You’re a noid and I’m a droid

Pithy line picked from Star Trek, I know. An update on my Motorola Droid situation: it is working just perfectly. It seems to do everything except BT voice dial. There’s huge threads on that lack all over the place, so no need to revisit fully here. As far as my replacement unit – it has been working just great. Emails, satellite photos, Google Voice integration, YouTube, and the awesome Google Navigation – all working and no more lockups or freezes.

Droid Update

Well, I was about to publish that the new Droid phone I received (after I swapped out the one that randomly rebooted and locked up all the time) was just perfect. However, 10 minutes ago it wouldn't turn on. I was expecting a text message from a coworker (I had watched him send it) and after 4 minutes or so of not receiving it, I thought I would turn the phone on and look. It wouldn't turn on. Removed the battery and put it back. Still wouldn't turn on. Held down the camera button and the power button until it powered up and rebooted. Then the text came in right away. When this type of thing happens, you can't receive calls or texts - so you are looking at an unreliable phone. Not good!

It hadn't done this for 24 hours or more after I got this replacement. I started thinking back to what I had changed. This morning, I had added the built in power widget to the home screen - so I could easily turn Blue Tooth off and on (I only need BT in the car). I wonder if this had anything to do with it. I have now removed the power widget from the home screen and will see if it does this again.

Droid Redux

Well after a hard reset (master reset), the rebooting robot – that automaton of lockups – kept locking up. In fact while driving to work, with the phone sitting on the passenger seat, it rebooted twice. Then once more in my jacket pocket while walking in to the office. I tried to show it to some folks in the office and it locked up and rebooted on them too.

I emailed Verizon customer support back with the news and asked if I could take it to a local outlet to have it replaced. I got some awesome service here and I want to give Kudos to Verizon on this – a rep checked for the closest store, called them and checked availability on the devices, then called me and let me know the address, who she spoke to at the store, and that they had some in stock and currently had quite a line of folks (so expect a little delay). All this from my email note. Well done Verizon.

I went to the store after work and only had to wait a couple of minutes. I now have a new Droid – and I expect this one will work fine.

These aren’t the Droids you’re looking for…

If my sly waving of my hand before my face while I said that didn’t work, perhaps you are Jabba the Hut. Anyway, I got my Motorola Droid phone yesterday! It seemed pretty nice, but locked up a few times almost right away. After having it for a couple of hours, and only using it with the screen on for perhaps 25 minutes it had locked up 10 times. Sometimes just turning on the screen and attempting to do the “swipe” motion that unlocks the phone would result in a lockup. Other times it would be in the web browser or just at the home screen trying to tap the “settings” icon. It would either freeze for 20 seconds then reboot itself (the bat signal Motorola Logo followed by the Red Eye – which is cool the first 3 times you see it). Other times it would just freeze and I would have to turn it off. On these occasions it would not turn back on without the “hold the camera button pressed while hitting power” trick.

It seems the hardware is pretty slick, and unless the reviews I have seen on this phone are extremely highly edited I must be the only person having this problem. I contacted Verizon support via email and they got back to me right away (Kudos there). The suggestion is to try the hard reset (also known as master reset), then setup the phone again and if it doesn’t work – have the phone replaced for a hardware problem. I’m going through setting it up again now. I’ll post back on progress.

Windows 7 Failed Install Reboot Loop Explained

As per my previous post, I spent the weekend upgrading my son’s and daughter’s Dell Latitude D820 notebooks. These were running Vista Ultimate 32 bit edition and I was upgrading them to Windows 7 Ultimate 32 bit using the in-place upgrade method. I had previously done my own Dell D820 quite some time back. My son’s machine went fine. My daughter’s – not so much. It would start the upgrade, do the Copying Files, the Gathering programs and settings, the Expanding files, the Installing Features, and then at some point during the last phase (restoring programs and files) it would reboot and say “The upgrade was not successful. Your previous version of Windows is being restored. Do not restart your computer during this time”. This was after about 2 hours of “upgrading”. For those who have not been privileged enough to see this screen, it looks like this:

This would be on the screen for about 20 seconds or so, then the computer would reboot and do it all over again – to infinity and beyond as long as the power held out. Once I figured out the cause I reproduced this in a VM and left it doing it all night. In the morning it was blithely rebooting away. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. On reboot, it would show these choices:

Note that there is no “Windows Vista” option – and both of the listed options result in the same thing – that failed upgrade screen.

So, I restored the original configuration of the machine using Windows Home Server. (Yes, we did a backup immediately before starting the upgrade – didn’t you?) The restore took just about an hour and worked beautifully. This was the first time I have actually restored a backup with Home Server and it was flawless.

Now, even the first time we went though the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor and uninstalled the few things it didn’t like (Learning essentials for Office, Microsoft Math, iTunes). I resolved to keep trying, so we went through preparing again and also removed printer drivers this time. Started the upgrade and waited about 2 hours. Would it work this time? Of course not. It did the same thing.

Restored the machine again (2nd time). Ran through the uninstalling of programs again, printer drivers again, and this time disabled some non-default services (some Windows Mobile connector ones). Started the upgrade and – same damn thing. This time I booted into WinPE and went through all of the Panther logs (setupact.log, setuperr.log, rollback.log). There wasn’t actually anything listed as a real “Failure”, but I did find one “warning” note about a redirected Documents folder. Just to be clear there are LOTS of warning notes even in the cleanest of installs, but this one made me wonder since the problem was NOT during the install phase. The problem was happening during the restore of profiles, programs, and files.

Restored the machine again (3rd time – way to go Home Server). This time after uninstalling programs, printer drivers, stopping non-default services, etc. I checked the folder redirection. Sure enough – the Documents folder was redirected from the normal “C:\Users\<user name>\Documents” to “C:\Users\<user name>\Documents\Documents”. Yes, that’s right – it was a subfolder of where it would be by default. Thinking “There’s no way this is going to work”, I changed it back to the default and ran the upgrade for the fourth time. What do you know? It worked.

Not content to simply leave it at that, I had to know if this is something that can be reproduced (and possibly happen to other people). So I fired up a Virtual Machine to test it Sunday evening. For this, I used Enterprise Edition as that was what I had handy. The steps were something like this:

1. Install Vista Enterprise Edition
2. Create a Documents folder under the Documents folder
3. Create a couple of files and folders there
4. Redirect C:\Users\<user id>\Documents to C:\Users\<user id>\Documents\Documents using the “Location” tab on the Documents folder properties dialog.
5. Apply Vista SP1
6. Apply Vista SP2
7. Apply the 31 other updates from Windows Update
8. Start the Windows 7 Enterprise Upgrade process
9. During the last phase, it reboots and you get the same problem as we had on my daughter’s machine

I let this go all night and this morning it was still rebooting and saying it was going to put the prior OS back. After several thousand reboots I gave up waiting for it to accomplish this miracle. So, anyone else have this problem? I know I spent mostly all weekend on it with four tries at the upgrade, three restores from backup then a repro in a VM.

Windows Home Server saves the day when Windows 7 upgrades fail

I’ve had Windows 7 on a few of our machines for quite some time. My wife’s machine got it right after the Beta ended (one of the free copies some Beta participants got), my test / dev machine got an MSDN copy the day it showed up on MSDN, etc. I upgraded my main notebook the first day it was available and I upgraded my son’s notebook yesterday. Then I tried to upgrade my daughter’s notebook. (Mine, my son’s, and my daughter’s are all Dell Latitude D820 machines with identical hardware configuration and Windows Vista Ultimate). Her machine went through the gathering files, expanding files, installing updates etc. just fine. It would get to the last phase where it moves the files back in place and would fail and then go into a reboot loop. It would say that the upgrade failed and it was restoring the previous version of Windows – then reboot in 10 seconds over and over and over and over – well you get the idea. It wouldn’t stop rebooting. This isn’t the “62% hang”, it isn’t the "BSOD” one, and doesn’t seem to have a solution yet.

Fortunately, I always make sure we have a current backup on Windows Home Server. We restored this (first time I have needed to) and it was right back to Vista running fine. Tried the upgrade again (after first making sure the upgrade advisor was green) and got the same problem. Restored from Home Server again and went to bed. This had taken the whole day.

Strange how both of our other D820 machines upgraded just fine.

I am an Idiot

If you patronize amusement parks, you too are an idiot. For example, today I plunked down $53 for the privilege of standing in line for 2 hours and 55 minutes for a 2 minute and 12 second ride. Let’s do the math here. 2 hours and 55 minutes is 10,500 seconds. 2 minutes and 12 seconds is 132 seconds. So my ratio of standing in the heat in a long line of people to time spent zooming around a roller coater was 98.7%. That’s right – I spent 98.7% of my time STANDING IN LINE (or for those not from the USA – standing on queue). I paid good money for the privilege of standing in that line too. Hence, I am an idiot, doofus, dork, you name it.

In fact, this Monday and Tuesday I have been a double idiot. That’s right – two amusement park visits in two days. Two bad experiences. Let’s see how those visits worked out:

Not Merry Farm

The first visit, on Monday, was to Not Merry Farm – a staple of the Greater Smog Angeles area. This area is so smoggy in fact that on the rare occasion that you get out of line and onto a coaster you can’t tell the difference between the sky and the ground when you go upside down because the sky is almost the color of asphalt. Think of your lungs and stay home. Anyway, we first went to the Not Merry website and checked out any special events. They showed that they were open from 10 AM to 10 PM. A quick check of the full events list for the day showed “yep, open 10 to 10”. Nothing else. At the Not Merry Farms gate, there is no indication of any problems. Yet, you go in and the two biggest attractions – the Coors Light (Silver Bullet anyway) and another big coaster are “not running today”. Also the BMX / Skateboard exhibition doesn’t run on Monday or Tuesday. Since the web site didn’t say this, and there was no sign at the gate saying “the following attractions are closed today” BEFORE you pay your money, we call bullshit on the operators of this park. We actually went there JUST TO RIDE THOSE COASTERS.

So, we decided to eat and then try some of the tamer rides. I decided not to get the pulled pork because they wanted $8.50 for it as opposed to the $7.50 for the cheeseburger – without fries. $4.50 extra for fries. Total for my wife, son, and I for a couple of pulled pork sandwiches, a burger, some fries, and a couple of sodas? $50.57! Can you believe the rip off? I’ve got news for them too – their fries suck. We rode a couple of rides but never got over the disappointment of the two main attractions being shut down.

Sick Flags Tragic Mountain

Mark me down as a double loser. Here in Santa Clarita is where I plunked down $53 in order to stand in line for 98.7% of my time. It’s no joke and no exaggeration. A full 2 hours and 55 minutes in line for the Excema 2 (they call it X2 for short) – and did that ever leave me scratching my head. It was a Tuesday, but the park was full so of course out of three cars they have they were running only one with the other two sitting there on a siding teasing us. There was no evidence anywhere of the little “wait is two hours from this point”, “wait is 45 minutes from this point”, etc. signs that other parks have. So we just melted along in the heat with a bunch of other drones all standing in line singing choruses of “I’ll stand in line and melt with you”. And standing, and standing. To break this down, we arrived at the park at 10:04 (they open at 10), parked the car where the guys in uniforms specified, made our way to the gate, plunked down our $53, ran for the bathrooms (shortest line all day!), then ran to the Excema 2. By this time it is 10:50. We wait 2 hours and 55 minutes, ride for 2 minutes 12 seconds, walk to the exit and it is 2:00 PM already! I guess you could ride the thing 3 times and that would be your entire day! All along the ride they have somebody in marketing’s interpretation of a “Type A Personality” which is NOT what I learned from psychology or from TV (That marketing droid needs to go back to school!). So we gave up on that and went to ride the log ride as it was a hot day. That line was only 26 minutes, with about a 3 minute ride. That brought my total to 97.4% of my time waiting in line!

I did notice that this park would like you to pay an extra $50 to get a flash past which lets you cut in line. Apparently bad manners are OK with them as long as you pay for the privilege. We decided that since they purposely only had one car running on the Excema 2, their business model must be “let’s frustrate everyone into paying for a flash pass”. Everyone else was scratching their heads too.

All in all a staycation would have been better than this, and my lawn would have gotten mowed. I think we should all avoid these amusement parks until they find a way to hold lines to a 30 minute maximum. I’m starting my boycott today.

I paid to stand in line – have you? Better yet, are you going to do it again?