I am writing a program for Microsoft refurbishers, and I would like to include a feature for creating a system recovery partition once all the necessary drivers are installed. The problem that I am running into is that it won't let me create the .wim file while the disk is mounted. When I try it gives me the error "The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process". I have seen guides that say to boot to a windows installer, but that seems inefficient. Is it possible to create a backup of a running machine without booting to another drive? Any help is appreciated.
This can be done by creating a shadow copy of the drive. A free project using this approach was presented by the german c't magazine as a command script.
The project can be found and the scripts downloaded here:
c't WIMage.
Unfortunately this page is in german, but the script files may show you how it works.
Related
This is probably a pretty easy question to answer for someone that is experienced with FS minifilters. I am trying to script the removal of a filter driver and device.
Some background... this driver is running on Windows 8/10 x64. The vendor that created the driver has not been helpful in fulfilling my request for a removal tool. Unfortunately their MSI uninstall is buggy and only works about half the time you run it... They want us to upgrade to their newest version that doesn't have the bug we are encountering during uninstallation. We aren't interested in continuing use of this software so a paid upgrade seems frivolous... Their only suggestion has been to reimage the computers without the software that includes the FS minifilter device... That's out of the questions because it is on 1000+ computers...
Basically, their official uninstaller does an API callback to one of their servers and verifies the machines eligibility to uninstall:
Does the MAC address of the primary network adapter exist in their
database?
Does the password you entered for uninstallation match
what is set in their database?
If you are eligible, it runs an MSI uninstallation and disables the FS filter, removes the driver file, service files, configuration, and restarts... The bug that is keeping us from doing a normal bulk removal (their way) is that the MSI freezes during the removal process (after checking eligibility) and requires us to restart a client computer up to 3 times to finish the uninstall.
I have been able to successfully remove the software and device/driver by externally mounting the Windows file system and manually removing the driver file under System32/Drivers and also removing all of the actual program files/services. I have not been able to do this booted onto the same partition where the minifilter is loaded. The minifilter driver that is running is protecting those program files, a registry key, and the actual .sys file under System32...
I've done some basic reverse engineering of their MSI... They are using custom actions to perform the removal... First step is the removal of the service, second step is the removal of the minifilter. Both actions are done via an executable that is packaged in the MSI... I've extracted that and attempted to use it by running the same commands that they do during the MSI... I haven't had any luck. The minifilter just doesn't want to die.
They have some other custom actions that are loaded via DLL. Initial investigation makes me think its all of their custom uninstall eligibility craziness.
It looks like their minifilter doesn't have an unload routine built in. Using FLTMC I get this error attempting to detach and/or unload:
0x801f0010 Do not detach the filter from the volume at this time.
0x801f0014 Do not detach the filter from the volume at this time.
Does anyone know of a good way to unload a minifilter that is throwing those errors?
Try to kick out FltMgr.sys of the kernel by:
Renaming %SystemRoot%\sytem32\drivers\FltMgr.sys
Or changing HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\FltMgr\Type to 0x4 (Disabled)
Reboot
Minifilters can't work without Filter Manager.
If you are desperate enough, look into Windows PE, available as part of the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit.
A Windows PE image can be remotely installed onto a machine's hard disk and configured to perform whatever task you need done and then automatically reboot back into the original operating system. Doing it this way gives you the same access as externally mounting the infected file system, but can be automated. I've used this approach in the past to automate offline maintenance tasks on several hundred machines (e.g., changing a registry setting that Symantec Endpoint Protection was "protecting") and while getting it working is fiddly, once it is working it works well.
My email address is in my profile, you're welcome to contact me if you decide on this approach and have questions about implementing it.
Alternatively, depending on your jurisdiction and circumstances, you might want to consider threatening the vendor with a lawsuit if they refuse to provide a proper solution. They broke your computers, it should be their job to fix it. From the sounds of it, they wouldn't even need to do any work, just let you have the upgraded version for a few weeks free of charge.
I am using osxfuse to develop a network disk with our service on mac osx, when I open a office2011 file and save in my disk, it will appear this error as below:
"you cannot save while the file is in use by another process.try saving the file with a new name."
but it is fine for office 2016. I am confusing about this and do not know how to resolve it?
who can help you?
I am working on my own FUSE file system and also had this problem. I found that in my case it was because I mounted the file system with the "noapplexattr" option.
It looks like MS Word requires applexattr.
MS Office apps uses extended attributes a lot. So your fs should has support of xattrs at least via apple double files (._fileName)
Also i found that MS Word likes to use exchange operation while saving files.
But it also may be an issues in your read/write/move methods implementation.
When i have such doubts - i use loopbackFS example app and just compare how it works with my FS.
I am using C# with .net 2.0
I am saving my program data in a file under: C:\ProgramData\MyProgramName\fileName.xml
After installing and running my application one time I uninstalled it (during uninstallation I'm removing all the files from "program data") and then I reinstall the application, and ran it.
The strange thing is that my application started as if the files in program data existed - means, I had old data in my app even though the data file was deleted.
When running:
File.Exists("C:\ProgramData\MyProgramName\fileName.xml")
I got "true" even though I knew for sure that the file does not exist.
The thing became stranger when I ran the application as admin and then the file didn't exist.
After a research, I found out that when running my application with no admin privileges instead of getting:
C:\ProgramData\MyProgramName\fileName.xml
I get
C:\Users\userName\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\ProgramData\MyProgramName\fileName.xml
and indeed there was a file that existed from the previous installation (that I obviously didn't delete, because I didn't know it existed).
So just guide me how could I stop this when apps running with no admin right.
I do not want to create any file automatically in VirtualStore folder. Please discuss all the possible ways to stop this.
First, ask yourself, do this need to be globally saved for all users?
If it doesn't have to be, save the file in Application Data instead, you can get the path with Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData), it should always reliably expand to C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\. Do note that this path is unique for each user though.
If you have to, you're out of luck. There is no reliable way to store application data for all users without admin rights (or UAC) on any Windows post-XP that's not extremely hacky, like storing your data in the Public user (which may or may not be possible, I can't check right now).
An approach to solving this is to use the Environment.SpecialFolder.CommonApplicationData location, but with some very important caveats & setup.
CommonApplicationData is
The directory that serves as a common repository for
application-specific data that is used by all users.
This location is described further here and here.
Important requirements and restrictions are given in another SO answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/22107884/3195477
which said in part:
The recommended solution is for your installer to create a sub
directory of C:\ProgramData for your shared storage. And that sub
directory must be given a permissive ACL by the installation program.
That is what grants the desired access to all standard users.
Otherwise the program running with standard user permission will still not be all equally able to read/write files in that location for all users.
I found a work around for this issue when transferring a very old win32 app to windows 7 & 10. The program wrote to a database on C:\Program Files... but the OS auto changed the path to virtual store. However the database was required globally. By changing compatablilty mode to Windows 95 or XP SP2 and always running as administrator the database was worked on directly in C:\Program Files\etc.
There are security implications for this and the box was removed from all networks and adapters disabled etc.
I am trying to install Obiee11g on my windows machine. While running through various tutorials in the web, many of them have suggested to use RCU to create MDS and BIplatform.
However when I downloaded RCU and extracted the same. While I am running the rcu.bat in the running directory, it is just opening my OBIEE_HOME folder. I am not able to see the RCU window.
Please Help!
Cheers,
Dwarak
Create a folder named OBIEE in the drive where you are trying to install OBIEE !!
In the absence of specific error information, I will provide you some generic instructions on how to run the RCU.
Make sure your machine is compliant. I prefer Linux but for Windows, I would use x86-64 2003 / 2008 Windows server.
Open a command shell
Execute rcu.bat
Follow the prompts
Record the error and upload that for further assistance.
Some of the most common errors are:
Lack of disk space.
Low RAM
Avoid running Oracle DB on the same machine where you are running OBIEE, for performance reasons.
Unzip the RCU shiphome in a folder without spaces
Cleanup your PATH variable which might be pointing to older BI installations
%TMP% and %TEMP% paths should not have spaces either.
Do not set ORACLE_HOME
Do not set JAVA_HOME
Properly de-install previous products
You cannot have a space in the directory where the RCU is installed.
I admit this is not strictly a programming question, although I do use my WHS as a source repository server for home projects, and I'm guessing many other coders here do as well.
Does anyone have a recommendation for a good backup solution for the non-fileshare portion of Windows Home Server? All the WHS backups I've seen handle the fileshares, but none of the system files or other administrative stuff on the box.
Thanks,
Andy
Windows Home Server is designed to not need a backup of the OS. If your system drive fails, install a new drive, and then boot the WHS OS setup disc and install the OS. It will find the data on the other drives and recreate all the shared folders. You do need to do some configuring once it is back up but that is pretty small compared to not having to back it up.
One good solution for backing up the home server itself is to attach an external drive, say via USB 2.0 or eSATA. For this to work, though, you need the supporting software like Norton Ghost or something similar installed on your WHS server.
Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 (aka WHS PP1) added a feature to perform backups of the WHS shared folders to an external drive -- as you mention, this feature is only intended to do the data side and not the OS.
If you have an HP MediaSmart server, you could try the method mentioned in Quick & Easy Windows Home Server Backup and Restore. The author said it worked for him, but of course, caveat emptor. This technique has you creating a disk-image for your backup, and using that to restore from in the Recovery Disk / Restore disk process.
If you want a faster way to recover your OS and you do not have a Media Smart server, you can also check out these instructions on how to use a USB flash drive for installing WHS, and merge in the instructions found above for restoring a disk image vis-à-vis the OS Recovery disk process.
WHS OS backup solved by running two copies of WHS each on its own computer in a virtual machine with each WHS backing up the other (running in a VM makes the WHS a file thus able to be backed up and restored by WHS).
iDrive is Great and free under 2 gigs