Computer reload

[johnridley]

I have a problem with my machines. Every one of them exhibits this problem. I can't get USB thumb drives to work AT ALL. They make the USB insertion noise, they show up on the device manager, but they never show in Windows Explorer, or when they do, it just says the drive needs formatting. If I try to format it, it says it was unable to format.

Tonight I gave up and reloaded Windows, which brought it back to working like a champ. I am sure that there's some piece of software that I load on all my machines which is causing this. I am going to do drive images every day, and try a thumb drive insertion after loading every piece of software to see what's causing it.

Reloading might seem extreme, but the way I set my machines up it's not really a big deal. It took about 20 minutes to restore the system image, and I was using the machine again about 15 minutes after that. I'll have to load a bit of software but I just do it as needed over the next few days.

I have a pretty strong suspicion that it's VirtualBox. It's the only software that I know for sure installs a driver that intercepts all USB traffic, so it certainly has the ability to bone things up if it's not written properly, but OTOH it's a pretty major piece of code and it's hard to believe that nobody has noticed that it screws up thumb drives.

The weird thing is,it's just thumb drives. USB hard drives aren't affected.

Speaking of thumb drives, I bought a couple of Kingston 16G thumb drives for $13 shipped and got them today. They're tiny, perfect for a key chain. It's kind of boggling when I stop and think about having 16GB on a little hunk of plastic that takes up about the volume of a quarter, and cost less than a pizza.

Comments

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Not that I was able to find. You have to have VirtualBox running, then "export the appliance", which takes up to hours as it has to write a new copy of the drive, then hand edit the definitions file to match VMWare's format, then import into VMWare.

I have no problems with VirtualBox other than it screwing up my USB ports (assuming that's what the cause is, and it makes sense), and I never need its USB features anyway.

[c0nsumer.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's a hassle then. :(

I agree, except for USB stuff it worked really well. I just find myself needing USB passthrough quite frequently on both my mac and PC, and on both I'd get frequent kernel dumps caused by it.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I agree that the USB stuff works well for the VM, but kind of makes a hash of the host.

I pretty much only use a VM to run an isolated machine to VPN to work with though, and that because the VPN is configured to hijack all IP connections, so any machine connected to the VPN can't get to anything except by going through work's network, which means I can't print, can't get to local shares, etc.

Also they now have a system where the VPN requires a crypto key that's specific to a single Windows installation and is a pain-in-the-ass, multistep process, so I got my key for an XP VM and use the image on multiple machines.

[kevinnickerson.livejournal.com]

Happily, I can use Shrewsoft, and only stuff directed towards the work LAN goes out through the VPN.

Hm, what would happen if you had two LAN adapters? Could you route them separately?

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I used to be able to use Shrewsoft. The system they switched to now is global across all TR divisions and is centralized in the Eagan data center. It requires that you install their software, then it generates a key request file that contains a profile of your machine. They then give you a key that will only work on that machine.

Using a VM solves that problem as well as the routing problem, because I have a key that works with my VM, and I can copy that VM around to as many machines as I like and I don't have to register a new key.

Interestingly, the most flexible VPN that we ever had was Microsoft's. When we had that, I could connect to it using just off the shelf VPNware, stuff that shipped with every Linux install, or even natively in the firmware of my router.

Then we switched to Cisco, and most of that broke but I could use Shrewsoft.

Then we switched to Juniper. Not only locked down tighter than a drum so you can't do anything else when it's on, but you must use their software only, and you must use Windows.

The hoops they make us jump through because they're too lazy to set up the routing from Eagan properly is the subject of a whole other post.