Vista - Missing Files in Vista

I know my way around computers pretty well. I have
programmed in assembler, Fortran, later Cobol, and other languages. To
this day, I still work in the technology industry. When it comes to
computers, and technology in general, people seek me out for input and I
generally always have the answer.

I say this to make you aware that I am not a typical clueless home user
poking away at the keyboard and hoping for the best. I say this also
because what I am about to tell you will probably make as little sense
to you as it does to me. Nonetheless, I hope that one of you may have
the answer.

About a year ago I purchased a HP Pavilion notebook, model dv2171cl. It
came with XP Pro with a promised upgrade to Vista Home Premium, when
available. When the upgrade became available I ordered it and waited
until about last July to install it.

Like many of you, I had acquired quite a bit of software over the
years. This was software that I needed to rebuild my computer should I
find myself re-installing Windows from scratch. Some of it was on CDs
but a lot of it was downloaded updates and new versions of existing
software. None of it was out of date, it was all XP era software. All of
this software was stored on an external, USB attached, disk. It happens
to be a Maxtor 500 GB drive. This was prudent, I thought, in the event
my C:\ drive ever crashes.

The day finally arrived when I decided enough time had passed that
there would be sufficient experience with Vista out there that I would
not be swimming alone. The install went smoothly and nothing seemed out
of order. I did have to do a clean install since Home Premium will not
let you do an upgrade. Since the install was clean, I had to re-install
software I had stored on my external drive.

I don't recall the exact sequence of events but at some point I
connected the drive to my pc. At some point after that, I went to
install software stored on my external drive. I swear I had not made any
changes or modifications to the drive at all. I opened up Vista Explorer
and navigated to my drive and the appropriate folders to begin
re-installation. Guess what?

The setup file was missing! I thought I was seeing things or made some
sort of mistake, perhaps selected the wrong drive. I closed Explorer and
tried again. Same thing. I tried another application and navigated to
its folder. No setup files. In fact, _EACH_AND_EVERY_EXECUTABLE_FILE_
stored on my external drive along with .dll, .ini, and .cfg files had
vanished. Only the executables stored in zip archives were spared.

I have managed to get by since I have several backups but I didn't
manage to find my files until last night. I did a search on my external
drive for \".exe\" and, lo and behold, they all showed up in what
appears to be a restore point dating back to last July (when I upgraded
to Vista). The restore point is located in one of two \"System Volume
Information\" folders on the drive.

The specific location is this:

H:\System Volume
Information\_restore{E5E4629D-F67A-49B3-B4CC-2A9B19E34103}\RP160

It seems that Restore Point 160 is where Vista *-*** WITHOUT WARNING
***-* decided to stash all the software it didn't like and only left
plain vanilla files (non-executables). To make matters worse, it renamed
many of the files making it nearly impossible to know where they belong
although, for some, the properties remain intact.

My question is whether anyone else has experienced anything even
remotely similar? I would also like to know what you did to retrieve
your files? My concern here is that

1. my restore points won't go that far back
2. if they do and I perform a restore, I will have restored
_EVERYTHING_ to that point in time
3. I don't know of any way to restore an individual drive, although
that's my next research project.

My guess here is that the issue may have to do with identities. Since I
would have had one identity - and set of credentials - in XP and Vista
would have assigned new credentials in a clean install, it may have
decided it was going to eliminate any threat from an unknown set of
credentials or identity. As I said before, a warning would have been
nice. The same issue happens in XP, but XP doesn't pull this stunt. XP
would not let you access another identity's files, even though they were
yours, unless you went into a folder's properties and took ownership.

Of course, all this happened when I first installed Vista and before I
became fully aware of how security conscious (*PARANOID*) Vista is. I
have since turned off all security \"enhancements\" Vista imposes on
users.

I hope the community can be of help and I do appreciate whatever input
I can get.


--
JM24
Posted via http://www.vistaheads.com

Personally, I have never heard of such an event.

Possibly, have a look at the drive with an undelete utility. Failing that,
try a hex editor.

Tom
MSMVP 1998-2007

"JM24" <JM24.32yc4w@xxxxxx-mx.forums.vistaheads.com> wrote in message
news:JM24.32yc4w@xxxxxx-mx.forums.vistaheads.com...

Hi, JM24.

You DID change the Folder Options defaults, didn't you? For the protection
of Newbies, Vista (and WinXP) comes set to hide system files and to hide
extensions for known file types (such as .exe files). That's one of the
first things I always change when installing Windows! It may be good for
Newbies, but it is frustrating, especially for experienced users - and
DANGEROUS, in my opinion!

To be sure, go Control Panel | Folder Options | View. In addition to any
other changes you may like, be sure to check Show hidden files and folders,
and uncheck both Hide extensions for known file types and Hide protected
operating system files (Recommended). That may be recommended by Microsoft,
but not by me and most MVPs that I know.

My guess is that Vista DID copy all those setup.exe and other executable
files, but you could not see them because of those default settings. So you
went through a lot of needless trauma because of that.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
rc@xxxxxx
Microsoft Windows MVP
(Running Windows Live Mail 2008 in Vista Ultimate x64)

"JM24" <JM24.32yc4w@xxxxxx-mx.forums.vistaheads.com> wrote in message
news:JM24.32yc4w@xxxxxx-mx.forums.vistaheads.com...

"JM24" <JM24.32yc4w@xxxxxx-mx.forums.vistaheads.com> wrote in message
news:JM24.32yc4w@xxxxxx-mx.forums.vistaheads.com...

Certain utilities (such as Windows Live One Care) may not copy, move or back
up executables and/or system files.

When did you move "all of this software" to the external drive? Was it while
you were still using XP or after you had already switched to Vista?

What application, utility, program or method did you use to get the data
onto the external drive?

After you moved the data, did you verify that *all* of it made it safely
over to the external drive?

Here's a bit of information I just retrieved from Windows Help and
Support (the system level help function in Windows) in Vista:

In this version of Windows, restore points are created
differently and are not recognized by earlier versions of Windows. If
you have a dual-boot configuration and you start an earlier version of
Windows, the earlier version will delete any restore points created by
this version of Windows. If you start this version of Windows, restore
points will resume being created automatically.

So, if your system has System Restore enabled running Vista and you
should go back to XP, XP will delete your previous restore points
created by Vista. Most likely, XP will do this automatically and without
warning.

Why would XP do that?

Incompatibility is the only thing I can think of.

If Restore Points between the two versions of Windows are so different
that XP would delete Vista-created Restore Points, what does Vista do
when it first encounters a XP created external hard disk?

While the Help function in Vista tells you outright that Restore Points
are created differently, it doesn't tell you what you most NEED to know:
_HOW_ are they created differently?


--
JM24
Posted via http://www.vistaheads.com

Hello,
There is additional information stored with the data\snapshot included with
the restore point information that is consumed by Windows Vista.
You may be able to locate some of that specific information querying on VSS
and Restore Points on MSDN.
For example this link-
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...32(VS.85).aspx

Windows Vista still recognizes the downlevel restore points since it has
the knowledge about the prior requirements and the prior data since Windows
XP was released before Windows Vista. So Windows Vista supports the legacy
restore point versions.
Windows XP doesn't have that knowledge, since the additional information is
was generated by an operating system that is released after Windows XP was
released. So when it looks at the data and doesn't recognize the new
information it thinks the data structures are corrupted.
Thanks,
Darrell Gorter[MSFT]

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights
--------------------
|> From: JM24 <JM24.338zgn@xxxxxx-mx.forums.vistaheads.com>
|> Subject: Re: Missing Files in Vista
|> Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2008 21:49:47 +0000
|> Message-ID: <JM24.338zgn@xxxxxx-mx.forums.vistaheads.com>
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|> X-Tomcat-NG: microsoft.public.windows.vista.file_management
|>
|>
Here's a bit of information I just retrieved from Windows Help and
Support (the system level help function in Windows) in Vista:
|>
|> In this version of Windows, restore points are created
differently and are not recognized by earlier versions of Windows. If
you have a dual-boot configuration and you start an earlier version of
Windows, the earlier version will delete any restore points created by
this version of Windows. If you start this version of Windows, restore
points will resume being created automatically.
|>
|> So, if your system has System Restore enabled running Vista and you
should go back to XP, XP will delete your previous restore points
created by Vista. Most likely, XP will do this automatically and without
warning.
|>
|> Why would XP do that?
|>
|> Incompatibility is the only thing I can think of.
|>
|> If Restore Points between the two versions of Windows are so different
that XP would delete Vista-created Restore Points, what does Vista do
when it first encounters a XP created external hard disk?
|>
|> While the Help function in Vista tells you outright that Restore Points
are created differently, it doesn't tell you what you most NEED to know:
_HOW_ are they created differently?


--
JM24
Posted via http://www.vistaheads.com

|>