Microsoft Fixit can't contact server??

I have a CD-ROM device that won't read or play disks, and I'm trying to run
Microsoft Fixit to get some diagnosing help. But when I try to run Fixit I
get the error message that it can't contact the server. Since my internet
is working fine, I'm not sure what the problem it, but it's persisted for
days.

I'm using WinXP, could this be the problem (no more support?). The firewall
is turned off, could there be a problem with Microsoft servers?

Any suggestions?

Forgot to mention the error code when I have this problem: error code
80072F8F. This apparently refers to a time/date difference, but I checked
this and also syncronized with the NIST server. So it shouldn't be a
problem, but the error message still comes up when I run/install Fixit.

jbclem wrote:
I have a CD-ROM device that won't read or play disks, and I'm trying to run
Microsoft Fixit to get some diagnosing help. But when I try to run Fixit I
get the error message that it can't contact the server. Since my internet
is working fine, I'm not sure what the problem it, but it's persisted for
days.

I'm using WinXP, could this be the problem (no more support?). The firewall
is turned off, could there be a problem with Microsoft servers?

Any suggestions?



OK, I rewrote my answer a bit... And removed some but not
all of the techie stuff :-)

I reproduced your symptoms. In the sense that, I attempted
to download the current Fixit. It's a stub only, not the
Fixit. The stub, in turn, opens a connection to some Microsoft
server. It looks like TLS is being used perhaps. (As SSL is
rather broken now.)

Anyway, the freaking stub does a 40MB download (that's the part
that didn't arrive on your machine). It includes a copy of Powershell.

It means Microsoft re-wrote the Fixit to use Powershell.
At least, since the copy of that Fixit that I have archived.

For a person on dialup, they're cursing right about now. 40MB...

*******

So the race is on, to find an old copy of 50027.
OK, this link still works! Yippee.

http://download.microsoft.com/downlo...Fixit50027.msi

When the program is downloaded, I double-click from my download
folder, agree to the license. Then I see...

"After you run this Microsoft Fixit, some programs
might not be able to use your CD or DVD
drive until you reinstall those programs."

Which of course is insanity, because the problem will come back
if you reinstall the trouble maker.

"Some examples of programs that might be affected by
this Microsoft Fixit

iTunes software by Apple [Likely the Gear Software burner]
Nero software by Nero Inc
Roxio Creator software by Sonic Solutions
Zune software by Microsoft [??? really?]"

Anyway, I wanted to go that far, to verify that is
the fixit for DVD drives. That's the Fixit that removed
an UpperFilter entry from a certain ClassID.

The old file is 652,288 bytes.
The sha1sum of the old (non-Powershell) MicrosoftFixit50027.msi is

98b9236f5416fdd692dd4b7e6a468225269e9335

Hope it fixes your drive for you. What the Fixit will be
doing, is deleting the contents of UpperFilter, for this
specific ClassID, so it no longer conflicts with other things.
By removing the driver entry that UpperFilter points to,
on the next reboot the optical drive might be working again.
That's a guess as to what will happen.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

UpperFilter

( as seen in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929461 )

Note that only that {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
one should be touched in any case. If you delete other
UpperFilter entries similar to that one, it can kill
your keyboard or mouse. So don't do that :-)

The main benefit of the Fixit, is the user not touching
the Registry directly. If you have any doubts about
what is going to happen, you could set a Restore Point,
which writes out a copy of the Registry and other things,
and allows you to go back in time, in case the computer
is (partially) "bricked". For example, you can revert
a System Restore point, from Safe Mode.

System Restore is in places like:

Programs : Accessories : System Tools : System Restore
Control Panels : System : System Restore tab (to verify, turned on)

HTH,
Paul

I downloaded FixIt and ran it, producing a window with this message: "the
computer settings already match this Microsoft Fix it and no changes have
been made".

Then I went into Regedit, after first running ERUNT, and checked the ClassID
you gave. It was the one for DVD/CD-ROM drives. But no visible mention of
Upper Filter.

John

jbclem wrote:
I downloaded FixIt and ran it, producing a window with this message: "the
computer settings already match this Microsoft Fix it and no changes have
been made".

Then I went into Regedit, after first running ERUNT, and checked the ClassID
you gave. It was the one for DVD/CD-ROM drives. But no visible mention of
Upper Filter.

John

So then it isn't an UpperFilter problem.

The Fixit is a lot of work, for one registry entry.

Paul

What about the LowerFilter? I'm not sure I even have one, but I've read
suggestions that included the LowerFilter. What exactly are these filters,
and why would changing them affect a problem such as I have.




"Paul" wrote in message
...
jbclem wrote:
I downloaded FixIt and ran it, producing a window with this message: "the
computer settings already match this Microsoft Fix it and no changes have
been made".

Then I went into Regedit, after first running ERUNT, and checked the
ClassID you gave. It was the one for DVD/CD-ROM drives. But no visible
mention of Upper Filter.

John

So then it isn't an UpperFilter problem.

The Fixit is a lot of work, for one registry entry.

Paul

jbclem wrote:

What about the LowerFilter? I'm not sure I even have one, but I've read
suggestions that included the LowerFilter. What exactly are these filters,
and why would changing them affect a problem such as I have.

Hardware has a driver stack.

The UpperFilter and LowerFilter offer opportunities to "filter"
what happens to a piece of hardware. The stack is a protocol stack,
translating from one protocol to another, until eventually a
command is sent to the physical hardware. There are two places
to "shim" in a filter driver, depending on whether you want
to work on the higher level protocol, or interfere with low
level hardware commands. That sort of thing.

A filter driver could be completely transparent ("watch, but don't touch").
Or, it can interact, remove certain commands, and so on. And the
result for the user, is the device could have quite
different behavior.

I don't know what a common mis-behavior is in this case, when
burner software interacts with the optical drive protocol stack.

Looking at your other thread, I would be examining Event Viewer,
for something related to File Explorer or just to optical drives.
Maybe an error is generated, each time the empty window appears.

I would also try:

1) Data disc (maybe with a backup on it)
2) Music disc
3) Installer CD
4) Commercial DVD

as the behavior might be specific to one type.

Perhaps the software path to accessing the disc, is different, and
is a function of the initially determined disc type.

There is a table at the bottom of this page, showing UDF support
on Windows. It cheats a bit, by showing five green blocks. But
UDF 2.5 only comes, if you install the Toshiba UDF driver. I doubt
this is your problem. I think I've had UDF problems, but it
may have been on a Macintosh.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format
http://www.videohelp.com/tools/UDF-Reader (example of UDF Reader download, untested)

If this problem was facing me, I would line up test media first,
to test with. An audio CD. A data CD. See which ones work or
which ones fail.

In Linux, I could apply this tool to each of the media samples,
to see how it is recorded. This is apparently available in Cygwin,
but I don't know if that helps matters or not. I don't have Cygwin
installed on WinXP. I have Cygwin somewhere here, and the first
program I tried, failed, because it simply wasn't using Windows
identifiers (it could not possibly have worked). In any case,
I know this works for me in Linux. The package manager usually
has a copy, as long as you turn on all the Repository source buttons.

http://disktype.sourceforge.net/

That program will tell me, for example, that some optical
discs are "dual format" and support more than one access method.

That sort of analysis is only worthwhile, if you notice that
some discs open and read, and others do not. And they're all
nominally CDs. If you notice differences between CD and DVD,
that could either be the content of the media, or dirty or
dead lasers. CD, DVD, Bluray, use different lasers, so it's
possible for CD working, DVD not working, to be a drive
hardware problem.

With a small collection of home computers, I don't work
on these problems enough, to offer a problem
resolution flow chart.

Paul

I finally got back to this problem, I hope you're still watching...

I've tried a bunch of different types of CDs and DVD's. On a few of them I
can see folders, and the files inside the folders. On one I could read a
text file, but the rest of the them even when I could see a file I couldn't
read/view it or run it.

Looking at the Event viewer/System just now...Nothing generated in Event
Viewer even though I was trying to play an audio CD that had opened up WMP
and was flipping through the tracks, giving one split second burst of sound
then on to the next track.

I next tried a disk onto which yesterday I had burnt(with this Asus device)
a television program (I booted up the computer with a bootCD and the Asus
CD-ROM device worked absolutely normally). Using VLC all I got was a blank
window with the heading "select one or more files to open". The Event View
did produce a bunch of identical "warnings" that said: "an error was
detected on device\Device\CdRom0 during a paging operation". Strangely,
when I tried this disk a second and third time it didn't generate those
warnings.

After I hard burnt this television program, and two movies (on a different
disk), I played them and they played perfectly while in the miniXP from the
bootupCD. Thus it really seems that the device itself is working fine, and
the problem is restricted to the Windows XP installation.

I also tried (again) uninstalling the device in Device Manager, rebooting
the computer, but the nothing changed.