information > Gparted.  I found it in 11.10 by mousing to the top left button (tooltip:  "Dash Home") and doing a search for GParted.  Once I did that, the Live CD temporarily added it to the toolbar stretching down the left side of the screen.)

This time, GParted gave me the surprising information that the entire drive (which I had just been using, minutes earlier) was unallocated; and when I took a closer look via the right-click Information option, GParted said, "Can't have overlapping partitions."  This post discusses this situation.  (The processes described here unfolded over a period of some days, so there may be some discontinuities in the account, but I think the basic picture comes through.)

I began with a broad search and then a narrower one.  These included repeated suggestions that I go into Terminal (available via search, and also down toward the bottom of the left-side button bar, as above) and type "sudo fdisk -lu."  (That's a -LU, not -1U.)  I had a couple of drives, and thus had to enlarge the Terminal window (or scroll back up) to see what it was saying about /dev/sda, which was the drive GParted had considered problematic.  As I looked down the list of what fdisk was telling me about partitions, I couldn't figure out what GParted was complaining about.  What I expected to see was something like this:

Device        Start        End
/dev/sda1         63     5000000
/dev/sda2    4999999     8000000

In that example, sda2 would start before sda1 ended.  But I didn't see anything like that.  The numbers in my list made sense.  I also didn't have an error message in my list, like that shown by one user:  "Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary."  A later post in that thread suggested typing this in Terminal:

sudo parted /dev/sda unit s print

That just gave me the same "Error:  Can't have overlapping partitions" message.  This was to be expected:  GParted was a front end to parted.  This was just two ways of getting the same report from the same program.

The problem identified in another thread was in the total disk size reported by fdisk.  The top part of the fdisk output said there was a total of 312581808 sectors in /dev/sda, but the list of individual partitions said that the extended partition (and a logical partition within it) ended at 312590879.  The latter was a bigger number than the former.  That is, the partitions were supposedly continuing on past the end of the drive.  There was also a discrepancy between an early line in the fdisk output, which said that sector size was 512 bytes, and a later line, which said that sector size was 2048 bytes.  The advice given in that thread was to use fdisk to delete and recreate the partitions with the correct size.  I would have been inclined to use GParted for that, as it seemed easier, but on reflection I realized that I had probably used GParted to create these partitions in the first place.  But I guess I could have used GParted and then tested it with fdisk again.

But anyway, I didn't have those problems.  The numbers in my fdisk output made sense.  So far, no answer.  I drifted through another thread that pointed me toward TestDisk.  Typing "TestDisk" in Terminal told me that I would have to install the "universe" repository of program downloads in order to install TestDisk.  This might not have been a problem with an installed copy of Ubuntu but I wasn't sure how to do that with a live CD in Ubuntu 11.10.  It appeared that I might have to remaster my Live CD to include the universe repository.  That seemed to be getting pretty far away from the original mission.

It occurred to me that I ought to be able to get similar output from a Windows program -- to see a list of partitions and sectors like that which I could see in fdisk in Ubuntu.  This would not be CHKDSK, which would check the file structure within a partition.  At the moment, I wasn't sure what program I would use for that purpose.

Before I could pursue that thought, I looked again at the fdisk output.  Now I saw something I hadn't noticed before.  My last partition did not go beyond the end of the drive.  But it did go beyond the end of the extended partition.  In other words, I was supposed to have this arrangement:  Primary Partition 1, Primary Partition 2 (optional), Primary Partition 3 (optional), and then either Primary Partition 4 or Extended Partition; and the Extended Partition was supposed to contain any additional (logical) partitions -- up to the end of the drive, usually.  Mine didn't do that.  The relevant lines from fdisk -lu looked like this:

Device        Start       End
/dev/sda3    7000000    9000000
/dev/sda8    8000000    9500000

In the System column provided by fdisk (not shown here because of insufficient line space), sda3 was the extended partition.  In other words, these numbers were saying that dev8 was starting inside the extended partition, as it should; but it was ending after the extended partition, and that was improper.  It wasn't a question of GParted not being reliable, as I had begun to fear.  GParted appeared to be identifying a legitimate issue.  But GParted wasn't going to help me fix it:  as noted above, it was showing the whole drive as being unallocated, which was incorrect, and the only option it was offering me was to create a new partition in that big unallocated space -- that is, wipe out all my data and partitions on that drive.

I was thinking that I should double-check GParted using a Windows tool, and that anyway it would be nice to have a Windows-type alternative to this Ubuntu tool.  I assumed Microsoft itself would not be inclined to give me something useful for this purpose.  The last partition was a Linux partition, not a Windows partition -- using ext3 format, I believed, not NTFS -- and Microsoft was not known for doing much that would be helpful in the Linux world.

It seemed that I would have to use fdisk, from the Ubuntu CD.  I wasn't entirely sure how to proceed.  Fdisk was giving information in terms of "blocks," but when I typed "fdisk" by itself at the command prompt, it gave me options in terms of cylinders, heads, or sectors per track, but not blocks.

Then again, as I thought about it, I realized that I actually could go into Windows > diskmgmt.msc and delete that ending Linux partition.  Disk Management did display it.  It surprised me that, if I wanted to use a GUI tool rather than a command-line option like fdisk, the tools offered in the Windows operating system would be more helpful, in this case, than those offered by Ubuntu.

I had been able to see that ending partition in GParted previously.  It had been marked in some way to indicate that it was problematic.  Why had GParted ceased to display it that way?  It occurred to me to boot up with an older Ubuntu CD -- version 10.04 rather than 11.10.  I did that and went into System > Administration > GParted.  But no, it was showing "unallocated" too.  So something had changed.  GParted was wrong, and I was definitely going to have to use another tool to fix the situation.

Before taking the plunge into fdisk, I decided to use this opportunity to play with one or two other partitioning utilities I had burned to CD.  One was Minitool Partition Wizard.  It got a glowing Editor's Review and four stars from 389 voters at CNET.  Unfortunately, it produced "Boot failed: press a key to retry" when I tried to boot my machine with the CD I had burned.  Oops.  Same thing on retry.  Well, evidently it was time to download a newer copy.  They were up to version 7.0.

While that was downloading, it turned out that I had another copy of Minitool Partition Wizard CD, version 5.2.  I tried that.  It loaded OK, and it showed the partitions without a problem.  It was also faster and easier to get to the information, using a dedicated partition CD, instead of having to load Ubuntu and find GParted.

So, OK, this was looking promising.  In Partition Wizard, I selected the appropriate drive and clicked the "Show Disk Properties" option.  It didn't report errors.  I wasn't sure if it was even capable of reporting errors.  It said that that last, troublesome partition was actually unallocated space.  As I recalled, I had formatted that partition to be ext3, in case I wanted somewhere to install Ubuntu.  Maybe the Linux partition had deteriorated somehow; maybe that's why it was now problematic.

I decided I could do without that Ubuntu partition.  Since I knew there was nothing in it, I told Partition Wizard to extend the preceding partition to take over this allegedly unallocated space.  But not all of it.  I had become superstitious about running partitions right up to the ends of drives.  Just for good luck, I made that unallocated space into an NTFS drive.  Partition Wizard decided that the last 14MB of that space would have to remain unallocated.  I clicked Apply.  Then I deleted the partition I had just made and replaced it with a relatively small (3GB) ext3 partition (which would not show up in Windows, just in case "unallocated" was a potentially troublesome status at drive's end), putting the rest of the space into the preceding partition.

That last step didn't go swimmingly.  Partition Wizard said that it had "Failed to execute the following command" with "Error Code 36':  Minitool Partition Wizard detects that file system of the partition have errors.  Please use 'Check File System' function to fix it first."  Ah, so there was a tool of that sort lurking there somewhere in Partition Wizard.  But where?  Now I saw why it hadn't popped out at me earlier:  it was in the Partition menu (and also the context menu), but it was greyed out.  I couldn't very well check the file system with a greyed-out tool.  It didn't seem willing to run on any partition or drive on that computer.

By this point, the download of Partition Wizard version 7 had completed on the working machine, so I installed it there and took a look at it.  Apparently it would work, for at least some purposes, while Windows was running.  I doubted it would help the troubled computer, since the partition that I was trying to resize contained my paging file.  The Check File System option was not greyed out.  But now it seemed that, if I wanted a bootable CD, I had downloaded the wrong thing.  The Minitool page for the bootable CD didn't specify that the bootable CD ISO would give me the Check File System option, but I decided to give it a whirl.  I downloaded that ISO and tried to burn it to a blank DVD.  ImgBurn said, "Invalid or unsupported image file format!  Reason:  First image file part is less than 2048 bytes in size."  So, OK, bad download.  I re-downloaded the ISO and tried again.  It was a slow download.  This time, when I tried to boot the newly burned DVD, I got "Unknown keyword in configuration file:" followed by eight junk characters and then "Could not find kernel image:  linux."  I tried a cold boot but still got the same thing.  This DVD was junk.  I looked for other sites to download the ISO from, but they seemed to be the kinds of sites that would install malware.

I did want a bootable CD alternative to GParted, for situations like this.  I looked into Parted Magic, but it didn't sound like it had the power of GParted.  Their Live USB option had TestDisk, though, and would apparently only take about 45MB, so I thought it might be a good option to put on an old 256MB USB drive.  I started up UNetbootin and pointed it toward Distribution > Parted Magic > Latest_Live.  I had already plugged in my USB drive, so I chose that, and indicated that I wanted to reserve 50MB for files to be preserved across Ubuntu reboots.  (I wasn't sure exactly what that was about, but it sounded good.)  It started the process of downloading and installing whatever it needed, onto my USB drive.  It said the download would be 175GB.  Larger than expected.  I decided to install from an ISO instead, so that I wouldn't have to re-download if the first try didn't succeed.  So I downloaded the Parted Magic ISO and then went through the UNetbootin installation process that way.

While that was in play, I rebooted the troubled machine and went into Windows > Start > Run > diskmgmt.msc.  As expected, Disk Management reported no drive problems.  It showed all my partitions, including the smallish ending partition I had set aside for some possible future Ubuntu installation.  I right-clicked on the partition adjacent to the ending partiiton, which Disk Management showed as "unallocated."  There was an option to "Extend Volume."  I went partway through that.  It looked like Windows 7 was ready to fix the problem.

I installed Partition Wizard on the troubled machine.  I wondered whether it would perform differently than the bootable CD version (above).  It looked like it, too, was ready to go.  Why was life so hard for had the CD?  Another highly recommended alternative was Easeus Partition Master.  I downloaded it from CNET (four stars, 943 voters) and installed it.  Same thing there:  the Windows installed version saw the partitions as expected, and seemed prepared to merge or resize as desired.  But their "Bootable CD" option took me to a webpage that said the free version -- what I had just installed -- wouldn't include a bootable disk option.

By this point, the UNetbootin process was nearly done.  But I decided to reboot with the Ubuntu 11.10 CD to test some other drives first.  To my surprise, GParted was now showing everything as being OK on the previously troubled machine.  Had we fixed something when I wasn't looking?  And now I saw what the problem was -- why I'd gotten that funky fdisk output (above).  The last partition on the disk, the one that I had set aside as unallocated, was not in the extended partition.  It was a primary partition.  Somehow, I had gotten myself into this arrangement:  Primary Partition 1, Primary Partition 2, Extended Partition, and then Unallocated space outside of the extended partition.

Well, I didn't want that, especially not if it was going to confuse GParted or anyone else.  It looked like I was going to have to wipe out the extended partition -- what's 900GB, between friends? -- and rebuild the thing, and have no excuse to test my cool new bootable USB version of Parted Magic (sniff!).  Then it occurred to me to wonder what those Windows programs -- Disk Management and Easeus and Partition Wizard -- were planning to do with this situation.  Were they somehow going to merge that last unallocated space into the extended partition, in some way that GParted wouldn't do?

Or, no, wait.  I was trying to get GParted to merge the unallocated space directly into the last logical partition.  That's not how these things are done.  I needed to merge the unallocated space into the extended partition, and then shuffle that space on down the line, inside the extended partition, to whatever logical drive was most deserving.  Is that what Windows Disk Management was planning to do?

I decided to find out, because if Windows could walk & chew partitions at the same time, I could meanwhile use the troubled machine to work on other things.  Boot back into Win7; back into Disk Management; extend the volume.  It took ... about seven seconds.  Kind of ridiculous.  I checked it with a GParted reboot.  Now GParted was reporting a single partition filling the entire drive, plus a 1MB partition at the end.

Some days had passed since I had started the processes described in this post, and I wasn't entirely clear on exactly what I had done as I reviewed my notes (above).  But I was sure I had set up an empty ending partition, in my superstition that having a little space at the end could sometimes prevent problems, and 1MB sounded like a possibility.

But in any case, the question had recurred:  why was GParted not seeing the multiple partitions that I had just been working in, in Windows?

I decided to try out the bootable Parted Magic USB drive that UNetbootin had concocted for me.  I made sure my BIOS was set to boot USB-ZIP first (instead of USB-FDD or USB-CDROM), and proceeded to boot that Parted Magic USB.  Its boot menu gave me choices between the default, which would run from RAM, and a couple of bootup alternatives, in case my system had less than 312MB of RAM.  It also gave me submenus for Extras, Failsafe, and RAID.  The Extras menu contained options to load various hardware diagnostics (e.g., Hardware Detection Tool, Memtest86+) and boot managers (e.g., GRUB, GRUB2).

I loaded the default (which, as I soon discovered, would load automatically after 20 seconds if I didn't make a selection).  This gave me an impressive desktop:  Parted Magic was offering me at least 20 to 30 utilities (e.g., Disk Health, Monitor Settings, File Manager) plus Firefox.  I was surprised they were able to squeeze so much onto one little USB drive.  I tried out the Firefox:  it worked.  This definitely seemed like a tool worth having.

But then it seemed that maybe I had played with the Parted Magic boot menus too much.  After a first or second reboot, the graphics became kind of buzzy (i.e., unexpected colored dots flashing in various colored spots, and along random horizontal and vertical lines) and off-centered (i.e., with a couple inches of black space on the left edge of the monitor) and began flashing on and off (i.e., intermittent black screen).  I tried a cold boot (i.e., shut the machine down for at least 30 seconds before restarting, to clear memory).  (Incidentally, the shutdown menu gave me the option of saving my current Parted Magic session.  I guessed that this option was possible on a USB drive, which would have space to store such information, but might not have been available on a bootable Parted Magic CD.)  But when I rebooted, I got two unexpected results:  the USB drive did not boot -- instead, I went into Windows -- and now the buzzy and off-center graphics were affecting Windows too.  Hmm ... probable hardware issue.  I tried rebooting with an Ubuntu DVD, without the USB drive plugged in.  But no, same thing there.  It seemed to be getting worse:  the black spells were longer.  A monitor reset didn't help.  I connected the monitor to a different computer.  It worked OK there.  I tried doing a longer cold shutdown -- several minutes -- and booting again, still without the USB drive plugged in.  That worked.  Now I got a normal Ubuntu screen.  I tried booting the USB drive again.  Now it worked.  Without further ado, I went straight into its Partition Editor.  But that turned out to be just GParted.  It showed the same thing as GParted had shown when run from the Ubuntu Live CD.  And I was getting the funky graphics again, and had to do another five-minute shutdown.

I had not yet succeeded in finding a bootable freeware CD or USB drive that would give me a believable impression of the partitions existing on that hard drive.  I booted into Windows to take a look with the installed (as distinct from bootable) versions of Easeus and Minitool that I had installed there.  I expected them to provide a realistic picture, even if all they did was to parrot what Windows was detecting (i.e., multiple NTFS partitions on that drive).  But now, even after a 10-minute shutdown, the graphics were still buzzy, off-centered, and flashing (indeed, mostly) black.

What in the world had happened?  I was tempted to try the bootable USB drive in another computer, to see whether it was the cause of this, but then I decided I really didn't want two messed-up computers.  It did appear that the USB drive had caused it; there had never before been anything of this nature.  The screen was totally black by now.  I had to do a hard reset to see anything.  I wasn't getting any distortion at the bootup phase.  I tried loading the fail-safe defaults in the BIOS.  I got an option to boot into Safe Mode, so I tried that.  I was still getting some buzziness there.  I tried Control Panel > Device Manager > Display Adapters > right-click on the adapter > Update Driver Software.  It said my software was up to date.  I tried right-click > Uninstall the display adapter (but not its driver software).  A reboot into Normal Mode still showed some buzziness here and there (e.g., in a CMD window).  I went back into Device Manager.  Instead of Display Adapter, I had Other Devices > Video Controller (VGA Compatible).  After five minutes or so, I saw a balloon tip telling me that the drivers specific to my video adapter (ATI Radeon HD 4250) had installed successfully, and now that device was visible as a Display Adapter in Device Manager.  But apparently that took us back to the Dark Ages.  After a reboot, the screen was black.

I rebooted into Safe Mode, hoping to do a System Restore.  Funny thing:  the login screen wasn't taking keyboard input.  I couldn't enter my password.  Even if I typed the password and hit Enter, the login screen did not change.  I rebooted and tried the same thing in Normal Mode, though this time I was entering the password into a black screen.  (I saw a flash of the login screen before it went black.)  I got a Microsoft happy sound, which as I recalled indicated that I had succeeded in logging in.  But the screen remained dark.  Moving the mouse, hitting WinKey, etc. brought no joy.  I could see the hard drive light burning away -- there was obviously a lot going on -- but I was blind to it all.

The monitor had VGA and DVI ports.  It was connected via DVI.  I thought I should try a VGA cable and see if that made a difference.  This transition led to the culprit:  loose DVI connector.  No VGA necessary.  Sorry for slandering the good name of the Parted Magic bootable USB drive.  I mean, it still had GParted, and thus continued to be useless for present purposes in that regard.  But at least it hadn't completely fubared my graphics circuits.  At least not as far as I could tell.

Back in Windows Normal Mode, I started Easeus Partition Master 9.1 and MiniTool Partition Wizard Home Edition 7.1, both in their installed forms.  Both saw the multiple partitions on that drive that GParted had been unable to see.  Minitool listed them in alphabetical order by name; Easeus listed them in the preferred alphabetical order by drive letter.  Easeus did, and MiniTool did not, show an 1.6MB unallocated partition at the end of that drive.  Both appeared to be glorified and perhaps enhanced versions of Windows Disk Management.  Both provided an indication as to whether a given partition was primary or extended.

On the drive in question (unlike another drive in that machine), both Easeus and MiniTool were listing the partitions as neither primary nor logical, but rather as "simple" partitions.  I hadn't paid much attention to the difference until now.  I didn't recall requesting any simple partitions; I had always just used primary and extended.  I guessed that Windows Disk Management had converted the primary and extended partitions previously visible in GParted to simple partitions in that little seven-second operation where it "resolved" the previous situation.  The general idea was that there were dynamic disks with simple partitions, and there were basic disks with primary and extended partitions, but the two did not mix:  you could not have a dynamic disk with a primary or extended partition, or a basic disk with a simple partition.

It seemed that GParted was unable to work with simple partitions.  Another way to say this was apparently that GParted would work only with basic (not dynamic) volumes, and the latter was what Disk Management had given me.  I noticed that MiniTool did, but Easeus did not, provide a right-click option to resize a partition, also available in Windows Disk Management.

A search led to a MiniTool webpage that said MiniTool could convert a dynamic drive back to a basic drive without data loss.  (Of course, one could always wipe and recreate partitions and then restore data from backup, assuming backup existed.)  It looked like I would have to buy the pro version to get this capability.  Another thread said that this wasn't possible without data loss via Acronis products, though one person did interject that a bit of expert-level hex editing could do it pretty easily.  (I suspected that, if it were that easy, these programs would have been offering the capability, but maybe that was exactly what Minitool was doing.)  The MiniTool webpage said that Partition Magic could do it.  I had used PartitionMagic for years, almost always with good results, but thought it was defunct and incompatible with Windows 7.  (Symantec had bought a good program and let it go to pot.)  So I wasn't quite sure what that MiniTool page was trying to say.

I was out of time for researching this issue.  My present impression was that I could (a) stay with the dynamic disk and use Windows Disk Management or the free MiniTool to resize or delete its simple partitions as needed; or (b) backup and wipe the drive, and then create a basic drive and fill it with primary and extended partitions, using virtually any of these tools, including GParted; or (c) buy the pro version of MiniTool and try converting the simple partition to primary without data loss; or (d) explore that expert editing approach to convert the partition manually.

My principal reason for wanting to be able to use GParted was to have a non-Windows perspective on what was happening on the drives.  This was useful in two regards.  First, until Windows converted the basic disk to a dynamic disk, I had been able to see partition information (with GParted and also with fdisk) and get insight into possible problems on my drive.  Second, GParted gave me a very quick heads-up as to whether there were problems on a drive that would call for CHKDSK /R.  Without GParted, I just ran CHKDSK /R on each partition.  It was a very slow and inconvenient process, but I had the impression that it was better than just using the disk tools available within Windows drive properties.  Its inconvenience tended to discourage doing it.  Being able to book GParted (with or without Ubuntu) and take a quick look seemed to encourage more often disk checks.  Typically, there would be no more than one partition needing this attention.

I decided that it would be easier to stay with the dynamic disk, at least for now, and that doing so would give me a chance to learn something about that kind of disk and its simple volumes.  I just had to remember that this was why I was getting those weird results from GParted.  There was also the possibility of an eventual update from GParted or some other tool to handle these volumes.

Internet Telephony with Skype, VoSKY IPW, and a Cordless Phone

I was moving to a new place. I wanted to see if I could use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) as my only phone, instead of paying to install and run a land line or buying mobile phone service. I didn't use the phone that much these days -- I was supposedly busy studying in grad school -- so all I needed was basic functionality. The place I was moving to, like the place I was moving from, had broadband Internet access, so it seemed like the basic potential was there. A month or so before the move, I began to take steps to put a VoIP setup in place. I cannot document all of those steps because some predate this writing. I will try, however, to describe the ones I remember. After doing that, we will be caught up, and I will continue describing the VoIP transition process in more detail. My first steps involved hardware. My first installation would be on my laptop, which was ready and waiting for software and hardware installation. I would also install software and hardware later on the desktop machine, and that would ultimately be the machine through which I would do most of my phone calling. I had headphones with a microphone, though at the beginning they were in storage and I would not be using them until later. I also had a cordless phone, which was the device I wanted to use for most of my phone calling. That way, I could roam around the apartment and do other things while continuing in the occasional long phone conversation. It was apparently possible to connect your traditional phone, cordless or otherwise, to the computer, so as to use VoIP. All you needed was a VoIP phone adapter device. After shopping around, I decided to get the Actiontec VoSKY Internet Phone Wizard. This device was affordable and had relatively good reviews. It arrived, and I installed it on my laptop as instructed. Unfortunately -- and this is the point at which we are up-to-date in this account, so I can begin blow-by-blow descriptions of my efforts -- it was not an easy matter to get it up and running on the laptop. But before describing what was happening at that point, I will mention that the VoSKY is designed specifically for use with Skype, a popular provider of VoIP services. VoIP itself is free, and there are a number of freeware programs that you can use to get you going. I chose Skype because it offered the things I needed in my particular situation. Getting those things was a bit confusing, though. As it turned out, I needed to spend almost $100 per year for my "free" Internet telephony. That's because I had to buy SkypeIn, so that I would have a telephone number that people could call, and SkypeOut, so that I could make unlimited and otherwise free phone calls anywhere in the U.S. and Canada (with low rates for calls to the rest of the world), and Skype Pro, which basically reduced the cost of SkypeIn and gave me voice mail and some other features. It took a fair amount of time to figure this all out and make it happen. Skype did not provide a single webpage that explained all of its services, and did not allow me to buy all of my needed services at once. Instead, in what felt like a confusing, nickel-and-diming approach, I had to purchase each service separately, going through the credit card process three times. It was a little irritating. With that in place, though, and with the VoSKY installed, I was ready to begin VoIP. Problem: I got an error message that said, "VoSKY Internet Phone Wizard application was unable to communicate with the VoSKY Internet Phone Wizard device." They told me to reboot and try again, which I did. Then, after some additional screwing around, I came across a VoSKY forum FAQ posting that said, "Can I unplug and replug Internet Phone Wizard into different USB ports on my computer? No. You must replug Internet Phone Wizard into the same USB port you used during installation. Or, you can reinstall Internet Phone Wizard on the new port." I couldn't remember which of the laptop's three USB ports I had used for the initial installation, and of course I wanted the option of using any of them, so I tried reinstalling. But when I inserted and ran the installation CD setup for that purpose, I got, "Are you sure you want to uninstall VoSKY Internet Phone Wizard?" So apparently what they meant was that I could use the VoSKY on any USB port, but only one -- and if I wanted to change the port, I had to uninstall and reinstall. Instead of doing that, I unplugged the VoSKY's USB cable from the first laptop port and tried it in the second one. Once again, I tried "Launch VoSKY Internet Phone Wizard" from the Start > Programs menu. Again, the "unable to communicate" message. I tried again on the third and last USB port. This time, the computer popped up a "Found New Hardware" notice. I didn't know if this meant that I had had the VoSKY plugged into both the first and second USB ports previously, or if the system was just now waking up to the existence of the VoSKY, or what. But after the laptop did its little USB-recognition process, it asked me if I wanted to reboot so that the thing would work. So I did. On reboot, the Start menu icon couldn't find VoSKYApp.exe. I searched and found it in, of all places, a TMP folder. Of course, TMP folders are the first to be cleaned out by various kinds of Windows system cleaning programs. It spooked me, so I quit and thought about it. I realized, who knows, maybe this was part of a larger plan. But when I tried again, Windows offered to delete the shortcut, and I thought that was probably the wiser approach, so I said yes. So now I had to uninstall and reinstall VoSKY again. This time, I could tell the installation was different. It seemed like I went all the way to the end of the process. (Still no VoSKY icon in the system tray, though.) The program offered to check for updates, and it downloaded one. It was prepared to download another, an update for "VoSKY IPW," but it said I had to uninstall the previous one. So I went ahead with the download, then the uninstallation of the old, then the installation of the new. Unfortunately, it still didn't work. At this point, some time passed. I had to deal with some other, more pressing problems with my system. I switched from the laptop, where I was not getting VoSKY to work, and tried installing it on the desktop instead. There, I thought I had installed the latest version of the VoSKY IPW software, but during installation I got a message indicating that there was a more recent version, and that I would have to uninstall the old before installing the new. So, OK, I downloaded the new. But when I tried to uninstall the old (using either Add or Remover Programs or the supplied uninstall link), I got an error message as follows:

VoSKY Internet Phone Wizard >SetupDLL\SetupDLL.cpp (462) PAPP:VoSKY Internet Phone Wizard PVENDOR:Actiontec (http://www.actiontec.com) PGUID:57FEC470-439D-48F8-A024-0B4DF3D8B545 $9.1.0.429 @Windows XP Service Pack 2 (2600) BT_OTHER 0.64

When I clicked OK on that, I got another message:

InstallShield Wizard Setup has experienced an error. Please do the following: - Close any running programs - Empty your temporary folder - Check your Internet connection (Internet-based Setups) Then try to run the Setup again. Error code: -5001

I got the same error message even if I tried to install in Safe Mode, so I didn't think active programs were interfering with installation. I was installing from a downloaded file, not through an Internet connection, so that didn't appear to be the problem either. And I had emptied my TEMP files. So I took a look at the VoSKY IPW forum. Already, frankly, I was sorry I had bought the product, and sorry, too, that by now 30 days had passed, so I could no longer return it to Newegg for a refund. I wanted this product to help me become more efficient, not to spend valuable hours on what might be a futile effort to make it work. I was willing to settle for the older version that I had already installed on the desktop computer, but I was not sure if that was an option. Each time I tried to start it, I got a message indicating that a newer version was available, along with a message as follows:

VoSKY Internet Phone Wizard VoSKY Internet Phone Wizard application was unable to communicate with the VoSKY Internet Phone Wizard device.

Then I remembered that I had unplugged the USB cord when trying to uninstall. So I plugged that back in and tried again. And, well, oops, but that took care of the error message. I still got the invitation to download the latest version, but I ignored that. We were talking, after all, about the difference between versions 2.1.0.4 (installed) and 2.1.0.7 (available). Uninstallation and reinstallation seemed unnecessary. So now I had a dialog whose tabs were About (telling me the version) and Option (offering "Smart" dialing). I clicked OK in the About tab. Nothing happened. Did this mean I was connected? I picked up my cordless phone. A dial tone! Also, the "Internet Call" light (and not the "Regular Call" light on front of the IPW was lit. Using the phone, I dialed the number for the landline in the place where I was living, starting with the area code, but the landline didn't ring. (I had another phone connected to the land line, but not the cordless phone from which I was trying to make this call.) I tried again, starting with 1 before the area code (because the SkypeIn phone number I had selected was in another area code), but that gave me a busy signal too. Same thing when I tried dialing 800-555-1212 or 1-800-555-1212. What seemed to be the main Skype program window had opened up. I clicked Help > Getting Started. This gave me a Getting Started wizard, or whatever you would call it. I started through its steps. It told me to go to Contacts > Skype Test Call. But I didn't have a Skype Test Call contact in my Contacts tab. I tried dialing 800-555-1212 in the provided space in the "Call Phones" tab. That gave me an error message, "Skype Cannot Hear You Talking." I tried searching for "Test Call" in the SkypeFind tab. That gave me an error message, "The service you are requesting is temporarily unavailable. Please try again in a few moments." In the Skype program window, I clicked on Help > Contact Customer Support. This gave me a Contact Customer Support webpage. There, I went to the Knowledgebase and searched for "Test Call." This gave me 40 or 50 items, but none appeared to be specifically on the topic of test calls. Apparently the Knowledgebase was pulling up all items containing either of those two words. So I searched for just Test. No luck there, either. I went to the Troubleshooter webpage. This started with four options, none of which applied to me. Going to the next item on the list of help options, there on the Getting Help webpage, I came to the User Guides. I chose the Make a Skype Call guide. It seemed to indicate that anyone I wanted to call had to appear on the Contacts tab in the Skype program window. I didn't have any Contacts at present. So I tried to add my landline. This opened the Add a Contact dialog, where I was invited to add people who use Skype. My landline did not use Skype. So evidently I still had the wrong concept. But then I noticed this window had the option to "Add an ordinary phone numbers as a SkypeOut contact." I tried that. Now I had my land line as a Contact. I clicked on the green button to dial it. It said it was Connecting. It rang. But I didn't hear anything in the cordless phone. We were getting closer, though. I could feel it. I went back to the Troubleshooter and chose the third of its four options, "My mic is not working, no one can hear me." The Troubleshooter pointed me, first, toward the Sound Setup Guide. Using that, I clicked to call the Testing Robot, identified as echo123 (though I wasn't sure what that meant). When I did that, I got a dialog box reading as follows:

External Protocol Request An external application must be launched to handle callto: links. Requested link: callto://echo123 Application: Skype. Take a deep breath If you were not expecting this request it may be an attempt to exploit a weakness in that other program. Cancel this request unless you are sure it is not malicious.

I was sure I was not malicious, so I said "Launch application." It seemed to dial. I noticed that, when it started to dial, it would give a short ring on the cordless phone, prompting me to pick it up and prepare to speak. This seemed like a nice feature. But I didn't get any further than that. The calling window said, "Skype cannot hear you talking. Click here to select correct Microphone and speaker." This made me realize that it was looking for a microphone plugged directly into the computer, which I did not have. So now the question was, how do I make it work with a cordless phone? This seemed to be the purpose of the VoSKY, which was doing its job insofar as there was obviously some kind of working link between the cordless phone and the computer; but something was still lacking. It seemed that I needed info from VoSKY, not from Skype. I started back at VoSKY's FAQs page. One FAQ that caught my eye was the one about how I had to plug the IPW into the same USB port each time. On the desktop machine, I had plugged it into a hub, not directly into the computer. I wondered how this rule would work on a hub. So I unplugged it from one port (which I would not have used, if I had remembered this rule, because this was the most conveniently accessible port and was therefore the one I kept open for flash drives) and plugged into another port on the hub. This, it seemed, might not work: the system immediately started going through its "Found New Hardware" routine, and concluded by informing me that my new hardware might not work until I rebooted. But then it did seem that I had achieved the same level of dysfunctionality as before, despite the new port: the cordless phone did ring when the call to the Test Robot started, and the call ended on the screen when I hung up the cordless phone. So it did seem that I might have latitude to unplug and replug in different ports on the hub, at least. So the Ready light on the IPW was lit. According to the FAQs, this meant I had a successful connection. I went on down through the FAQs until I came to this one:

When I make a phone call I cannot hear the other party. Make sure the Internet Phone Wizard's sound card is set to an appropriate volume level. Go to Start -> Settings (2k or XP Classic Mode) -> Control Panel -> Sounds and Multimedia (2k) or Sounds and Audio Devices (XP) -> Audio -> Sound Playback* ->Volume. *When adjusting the volume, make sure the Preferred Device in the Sound Playback tab is either USB Audio Device or Actiontec Internet Phone Wizard. When you have finished adjusting the volume for this device, change your Preferred Device back to the default Windows sound device.

That asterisk looked like it might be the issue. My default sound device was Realtek HD Audio output. I didn't have USB Audio Device as an option, so I switched to VoSKY IPW and clicked Apply. It still wasn't working, so I turned up the volume control all the way and tried again. This time, I made a connection with the Test Robot. I realized that I might have done so before, but I was listening in the wrong place. Instead of hearing her on the cordless phone, the sound really came blasting out of my headphones, which were connected to the computer. So the VoSKY wasn't directing the audio through the cordless phone instead of the headphones and nonexistent computer microphone. I saw that there were some complaints on the VoSKY forums -- which I thought was pretty cool. It seemed to me that a company that was open and honest about criticism must be trying to make things better. I was also impressed by some of the postings from Charles, who appeared to be an Actiontec VoSKY programmer who was trying hard to update drivers and so forth. Now the trick was just for me to figure out whether Charles or someone had already solved my problem, or how I should proceed. Well, if all else fails, RTFM. It seemed I had exhausted the available online sources and would therefore have to resort to paper, or what would have been paper if the manual didn't exist in PDF format. To call a regular telephone using SkypeOut, the manual said that you could call a domestic SkypeOut number by dialing 0 + Area Code + number. I hadn't tried that. But this didn't explain why I had succeeded by dialing 1 + Area Code + number -- had succeeded, that is, to the point of making the landline ring when I dialed it. Anyway, when I tried editing the SkypeOut Contact for my landline, by right-clicking on it, so that it began with a zero rather than a one, the "OK" button went grey and did not become functional again until I replaced the zero with a one. It also remained functional when I removed both the zero and the one and just used the area code plus number. But when I saved it that way, the program told me that my landline was now in Japan. So I changed it back to 1 + Area Code + number. That was all TFM had to say on the subject. So, there was no joy in paper. I saw that the Skype Getting Started wizard was still up, so I went a bit further in it. It didn't offer any troubleshooting suggestions, so after advancing another step or two in it, I went back to the VoSKY tech support pages for more ideas. I was going to post a question in the forum, but it told me my account was inactive and that I had to talk to the administrator. So I included that new issue with my main question about making the thing work, in an e-mail to support@vosky.com, as indicated on their contacts page. I tried to call them, but they were requesting that I enter a code, and I had no idea what that was about. So that was a third question to include in my e-mail. I wasn't actually sure whether to send it to the address just shown or, instead, via their Technical Support Request Form, but I decided to err on the formal side and used the latter. Here's what I wrote:

I have three problems: 1. When I tried to call you at the phone number indicated on your webpage, I received a recording instructing me to enter a code. Please tell me what code I should enter. 2. When I tried to post my question in your forum, I got a message indicating that my account was inactive and that I should contact the administrator. It is a brand-new account. Kindly tell me how to rectify that problem. 3. The substantive issue: Setup: I have a regular phone connected only to the IPW (i.e., not to a landline). The computer has headphones but no speakers or microphone. The Ready light is on, on the IPW. I dial a Contact in the Skype window. The Contact that I am dialing is a separate phone, connected to the landline in my apartment. The IPW-connected phone rings, indicating (I think) that a call has commenced. The landline rings. I pick up the landline phone. I have audio working only from the receiving phone (i.e., the landline) to the computer headphones (that is, not to the actual IPW phone). In other words, if I speak into the landline phone, I can hear my voice on the computer headphones, but not on the IPW phone. I am basically getting Skype service, but nothing from the IPW. Thanks for your help.

The VoSKY people got right back to me. They weren't going to waste words. They got right to the point:

The IPW allows you to use an analog phone opposed to the computer speakers and microphone. It will not support both at the same time.

This called for a response:

This is my second attempt to obtain answers to the following questions. You did reply once, but your reply did not answer any of these three questions: [Three questions, and VoSKY's reply, repeated from above.] I appreciate that reply, but I do not know how to make the phone work instead of the computer speakers or headphones. And I would still appreciate an answer to the two other questions.

* * * * * Some weeks passed after that posting. Unfortunately, I did not keep notes during that time, and therefore cannot explain exactly how I managed to get the VoSKY working. But I did. I was now on to a new problem. I found that Skype's quality was pretty poor. I could not conduct a single conversation without dropped connections and breakups in phone conversations. The system also seemed to display too much sensitivity to noise on my end. If I made even a small noise, the system would assume I was talking, and would mute anything that the other person might have been saying. Skype was not entirely useless. I could carry on some conversations with it. I also thought I might learn some new tricks, if I had time to research it more carefully, and might thus overcome these problems. I also thought it might make sense to acquire a TracPhone or some other pay-as-you-go cellphone, to use in emergencies and so forth, while continuing to rely on Skype to the extent possible. This plan threatened to increase the overall cost of the Skype solution. My investment thus far included about $100 for Skype (including a SkypeIn phone number) and $45 for the VoSKY, and I did not yet have reliable, acceptable telephone service. A regular land line or cell phone would have cost me at least $35-50 per month. So we weren't at that stage yet. But we were getting closer, pricewise, and of course a land line would have offered the advantages of call quality and emergency dialup Internet access, and a cell phone would be mobile. So I was becoming less happy with the Skype option. Then Skype stopped working. It wasn't my phone. I had two separate phones on the line from the VoSKY, and whereas both of them had been working two days earlier, now neither of them was. The VoSKY was still showing one green light, "Ready," but its "Regular Call" and "Internet Call" lights remained dark. After about two days of being without phone service, I discovered that the problem was that my telephone cord was not staying firmly plugged into the VoSKY. Feeling a little foolish, I plugged it in, and now it worked. But it did not work better than before. There were still too many blackout periods, lasting from roughly two seconds to five or more, as well as outright lost connections. For example, I got disconnected four times while attempting to make a simple call to set up a doctor's appointment. It was not a useful option for me. I probably would have given up immediately -- would, indeed, never have fooled with Skype in the first place -- if the alternatives had been more appealing. But in addition to the cost factor just mentioned, there was also a quality issue. With cell phones in particular, I was reading that about half of all cell phone users were dissatisfied with their cell phones and/or their cellular service. Even though it seemed like everyone had a cell phone except me, I was not excited about bringing yet another source of hassle and frustration into my life. An acquaintance suggested trying Gizmo. The problem, there, was that I had invested in the VoSKY, which was designed to work specifically with Skype. I had done that because I wanted to be able to wander around the apartment and do mindless tasks while talking on the phone. The VoSKY theoretically made this possible with my old cordless phone. Without the VoSKY, I was tied to the computer. I did notice that Skype functioned better after hours. I noticed this, however, in connection with calls from a friend who also had MSN Messenger. Since MSN was free and offered good quality (and, to my knowledge, didn't work with the VoSKY), there seemed to be no reason to continue with my Skype setup. As I thought about this, however, I realized that both Skype and MSN were cutting out at times. I wondered whether the blame might be, not with Skype or the VoSKY, but rather with the wireless connection that my roommate had set up, or with the cable TV connection that linked us to the Internet. I wondered, that is, whether I would get better results, with Skype and the same hardware, if I were connecting through some other network. There was also the possibility that the problem was with my computer. My new system used an Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 processor. It was faster than the Pentium 4 I had been using previously. I also noticed, however, that sometimes it would hesitate when I was multitasking. Unlike the Pentium, it did not have hyperthreading. As described above, the laptop had not worked happily with the VoSKY; but I thought that perhaps I could test Skype using the headphones connected directly to the computer, as I had just been using them with MSN on the desktop machine. Alternately, I had recently decided to invest in a KVM switch and a backup computer. [add link] The parts for that machine would be arriving any day now. Even if I couldn't make it work with the laptop, which was very slow, I might have some luck with the secondary desktop machine. It was about midnight at this point, so I felt confident that I could call the local post office on a test call from the laptop, using the headphones (as distinct from the cordless phone and the VoSKY). I just wondered whether that call would drop out or act up in any particular way. But their number was evidently connected to a fax line. I called the 800 number for the Post Office, and there seemed to be no dropping out as I led the automated voice lady through a labyrinth of nonsensical answers to her perfectly reasonable questions. I did the same thing with Julie, the automated agent at the Amtrak 800 number. Their voices were compressed, and since I knew Julie's voice I could tell that the treble had been trimmed out, making it flatter; but there was definitely a solid connection. In subsequent weeks, using the VoSKY with the laptop, I experienced no problems of the kind that I had experienced with the desktop. Calls were of decent quality. They were not as good as with a land line, but the functionality of the cordless phone was otherwise about the same as it had been with a land line. This is not to say that I enjoyed all the benefits of a land line. First, I was not sufficiently confident of the technology to justify installing outlets around the house, and anyway I wasn't supposed to do that in the place I was renting. So I did not have the option of having phones anywhere other than the computer room. Even if I had installed the outlets, I would still have needed to go back to the computer room to dial (though not to pick up incoming calls, which I think would have rang on all phones). Dependence on the computer also meant there was no phone service when the computer was not up and running. Skype warns users not to rely upon their service for emergency calls. That made sense to me, both because of the dependence upon a running computer (would you want to boot it up during a fire in the middle of the night?) and because the computer could be in only one place (what if you were cornered somewhere else in your home?). So ultimately I went to Wal-Mart and bought