Wow...mine is 15.8 gig! One of the many reasons to have 2 drives...or at least 2 partitions. One for your OS and the other for data.
Eric -----Original Message----- From: Vivec [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, May 28, 2010 8:28 AM To: cf-community Subject: Why backing up your Win 7 installation is a MUST. A while ago, maybe a few months, I posted that my brand new machine had a software crash during a Anti Virus scan. This resulted in over 150 files becoming corrupted. I did the usual in-place Repair and update with the WIndows 7 installation DVD, and most things worked fine. Some programs which were previously installed, however, simply refused to function.Namely my Printer drivers, and my ATI drivers. These simply would not install. I was wavering on doing a full system reinstall, and finding some way to fix the problem. In my research, I looked at the ATI Installation Log, and saw that it was failing on a file within a directory I never knew existed. The WINSXS directory. It sounds like some novel folder to hide Porn, but no it's actually a legitimate System related folder. I learnt that this directory stands for Windows Side by Side, and it was Microsoft's effort to get around a problem in their operating system. This problem which some of us may remember from Windows 98 days, is the issue of multiple versions of .dll files lying around the system directories causing programs to crash. Microsoft had the stroke of genius to simply create a folder, and place copies of as many .dll files as a program installed into this folder. Go look at your Vista or Windows 7 install directory. Check the size of the c:\windows\winsxs folder. I'll wait. Shocked at the size? If you have installed a moderate amount of programs that directory should be pushing upwards of 6GB. For those of us who install and uninstall software regularly, or play games on their machine this folder can grow exponentially in size. Not good if you have a small SSD hard disk as your OS drive. So this is Microsoft's solution to the multi-version .dll dilemma, as well as installing programs in general. No longer can you clear a bad installation by deleting entries in the Registry, and manually deleting the installation folder. Now there is a hidden folder, with a name you will never know somewhere within the winsxs folder. Nice huh? So imagine you installed a program, and a file got corrupt in this winsxs folder. Even if you uninstall, delete, clear the registry....there will still be these corrupt files. And you won't know where they are. But hey, in this case I knew where the files were. So I decided to just replace them. Sorry...can't do that. The directory is owned by Trusted Installer. Which means you can't do anything with it. You can take Ownership..but if some of the files are corrupted then that will fail. So back to my problem. Files in WINSXS are corrupted. I don't know which files, if I uninstall programs it doesn't matter...because upon Reinstalling the program, Windows 7 tries to use files contained in WINSXS. So the installation fails. In fact if you use Linux to delete these folders your Windows OS will crash. When you try to install programs, they will also crash if you had installed them previously. Basically you cannot do anything with the WINSXS folder. There is nowhere in the OS that I have found that explains what programs these directories are attached to, and there is no way to delete 'Orphan' directories. it's one of the most ridiculous systems I have come across in Windows. It is such an obvious workaround and a band-aid that it is almost offensive to the user. You essentially have zero control over recovering your Operating System in the case of file corruption. Additionally, your Operating System footprint will increase continuously as you use your machine and you have absolutely no way to reduce this. The end result is that I have to reinstall my entire system, because of a single system crash which corrupted a few files. And I now know that it is possible for my Windows 7 directory to grow to fill my entire hard disk through doing nothing but simply using my computer and installing programs. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Order the Adobe Coldfusion Anthology now! http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Coldfusion-Anthology-Michael-Dinowitz/dp/1430272155/?tag=houseoffusion Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/message.cfm/messageid:319681 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/unsubscribe.cfm
