A couple weeks ago I had an issue with my computer, I was logging into the computer remotely so I could access my programs from work (I told you that I was a geek when it came to computers). I noticed that my recycle bin was showing that it had trash in it. Now I am usually one of those people that when I delete a file, if I don't delete the file directly, I immediately empty the recycle bin. So for me to see files in the recycle bin is kind of unusual, so I thought maybe I got distracted and forgot to empty it. I decided to open the bin and see what it is that I forgot to delete. When I opened the bin it was empty. The icon showed it being full and the bin was empty. Now this isn't all that surprising. Windows is know for having strange quirks and seeing a malfunctioning icon is nothing new for me. I've seen that a dozen or so times and there is usually a really quick fix for this issue. Delete a file and empty the bin will take care of it 98% of the time.
So I created a quick junk file, a simple txt file that I planned to immediately delete. So I trashed it as soon as I made it and followed my usual procedure of emptying the recycle bin. I got the usual "Are you sure you want to delete the items in the bin" and I clicked yes only to get a response "Error: Not all files could be deleted." I opened the recycle bin and the junk file was gone and there was nothing in
the bin, but the icon still showed a full recycle bin.Well that seemed annoying, so I decided to do what any good tech would do and "restart the computer". A few minutes later the computer is back up and running... and the recycle bin is still full. I check the bin and it shows nothing. So I decide to do the next trick and try to empty the empty recycle bin.... this time the message says "Are you sure you want to delete Windows?"
Ok so this is an interesting question, do I want to delete windows? Well considering the frustration that it has caused me over the years I went for the immediate response of "yes". I clicked on Yes knowing that there wasn't going to be any way that this system would allow me to physically remove windows. And I immediately got an error that says that it couldn't delete windows, files were in use etc. With some comfort of knowing that the computer was smart enough not to delete the operating system while it was running I knew things couldn't be too bad.
After about a day of research I found out that this is a bug that randomly occurs in windows and that Microsoft is well aware of it but has no intention of ever trying to find a fix for it.
I tried a number of options to correct the problem, searching through forum after forum of other people having the same problem and what they did to try to resolve the issue. After about 2 days the problem was solved.... but not before I discovered another issue. One of the things that I thought about doing to resolve the issue is to use Microsofts "Restore System" function. This can be quite the life saver. If you have never used it, here is how it works: Windows saves a snapshot of your computer (usually on a daily basis) it saves a quick image of what the computer was running and what the registry looked like on a specific day. Now the idea is to look at just the programs that are installed and the registry. It does not look at files that are saved or emails that are downloaded. So when you use the restore it ignores everything except the program changes. So if you install a program that has an issue with your computer you can restore the computer to the way it was the day before without losing your email or any new things that you may have downloaded. It simply pretends that it never installed the software and removes all knowledge of the software from the registry and its installation folder. This can save you a lot of time if you have a problem with the computer. So where was my issue that I discovered before resolving my recycling bin problem?
All of my restore points were gone. This was an issue. I looked at the system and it was set to save restore points everyday, and there were no restore points to be found. This is could be a major issue. Without those restore points I can't restore the system to a previously working state. So here I am wondering what I am going to do if I can't get it working?
So I am now surfing through even more forums trying to find where this problem comes from, the only info that I could uncover on this problem is that windows does this if you are running low on hard drive space.
This is the part of the blog where you need to know that I was laughing about "lack of hard drive space". Anyone that knows me knows that I have more space on my computer than most people will have in the next 5 years. When people were talking about how they had 1 gig of hard drive space in 1996 I had 2 gigs. When people were telling everyone about how they had 10 gigs of hard drive space in 1999 I had a 40 gig drive. Here we are in 2008, and people are talking about how their computers are coming with 500 gig drives.... I have just over 2 Terabytes (2000 gigs). Yeah it seems like a lot but for what I am doing with my computer you'll realize that in the next 5 - 10 years I'll have a petabyte (1000 Terabytes) just to support the kind of animation that I want to be making, and backing up all of my previous work. Needless to say I have plenty of hard drive space so for my computer to be doing something that is usually only done when there is no hard drive space that means that there is a problem with windows.
So as I said, I managed to fix the recycling bin problem, and I didn't want to panic over the inability of restoring my system should a major issue occur. So I took this time to start backing up my system. I spent the next 4 days backing up as much of my system as I could onto my external hard drive.
After I had backed up most of the hard drive I noticed one other strange occurrence my image files wouldn't open using windows picture viewer. They would open fine using my image editing software (Photoshop) but the problem with that was it takes nearly 1 minute to get Photoshop started and if someone sends me a picture that I want to look at quickly I want to just use the windows software because it will open the image in a matter of seconds and then I can close it. A day later, the recycling bin error returned.
Well, with all of this happening I made the decision that I need to reinstall windows. I decided that windows had become corrupt and without being able to restore to a good state, it seemed only logical that I wipe out my hard drive, reinstall my software, and have a fully functional version of everything running.
The weekend hit and I spent 2 days reformatting and reinstalling, I had most of it taken care of by the end of Saturday and on early Sunday morning I realize exactly how bad my situation had become. The wipe of the hard drive was a good thing, a fresh install of windows is something I usually do once a year but this was something that I had done only about 6 months earlier.
So if the reinstall was a good thing why was my situation bad? I realized that it was bad as soon as I plugged in my backup drive. The computer identified it immediately and I was able to browse the files. Everything that was on the drive seemed to be there. The only problem is that everything that I had backed up from the previous install of windows had become corrupt. Apparently the corruption of windows was passed onto all of the files that I had been storing on the same drive as windows. It wrote all of the files in an undecipherable format that only the corrupted version of windows could read.
I spent the next 3 days attempting to recover my files only to find that they were gone. Hundreds of pictures gone... audio files that I was editing for my next film....gone.... months worth of work all history because windows destroyed the files. Nothing could decipher the corruption and what made it worse is that the corruption was tying itself to my hard drive. It wouldn't allow me to delete any of the files, so it was eating up hundreds of gigs of space and preventing me from being able to delete the files.
So I spent 2 more days copying the good files that I still had access to which had never been on the corrupt drive. And finally I had to run another program that would forcibly and permanently wipe out the drive.
So here I am a couple weeks later, still trying to see what was recoverable. I'm glad that I make multiple copies of my important files, but I kick myself for not having been able to catch this issue earlier.
There is a lot that I can never recover, but if anything I hope this serves as a warning to all that a simple backup is not always the only answer. From this point forward if I ever notice corruption in windows and I still have network access I will be transferring the files to another working computer first to make sure that the files are truly backed up before I wipe it out.
