Computerkram

The first article in my series about tools I just have to install right after Windows installation and use daily in my life is about a mostly unknown open source software called CopyHandler. Ever since I moved to Windows from DOS and got used to "multi tasking", the standard Windows copy routine annoyed me. I guess we've all grown accustomed to its defects, because I don't ever hear people complaining about it.
Think again. Can you tell me why I have to live without a simple mechanism to pause/resume whenever I want (surviving shutdown and network loss), why it took Microsoft over 10 years to check if the destination has enough space before it starts the transfer, and show me a reliable progress bar including transfer speeds? (Yes, Vista actually has it) Is it so hard to have an option for notification on completion, or when it stopped for some reason? Why does the Vista copy routine take ages after I cancel it?

CopyHandler neatly integrates into Windows up to the point that it (optionally) intercepts your drag and drop transfers transparently and handles them, while you can still select the default copy/move from context menu. Let me give you a quick list of features and options:

• pause, resume, restart
• auto-resume on error, shutdown when done
• set priority
• detailed information about copy/move progess
• sounds on error/completion
• small or detailed status window, or none at all (tray icon)

By far the most important feature and the most annoying Windows defect (I actually started to write my own utility for that before I found this gem): You can configure a number of concurrent copy tasks and all subsequent copy actions will be queued. No more ugly disk seeking when you move a number of files with separate selections!

Unfortunately, the author doesn't seem to have much time to maintain the tool (last update was in October 2006). It works great, but has a few problems: After installation, make sure to select your language in the settings, or it will switch to some illegible character set next time. Also, don't forget to register the shell extension (there's a menu item for it), or it won't integrate. More importantly, it does not support Unicode characters in file names (German umlauts are okay), so you will have to copy those with the default Windows copy routine. And I haven't found a way to get it integrated into Vista 64bit yet because the shell extension is a 32bit DLL (other than that, it works on Vista too). The source is available, so maybe I'll try compiling it for 64 bit some day. Edit 25th March 2008: A new version of CopyHandler has been released today. It finally supports Unicode and Vista 64bit!

I have prepared a short (one minute!) screencast as an introduction to CopyHandler, don't miss it. Continue reading "Tools I Can't Live Without: CopyHandler"

Quite a few things happened this month in regard to privacy. I highly recommend the 24C3 Conference Talk about Tor to all german readers. Tor allows oppressed citizens of censoring countries such as China and the USA (see below) to bypass filters and surf anonymously, but only with your support (see "related links"). It is not yet clear whether german Tor nodes will be required to log IP data next year as a result of the new data retention law passed in December, which will effectively kill most of them (the amount of data collected over a period of 6 months will be several terabytes). The Chaos Computer Club argues that Tor and similar anonymity services cannot be seen as communication providers and thus are not affected by the law, the Arbeitskreis Vorratsdatenspeicherung isn't so sure about that. We'll see.

One month after Austria has passed a new controversial security law (Sicherheitspolizeigesetz) which allows police to access provider data (including cellphone location and IPs) without the consent of a judge, the left wing party Die Grünen set up a video/blogging platform to monitor Home Secretary Günther Platter, PlatterWatch. More importantly, they published a draft form of Viennas police, which in it's current form allows up to 30 queries at once and supports police officers with clearly illegal requests, for example for IMSI information. The party argues that with the responsibility to decide if a request is legal in the hands of the provider - who might be faced with hundreds of requests - this will certainly lead to abuse.

Video surveillance is another hot topic in Austria at the moment. While many attorneys state that more than 100.000 video cameras are currently being operated without legal grounds, the Ministry of Transport plans to monitor highways and automatically detect car types and license plates in one central police database. Also, federal government is looking into "suitable legal foundations for public video surveillance by individuals".

On a side node: AT&T is preparing to filter internet content for copyright violations.

I have cited a few more privacy related news from Heise Newsticker in the german version of this article for all german readers.

I finally managed to purchase a new computer! Well, parts for a new computer. With neither ATI or Nvidia able to ship their latest mid-range video cards, I skipped that one, for now. Fortunately a friend had a spare 7900GT lying around waiting for me to borrow it.
The plan was to migrate to Vista 64bit as my main system, but keep a familiar XP as backup system in case something doesn't work. I went through a series of problems which ate my whole weekend.

Installation

1. AHCI. Determined to install both XP and Vista with AHCI, I enabled the responsible BIOS settings for both controllers of my board. What I didn't know yet was that - for reasons unknown - I managed to buy the wrong board. What I wanted to buy was a P35 DS3, but I got a 965P DS3 instead. Of course I had CPU and cooler already mounted when I found out, and hey, at least it supports my Quad Core! I guess I have to live with it now. Back to AHCI: The onboard intel chipset doesn't support it (although there is a BIOS setting for it?), the Gigabyte controller (JMicron 363) supposedly does. I don't want to mention the problem of getting the drivers loaded, but at least Vista now supports USB drives and CDs for additional drivers (hooray!). Nobody told me that it only detects USB drives if they're connected at startup, so I had to go through the installation process again. But hey, it only takes five minutes to (re)boot the Vista DVD on my new quad core with 4GB of RAM! Finally it detected the hard drive and started to install, but after imaging the drive repeated to reboot again and again. Of course I tried various drivers and wanted to find a real solution, but most installation guides and user comments just told to install without AHCI. After hours without any progress, I gave up. No AHCI for me, then.

2. I wanted to reuse my existing SATA drive, so I moved the previous single partition and created one partition each for Vista and XP (physically before the data partition). The partitioning tool I used defaulted to logical volumes and I didn't look close enough, so I had the following (wrong) layout: 30GB Vista (logical), 10GB XP (logical), data partition (primary). Not that XP or Vista wouldn't let me install, no, but I experienced strange NTFS errors later after everything was configured the way I wanted it to be. Some hours of diagnostics later, I accidentally tried another partitioning tool and saw the mistake. Whoohoo, here we go again. Formatted both OS partitions, set the Vista partition to active and all three to primary.

3. At 5am, I was through with my (third!) XP installation that day (and night). After the first reboot, error, "HAL.DLL not found". **sigh** I knew that message - at least that's the kind of experience you get in 2 years of IT support - and especially that it rarely has anything to do with real files missing. The boot.ini entry was incorrect (on a fresh installation? WTF), I used bootcfg /rebuild to fix it and - voilà - XP continued the installation. It wanted activation again, but didn't allow it over the Internet, so I called the Microsoft hotline (free call). I made it through the tedious process of telling the answering machine that it was the only computer I had that XP version installed on (what a surpise answer...) and got the lengthy confirmation code.

4. Vista installation again. At that point, I wished I had prepared a custom unattended installation DVD... out of no reason, it again kept rebooting after the first part. Superb.

(insert some hours of sleep here)

5. Reformatted the Vista partition. Now, of course, all traces towards a bootable XP on the second partition were gone, but at least Vista installed. I tried FIXBOOT/FIXMBR in the Vista and XP recovery console, but that didn't help. XP repair installation, then Vista automated boot problem repair.

Done! I had a working dual boot with Vista and XP. No, I'm not done yet. XP is only supposed to be a backup system, but for Vista, I wanted the Users directory (all profiles) and the program folders to be on a separate partition. I regard this to be a standard use case, nothing special here - I don't understand why people at Microsoft make it so hard to achieve. Okay, you can invidually move the Documents and Movie folder in your profile, but that's not what I wanted. Turned out that this is possible with a customized unattended installation, but you might understand why I didn't choose that route. After a few trials (and, unfortunately, errors), I managed to move the whole directory structure transparently.
After this, so-called NTFS junctions will point from the original locations to my new folders (in this example, in the root directory of E). This (hopefully) keeps everything intact without having to mess around in the Windows Registry. Afterwards, you can tell your programs to install to C, while they really write to the new location.

Moving "C:\Users" to A Different Partition

Boot into recovery console and execute the following commands.


You might need to repeat the rmdir/mklink for your localized user folders. If you forget the /XJD switch on robocopy (exclude junctions pointing to directories), it will run into an endless loop, so be careful! If everything worked, you can later remove "C:\Users (OLD)".

Moving Program Files to A Different Partition

Again, boot into the recovery console (or any other boot CD). Basically, I have repeated the steps for moving the Users directory for both "Program Files" and "Program Files (x64)". I'm not sure whether /XJD is really required here, but it does no harm either. Edit: You can move the folders using Microsoft's own utilities PendMoves and MoveFile without having to boot into a recovery console. Matthew Wade explains how.


Again, make sure that you remove existing junctions and create new ones if you have a localized version of Vista, or they will still point to the old (moved) directory; you might also want to move c:\ProgramData. By the way, you can list the complete content of a folder including hidden and system files using "dir /a".

You can use the same method to move profile and program data in Windows XP. It doesn't ship with robocopy or a tool to create junctions, but I was able to successfully copy both folders using xcopy32 and create junctions using the Junction utility by Sysinternals.


Edit: Warning! Booting into Windows XP will delete all system restore points of Vista, including file shadow copies (file history). Microsoft is aware of the problem, but does not provide a fix. The only workaround at the moment is to hide the Vista partition from Windows XP (explained in KB926185). What a stupid issue...
Edit 2: Warning! If you move your program files, some Vista updates will not install (error 80070011). There is a semi-automated fix, but you need to use it every time an update fails.
Edit 3: Especially Vista SP1 doesn't install and I haven't found a way to work around this...