It was just a few months ago in early July when I wrote about reinstalling Windows XP on my desktop machine. And even though I managed to avoid the Windows XP reinstallation bullet when my server's CPU died a whopping four weeks later, it seems now that I didn't escape it altogether. Nope, that bullet was apparently more like a smart missile, zipping past me the first time but turning and coming back to nail me squarely between the eyes a few days ago.
I began to notice a problem over the last couple of weeks with my house server, insofar as it was intermittently rebooting itself for no obvious reason. I discovered it because fellow members of my gaming clan would contact me about game servers not responding, my wife would complain about her email client not being able to connect to the server, or I would simply find the machine waiting at the Windows XP logon when I switched to it via my keyboard-video-mouse (KVM) selector. I wasn't sure why it was rebooting, but I could think of three things that had recently changed:
The type of error involved was consistently a kernel fault of some sort, which in my experience often means something memory related. Since I had already noticed that the current T:V server beta leaks memory over time, I was immediately suspicious of it. Somewhere along the way I discovered that the server could be induced to reboot more quickly if I would have NIS run a full system scan; it would never make it past my C: drive without restarting. So I was surprised when disabling the T:V server made no difference; i.e., the system would still reboot intermittently or whenever I ran a full scan.
After fussing with it for a while, I decided that I just didn't want to waste any more time. I had never used the system restore feature of Windows XP before, but this seemed like the perfect opportunity. After all, if rolling back the recent changes didn't fix the problem, I could always ditch NIS and see if that made a difference, right?
I was pretty pleased to see that the system restore utility had checkpoints dating all the way back to the beginning of the month. So I selected one from October 1, 2004 and let system restore do its thing. It brought up a dialog box, said it had restored files and settings, restarted my machine, and... reported that no changes had been made to my machine because system restore had failed. Hmph. I didn't think that's how system restore was supposed to work. Still, I wasn't too concerned because there were plenty of other checkpoints from which to choose.
So I tried a checkpoint just a few days into the month and it failed again. I tried one still closer to the present time and that failed too. After failing with a dozen or so other checkpoints—including one from the very day before—I was beginning to get the impression that system restore was simply useless. But then it occurred to me that maybe I needed to be using safe mode for system restore to work, so I repeated what I had just done using the safe mode of Windows XP.
It was then I realized that I had been wrong in condemning system restore as useless. It's not useless at all, no, it's a system killer! In the middle of one of the restore attempts the system rebooted suddenly for no obvious reason. When it restarted it refused to boot into Windows XP at all, giving me some error about a missing system file. Naturally, the repair console of Windows XP failed to fix the problem, and the Windows XP installer refused even to attempt to fix it.
So yes, dear reader, that's right: a feature Microsoft added to fix systems in trouble was the very feature that hosed Windows XP completely. Irony, that. But then, can it really be irony, given that this is exactly the kind of garbage Microsoft has been dumping on its customers for years? At what point do we go beyond the merely ironic to the downright criminally stupid? But I digress.
Anyway, system restore apparently does nothing to ensure that it won't foul up the system all the worse if something goes wrong while it's running. So let's see, the recovery console is useless more often than not; the Windows XP setup repair function can't fix a broken installation; and now I find that system restore not only fails to restore to any of its checkpoints, it can actually break a Windows XP installation completely!? I guess that's just more Trustworthy Computing™ from Microsoft. Sheesh.
And so yet another completely fresh reinstall of Windows XP was in order. I went through all the usual crap to get it installed, updated to DirectX v9.0c, applied the v5.10 drivers for the NVIDIA nForce2 chipset, installed service pack two, put NIS back on the system, etc. I'm happy to say that I no longer have the rebooting problem, and NIS can now finish a complete scan of the system without incident—even with all the latest patches from Windows Update and a T:V server running.
I don't know what caused the problem in the first place, but I did learn one valuable lesson along the way. Because the system restore feature of Windows XP was unable to restore any of the checkpoints it had saved, and because it actually screwed the system completely, there's only one conclusion I can draw from this whole mess: system restore is not merely a useless feature, it's a system killer. I think going forward I'll just turn it off and leave it off; it's a lot safer that way.
10/26/2004