Salient Soft

I created a simple batch file to run a number of npm build commands in succession.

However, the file exited after running the first npm command. This appears to be a side effect of the way npm runs – when you run npm, you actually end up running npm.cmd, which exits after completing. This is detailed on StackOverflow here.

A simple workaround as per the post is to prefix the npm commands with call – I did this and everything worked fine and all the builds were executed.

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I hit  number of issues getting the scanner to work, even after an extended period where it had worked ok.

There were 3 main issues:-

• During (re)installation of the software, a test scan is done and this typically failed. This was frustrating because when running the SVT diagnostics utility which came with the software, it would readily perform a scan and save a valid JPeg, indicating that there was nothing wrong with the base drivers. The solution to this was to do an advanced install, and just untick the scan test to allow the install to complete.
• I often had issues where the Kodak ScanMate software (which allows scanning to PDF directly using the front panel of the scanner) refused to connect to the scanner. The main issue here was that the correct USB cable (with an inbuilt suppressor component) must be used – any other USB cable seems to be prone to error. In addition, I found that it helped to exit the ScanMate software from the tray, and restart it. This then gives a choice of either starting the scanner first or the software – it was not clear which was best, but at least this allowed a complete reset (especially after changing settings). I also disabled running ScanMate on windows startup. It is straightforward to run from the start menu when needed, which is not very often. I have also tried installing a later version of the drivers etc. (v2.2.6 rather than the v2.1 on the original delivered CD) but this does not appear to have done anything to improve the reliability (at least on Windows 7)
• Having sorted the above and got to the point of performing a scan, I would often get an error whilst the PDF was being created “Failed to format images” after which the scan attempt just died. This link here details how to delete a sys folder to resolve the problem and this certainly helped – the folder however was in fact in C:\Users\SteveW\AppData\Local\Smart Touch\i11xx  in my case under windows 7. I had to exit ScanMate and disconnect the scanner to be able to delete the folder, and it was recreated automatically when I reconnected and restarted ScanMate. An additional issue was that using a high resolution in the settings definitely triggered the issue – to the point that my gut feel is that this may be a prime cause of the problem. It certainly failed  at 1200dpi, and the improvement in quality was hardly noticeable compared to 300dpi. Also a double sided A4 colour scan to PDF increased in size from around 5Mb to 25Mb so it was definitely not worth using. It also took a lot longer doing the conversion/saving at resolutions above 300dpi (and typically e.g. for 1200dpi, took a long time and then failed). In the end I stuck with 300dpi, and just wound the Jpeg quality up to best to help improve things. After this I was able to get reliable operation.

A backup plan if all else fails is to used the SVT diagnostics utility to scan to a JPeg (tweaking the settings allows colour or monochrome selection etc. but paper size appeared to be just automatic). I then used an upgraded version of PDFSam which allowed creation of a PDF directly from the JPeg. To to this I had to register PDFSam but it appears to allow PDF creation as a free option if you register. This worked fine as an emergency backup. The downer with this approach is that each page side gets saved to a separate file, so they all need pulling into the PDF separately with PDFSam – not an issue but a bit time consuming.

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I have used Baretail which may be found here. It has a number of features but crucially allows you to a follow additions to a log file, as you would with tail –f on linux.

Baretail is an improved version of Wintail which is also from Bare Metal Software.

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I hit this problem and found it was due to Kaspersky’s internal firewall that was blocking inbound TCP/UDP network traffic on the lan. This post here had the solution – see the comment by Dr Maveras near the bottom, which details how to reconfigure the Kaspersky Firewall to allow the traffic:-

I found the solution to _MY_ problem… I had been experiencing the same issue as in the original post – I could not access the XP pc from the W7 pc. But I could access the W7 pc from the XP pc.

I checked / tried these things first:
-Network Troubleshooter (W7 pc)
-Network Discovery turned on (W7 pc)
-Simple File Sharing (I could not even find this option anywhere on the XP pc)
-I was NOT able to ping the XP pc from the W7 pc
-I was able to ping the W7 pc from the XP pc

Solution:
When I disabled my antivirus’ (KIS 2011) built in firewall, I immediately regained access to the XP pc from W7.

It turns out that KIS 2011’s built in firewall had both “Local Services (TCP)” and “Local Services (UDP)” blocked under the “Packet Rules” tab. After changing the settings from “Blocked” to “According To Application Rule”, the problem was resolved.

I also had an issue where the XP pc did not always appear on the W7 pc network map. I resolved this issue by creating a shortcut to the XP pc on the W7 pc.

I hope this helps someone else.

Windows XP Home SP3
Windows 7 Professional SP1
Kaspersky Internet Security 2011 (KIS 2011)
Linksys WRT160Nv3

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Previously this had been an issue as the PC would sleep during the validation of a Backup, so I manually switched to an Always On power plan.

With the current PC build I was using, the PC would hang and not shut down cleanly if it was put into sleep and woken whilst an eSATA drive was attached to the 2-port STARTECH card I was using. Providing the PC did not sleep, all was fine.

I therefore looked for a means of automatically switching to always on for Backup runs. Rather than switch back to the normal power plan automatically after the backup, I elected to leave Always On set and switch back to normal on every startup. This way, I would be sure that if I still had the eSATA drive connected after a backup, the pc would not sleep.

This Acronis forum post which refers to this instructional pdf detail a workaround to the problem, which involves coding a batch file to switch power plans, and calling it as a pre/post custom command in Acronis in the backup settings.

In addition, as I wanted to set the plan back to normal at boot time, I used the technique from this StackOverflow post which worked correctly. Originally I had tried using a scheduled task triggered at boot time, but it refused to run and did not give a reason why.

My registry settings file, batch files, and vbs script are listed below for reference. Note that the GUIDS correspond to the particular power plans, and are unique for each one and different for each pc – see the above pdf for details of how to list the power plans with their corresponding GUIDs.

This fixed the problem, but I remain unimpressed that Acronis does not handle this automatically or have a setting for it in a backup definition. You can tell it to prevent sleep for scheduled backup runs, but not for manually initiated ones.

SetPowerPlanNormal.reg

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]
"SetPowerPlanNormal"="wscript.exe \"C:\\System Management\\RunInvisibleBatchFile.vbs\" \"C:\\System Management\\SetPowerPlanNormal.bat\""

RunInvisibleBatchFile.vbs

CreateObject("Wscript.Shell").Run """" & WScript.Arguments(0) & """", 0, False

SetPowerPlanNormal.bat

:: Change Power Plan to Normal.
::
@ECHO OFF
POWERCFG -SETACTIVE ccaec46d-cbf8-42af-9e8f-ab66182942f7
::
@EXIT

SetPowerPlanAlwaysOn.bat

:: Change Power Plan to AlwaysOn.
::
@ECHO OFF
POWERCFG -SETACTIVE 499ab33e-0735-4605-8ccc-98211478164b
::
@EXIT

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My event viewer is slow to open – feels like 20-30 seconds or so.

This post here indicates that others have found the same thing.

The post has a workaround – copy the eventvwr.msc from Windows\System32 on an XP system, and it will run the XP style event view on Windows 7. This starts almost instantly, but of course it does not provide the nice error summary of the new version, so you can’t have it both ways!

Unlike the advice in the post I copy the file to another folder rather than System32, such as System Management, as it is a separate addition. I renamed it EventVwrClassic.msc.

You can just make a shortcut to it to run it. Unlike the standard windows 7 one, it will pop the UAC dialog to ask you to approve the privilege increase, even if you set the shortcut to run as administrator.

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This was done in order to resolve ongoing reliability issues with the OCZ Vertex and SATA port errors from the P6T as detailed here.

This post also follows on from my earlier post here concerning hot swap issues, where I went into some detail of the P6T flashing process. Reference should be made to that post for more details of P6T flashing.

The following steps were performed:-

1. I identified the current firmware version of my OCZ Vertex. To do this start device manager, find the disk under Disk drives, and open its properties. Then select the Harware Ids property and the version number of the firmware will be shown. There were hints in the forums of a more detailed revision number, but I could not find it. My initial version was 1.5.
2. I also tried to run the OCZ Toolbox which allows identification and upgrade of the firmware, and also auto downloads the correct new version. I nice idea if it had worked! In my case it failed to find the OCZ Vertex either before or after the upgrade process.
3. I did note that a number of posts suggested switching the SATA mode to AHCI in both the bios and windows. This OCZ post details the process, which (for the windows part) simply involves changing the value of HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci\Start in the registry from 3 (=IDE mode) to 0 (= AHCI mode). However, when I tried this at this stage, the system froze at boot time. Fortunately, I was able to switch the setting back in the BIOS, boot into safe mode, and set the registry setting back to 3, to restore the system to a working state.
4. The latest version for my Vertex was 1.7, but it is not possible to upgrade directly from 1.5 to 1.7. It is necessary to upgrade to 1.6 first. Finding all the historical versions of the firmware is not easy on the OCZ site – the main download area only has the most recent version. Older version may be found from a forum post here which has all the historical downloads.
5. For my Vertex, here is  the 1.6 upgrade and here is the 1.7 upgrade.
6. Note that as per the 1.6 upgrade, I had the ‘filename error’ which meant that I had an older version which needed a destructive upgrade to 1.6 due to a change in the NAND/wear levelling algorithm. This would mean loss of all data on the drive and a restore afterwards, and the use of a different kit for upgrading. The upgrade also could not be done with the drive in use as the system disk. The links in the previous paragraph give all the instructions and the alternative versions of the upgrade.
7. I then made 2 full backups with Acronis, plus another daily file backup, to be sure I would be able to restore the drive.
8. As per the instructions, I jumpered the drive to set it into standalone/upgrade mode, and booted from the previous version of Windows 7 which I still had available on a standard Hard drive. I kept this available just in case, and on this occasion I was very glad I did.
9. The destructive upgrade is available as 16_win_vertex.zip. Unfortunately the zip contains 2 versions of the update, 641102VTX.exe and 661102VTXR.exe. There are no release notes to say which version to use or what they are (!) I wondered if they related to the internal firmware/drive version from which you were upgrading, but I didn’t know that either as I have said earlier. Another forum post hinted that as may be expected, the 661102VTXR.exe was a later version and the ’R’ indicated revised. I decided to try this one.
10. Having jumpered and rebooted, the drive correctly identified itself as YATAPDONG BAREFOOT, and I proceeded with the upgrade, which went successfully.
11. I then immediately upgraded from 1.6 to 1.7 using 17_updaters_1.zip.  This time, a standard non-destructive upgrade could be done (not that it mattered in my case), which mean burning an ISO on a CD, and booting that to do the upgrade. The zip contained ISOs for a number of OCZ products plus some release notes this time, so I burnt the ISO for the Vertex. I booted it and did the upgrade, which went with no problems. One point is that I cannot recall whether I removed the jumper on the drive before or after this final upgrade. I am fairly sure that it was after, in which case the upgrade does not mind whether the jumper is present, but if there are any issues it should be tried without the jumper present as would be normal for a non destructive upgrade.
12. Following this, I booted the system. Initially it could not see the Vertex, so I rebooted into the bios, found it was then visible, and did a bios save and another reboot. This time the drive was visible but not formatted.
13. I then booted Acronis from its rescue CD and restored the backup, plus the Master Boot Record. This proceeded normally.
14. After rebooting, the system came up and ran fine, however it did present the boot manager from the other disk, and the system had to be selected from there. To prevent the need for this, I copied the boot files back to the new SSD using bcdboot as per this post here. It was also necessary to reset the boot order in the bios so that the SSD was chosen first, otherwise the boot manager is still presented even after you have run bcdboot.

Now I had a working system with the updated SSD, I decided to reflash the P6T as well. Previously I had had hot swap and SATA issues with later bios versions, as detail here. However, since then I had disabled the onboard JMicron controller which was giving problems, and replaced it with a Startech controller, as detailed in the update to this post here. Therefore, the original issues which were preventing the use of a later bios were no longer present, so I opted to flash to the latest version which at the time of upgrade was version 1408 :-

1. I used the in-bios EZ-Flash, and the process and precautions are detailed in the original section of this post here.
2. I re-applied the required motherboard settings as per the process, and rebooted successfully.
3. I then retried switching into AHCI mode, as detail above when I tried it prior to the upgrade. This time it worked correctly with no problems. In the bios, I just set the onboard SATA to AHCI. The JMicron controller was disabled, and the Startech controller was not touched as this was an add-in card just used for SATA backups. It is possible that now either the onboard ICH10 SATA or JMicron SATA might work and hot swap reliably in eSATA mode with AHCI enabled, but as I was happy enough with the Startech I decided to leave this issue well alone for now.
4. As a final test, I re-ran the Windows Experience tests to see if AHCI had improved performance, and indeed the primary hard disk figure had increased from 7.1 to 7.3, which is good considering the fact that my original OCZ Vertex is now an old  technology which has been set to End-Of-Life by OCZ. The system certainly felt snappier, but this is highly subjective as I had not run before and after benchmarks – the goal of the whole excercise was reliability rather than speed.

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My old TyTn II has had sync issues over the last few weeks, sometimes needing several attempts to sync.

A few days ago it failed completely with sync errors part way through.

I have tried a number of things to resolve the issue, with only partial success.

1/ WMDC 6.1 did not sync at all. I tried turning ‘advanced network functionality’ both on and off on the TyTn II (under settings/connections/USB to PC), and neither worked. The advanced setting is apparently what allows the device to share the PCs internet connection, and is not available with this turned off, although I have not investigated this.

2/ I tried removing WMDC 6.1 and installing WMDC6.0 for Windows 7/Vista 64 bit, but it always installed 6.1 as part of the install, and so was very tricky to roll back.

3/ This procedure worked in the end and allowed 6.0 to install (as per this forum post here):-

Note that as part of this procedure, when deleting the WindowsMobile folder, renaming it first then allows all the contents to be deleted (possibly rebooting after the rename but this was not always required). Note also that I turned windows update automatic mode off so that it would always ask about any update first, in case it was responsible for the ‘invisible’ update to 6.1

Here are the steps that I performed during this cycle of events that has got
my Dopod phone with WM6 sync’ing again with WMDC 6.0:
— Uninstalled the two Windows Mobile Device Center 6.1 items from the
Control Panel > Programs and Features list
— Manually deleted the contents of the C:\Windows\WindowsMobile folder.
Initially I could not delete some DLLs but once the two “Windows Mobile
device connectivity” services were stopped from the Task Manager, I was able
to delete the rest of the files in the WindowsMobile folder, except for the
en-US folder containing the *.MUI files. I could not delete them and so
decided to leave them.
— Using Regedit, I deleted all entries from the following two keys that
related to my two devices:
* HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows CE Services\Partners
* HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows Portable Devices\Devices (I left
in the entry for my memory card)
— Using Windows Explorer, I deleted all files in the following folder:
* C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Acti veSync\Profiles
— With my two Pocket PCs disconnected, I tapped on Start > Programs >
ActiveSync > Menu > Options, highlighted the Windows PC and tapped on and
the Delete button. Both of my PPCs had two entries in here so there could
have been some confusion on the desktop at some point, so I deleted both of
them. They do not sync with any other computer.
— Rebooted (Restarted) my Windows Vista computer
— Reinstalled WMDC 6.0 from the Microsoft Download website.
— Recreated the two relationships from my two devices, and they each did
the initial long sync
— I then tested each device that it could perform a sync not long after it
was reconnected, and they both now sync perfectly. I also tested that making
any changes to some contact details in Outlook 2007 would update the devices
after a sync. and it did.

4/ When using WMDC 6.0, I had to disable the Advanced Networking Functionality on the device, as WMDC was unable to install the correct driver for it when I tried.

4/ This now allowed the TyTn II to sync contacts, calendar and tasks. However, annoyingly, it does not sync the textual content of calendar appointments or tasks – only the headers are synced. This is the ‘partial’ solution that I am having to live with. The good point is that at least contacts are synced properly, and at least with the appointments I will get reminders on the phone plus the title details, which is enough for most of them.

5/ I retried the different versions a number of times but this behaviour was consistent. In the end I had to use system restore to remove 6.1 as the driver update would not remove. It may have done so in safe mode but I did not try this. The behaviour was consistent with both USB and bluetooth syncing.

6/ I also tried syncing with a laptop running Windows XP, but interestingly this also failed to sync, which perhaps points the finger at the TyTn II as this used to work.

7/ I tried running SCANPST.EXE (in the C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12 folder) to check for PST corruption as a possible issue. Interestingly it did find a number of issues. It fixed most, if not all of them ( I reran the check again after it had done the fix and some errors remained). However, these errors have not caused any issues when using Outlook and did not allow the TyTn II to sync with WMDC 6.1

It is not clear what the actual issue is, but it is interesting that WMDC 6.0 at least completes a full sync consistently (albeit without calendar/task text). There are any number of posts on the internet complaining about this issue, and I must say I agree with them. It is hugely ironic that an iPhone can sync with Outlook but in many cases a Windows Mobile cannot.

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I had issues getting Activesync to connect over bluetooth during the last few days. at each attempt activeSync on the HTCgave the error “attention required, unable to connect, bluetooth port may be in use” etc.

I tried restarting both and reconnecting but this did not work.

On one occasion, Window 7/panther was unable to complete listing the devices, but this appears to have been a one of as it is fine today.

In the end, I tried deleting the pairing and repairing the devices. This solved the problem. I was concerned that it would also delete activesync related info and require reconfiguration of that, but it did not. Once the pairing was set up, I was able to connect via Bluetooth from the HTC and resync correctly with no further errors.

I have seen this before in other situations where a bluetooth pairing appears to get corrupted in someway, and generally as in this case deleting the pairing and repairing seems to resolve it.

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Update 24/3/2011 09:08

The event log reported an error on boot today (after a very slow boot with a long blank screen), seemingly for SATA 3 again (unless I am still confused about how the port mapping works)!

The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort2

This is very strange as SATA 3 is no longer connected, so it appeared to be winging about an unused port. It is possible that Windows interrogated the port on boot and got an error even though nothing was connected, but it is still a bit weird. No immediate action has been taken – will monitor over the next few weeks.

The next step would probably be to add a new PCI express SATA controller and disable all the onboard SATA completely. This Startech controller offers 4 internal and 2 external ports, and needs a pci express X4 slot. It would therefore fit in the spare pci express X16 slot in my P6T, as pci express cards with less lanes can fit happily in a larger slot and use it partially. At the time of writing it is available from Lambdatek for around £66 inc VAT. It appears to get very mixed reviews, although my experience with startech has been good. A search did not reveal any other obvious cadidates for a reasonable price – just some higher end raid ones which also seem to have fans so hot and noisy as well as pricey!

Update 7/2/2011 12:54

I examined the event log again over the last few weeks and new errors were present for SATA 3:-

Error, Event 11, Atapi – The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort2

This appears to be a new problem affecting the Samsung 1TB data drive. The drive has therefore been moved to SATA 6 and will be monitored over the next month.
It is still not clear whether these issues are due to one or more faulty cables or to faulty ports on the motherboard. The next test will probably be to swap the cables for new ones and monitor again, as this is much easier and cheaper than a full motherboard swap. Given that a single cause is more likely than multiple independant failures (unless a whole batch of cables were faulty or of poor design), a fault on the motherboard looks most likely for all the issues.
As multiple disks have now been affected (The Vertex and one of the Samsungs), at least it does not appear to be a fault with a particular device.

Update 7/11/2010 8:33

I examined the event log and the drive error has not occurred since before moving the cable to port SATA 5 (last occurrence of error was 2/11/2010 at 9:51)
Therefore my conclusion is that either port SATA 1 on the motherboard is faulty, or there was a poor connection, or a faulty cable issue which has been rectified when the cable was moved.

I may try some further tests – perhaps moving back to port SATA 1 with a new cable to further narrow down the issue.
I will check again in a couple of weeks for any errors and perhaps try a further test then.

The good news is that the evidence does not point to a faulty OCZ Vertex drive.

I have had occasional drive errors logged, as follows :-

Error, Event 11, Atapi – The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort0.

It appears that this error relates to SATA 1, the OCZ Vertex, although the mapping between the event and the actual disk is hard to establish. There are Microsoft posts on how to do this here and here, however they do not use the same disk/port designation as above so they are not all that helpful.

The problem could be the drive, the motherboard controller, or the cable. To start to diagnose it, as at 12 noon on 2/11/2010 I have moved the OCZ Vertex onto Port SATA 5 with the same cable. I will monitor the issue and try further diagnosis over the next few days/weeks and post the outcomes here.

IF I do have to replace the existing OCZ Vertex (should be under warranty though…) there is now a Vertex 2 which is faster, and also a Vertex 2e which reduces the overprovisioning in the SSD. This overprovisioning is the area used for read-modify-writes/block cleaning where a block is swapped for one in the overprovisioning area. It is also used for wear levelling and bad block replacement. See here and here for for a discussion by AnandTech on this. See here for a  review of the Vertex 2e and comparisons with the Vertex 2.

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