Vista - Photo Gallery Migration - followup

This is directed to John Inzer, who replied to my previous messages about
this, as well as anyone else who is curious on the subject.

About a week ago, I posted about wanting to migrate the Windows Photo
Gallery database from one machine to another. Moving the Pictures.pd4 file
works, kind of, but WPG begins complaining that your pictures folder is
missing and will not be quiet about it.

Bottom line: Windows Photo Gallery checks the volume serial number, and if
it doesn't match what is expected, it throws up the error I mentioned in my
previous posts. Changing the volume serial number of the C: drive (and
perhaps of the drives of any other folders monitored by WPG) on the
destination machine to match that of the one of on the source machine
resolves the problem.


Today, I sat down to try to figure out why this is. Digging through the
Pictures.pd4 file, which is the actual Windows Photo Gallery database, is
not too bad because the file is not encrypted or compressed. However, it is
certainly not straightforward.

I first attempted to reproduce the problem with a smaller database. I set
up two Vista machines (both running 64-bit Vista SP1), deleted all of the
"sample photos" that come with Vista, and put just one photo (a .bmp) in the
Pictures folder. Here, we have two identical WPG libraries, file paths and
all.

Replacing the Pictures.pd4 file on one machine with the one on the other
machine was all it took to reproduce my problem. If I put the original
Pictures.pd4 file back, the problem goes away.

Comparing the two Pictures.pd4 files did not yeild anything interesting at
first. There were about 1200 bytes different. However, running WPG without
a Pictures.pd4 file present (so that it would generate a new one) yielded a
slightly different file each time I tried it, so no helping on where to look
from that approach.


I decided to use Process Monitor from SysInternals to track what WPG was
doing when I opened it with the wrong Pictures.pd4 file. I found the key
here, observing WPG checking the volume information of the C:\ drive, and
then removing one of the folders from the WPG scoped folders registry key,
over and over. Is this what is causing the error - the volume information
on the two machines is different?

I located the volume information (including the volume label and the volume
serial number) actually stored in the Pictures.pd4 file itself, around
offset 0x35000. Changing this information in the Pictures.pd4 file didn't
work though... WPG detects that it has been tampered with (some checksum
fails, presumably), gives an error message, and throws it out and generates
a new one.

So, I used this utility from SysInternals to change the serial number on the
drive itself.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../bb897436.aspx

That did it, WPG now took the Pictures.pd4 file from the other machine
without complaints.


--
- Aaron

Good work...Aaron.

Congratulations on solving a sticky issue.

I'll keep a copy of your message and share
it with other users who report a similar issue.

Thanks for the feedback.

--

John Inzer
Digital Media MVP

Notice
This is not tech support
I am a volunteer

Solutions that work for
me may not work for you

Proceed at your own risk
==========================================
Aaron Kelley wrote:

I kind of wrote it up here with some bullet-point steps at the bottom.
http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/index.php?itemid=18

--
- Aaron
"John Inzer" <oobie@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:umSdRkXhIHA.3788@xxxxxx

Aaron Kelley wrote:==================================
Excellent!

I'll save the link.

--

John Inzer
Digital Media MVP

Notice
This is not tech support
I am a volunteer

Solutions that work for
me may not work for you

Proceed at your own risk