O.T. Missing Folder/files

If by adaptor you mean my surge protector it's pretty hard to
keep them separated but I will try the next plug over but it
doesn't explain how my external Mrimgs hd could connect
and this one doesn't.

I believe Dell Imagining was part of Jasc

I tried the external #4 hd again with the same results then I
used my other spare Startech case and replaced the cable
with a new one and power supply and it still would not connect
as it should like the Mrimg HD did. Could it be that I have a bad
HD in there? Should I should put #3 in the case and see if it
works? That's the only thing I can think of? I've been up all night
so it's going to have to wait till I get some rest.

Robert

Robert in CA wrote:
If by adaptor you mean my surge protector it's pretty hard to
keep them separated but I will try the next plug over but it
doesn't explain how my external Mrimgs hd could connect
and this one doesn't.

I believe Dell Imagining was part of Jasc

I tried the external #4 hd again with the same results then I
used my other spare Startech case and replaced the cable
with a new one and power supply and it still would not connect
as it should like the Mrimg HD did. Could it be that I have a bad
HD in there? Should I should put #3 in the case and see if it
works? That's the only thing I can think of? I've been up all night
so it's going to have to wait till I get some rest.

Robert

Yes, try a working hard drive.

Now, if there were to be a domino fault, then the
second drive could be damaged by being put in that
enclosure.

Testing the (suspect) enclosure drive (somewhere) would be to verify
the drive works.

Testing the wall adapter, would be to determine whether
it is going over-voltage. The adapter is usually 12V @ 2A
and the enclosure has a 12V to 5V regulator of some sort.
The adapter should be current limited. If it gets shorted
while testing, that's not supposed to harm it, as it
shuts off the output.

If it is a barrel connector with two conductors, perhaps
it is a center-positive (+12V) and ground on the
outside.

That is some info, when considering whether drive or power
source are at fault.

Usually the USB controller inside the enclosure, will not
present credentials, until a spinning drive can be read
and proved ready for service. Then the USB chip sets the
voltage levels to signal presence, and discovery happens.
If you sere using USBTreeView and plugged in an unpowered
enclosure, the enclosure should not respond. The thing
is, the USB chip could receive bus power (VBUS) via the cable,
but by not responding, the enclosure "doesn't get your hopes
up". It's only when everything is ship-shape, that the
magic happens, and not before.

If the enclosure is safe to operate without the cover,
sometimes you can "feel" drive vibration, to determine
the spindle of the drive still spins. This also indicated
+12V is good during the test (if it keeps spinning).

I have some older enclosures that are more sloppy. They
will respond a bit without a disk installed. But they
also have capacity limits, so they're pretty well ready
to go to the recycler. One thing different about those,
is the wall adapter uses a 4 pin DIN, with +12V and +5V
offered by the wall adapter, and no regulator inside the
enclosure. This makes it easier to check voltages are
present. "All your failures, in one spot". But this
sort of design, probably cost more to build.

8500 ---X USB port tested good

8500 ------ USB ------- Drive ------ +12V -------- Adapter
^ +5V ^
| |
Bad SATA ports Most likely failure point
do exist based on (my) field data

In a domino failure, multiple pieces of test items get
damaged while carrying out the test procedure. Maybe the
second drive you stick in the enclosure, there is no response
either, and that drive never works again.

The ability to test the power adapter, independently, helps
a bit.

The SATA port on the USB chip, there's not much we can do
about that. I have a SATA port on the machine I'm typing on,
which probably has a common mode voltage problem and it
seems to have ruined the SATA port on my old 2TB drive.
Causing me to have to replace the drive, and "X-off" the
cable that did it. The X-mark on the cable label, tells
me not to use that one. That is a less-common failure, and
for that drive, being permanently in the computer case,
there was no ESD excuse for a failure.

Anyway, if you have some older, non-important SATA drive,
perhaps you could use that for test in this case. If this
were 20 years ago, I'd just tell you to "throw away the
enclosure". But not in the year 2021, as large enclosures
are getting darn hard to find (ones with a fan at least).

You would think it was a bad drive, but I suppose time will
tell, as you test stuff. The last complete drive failure
I had here, is a Maxtor 40GB IDE yonks ago. There are
many sick drives here (five 500GB ones with platter
issues), but they never seem to drop dead.

One of the reasons I own 2-port PCI Express SATA cards, is
for this very scenario. I have a drive. Status unknown.
Like the 2TB with the blown port. Well, we don't want that
2TB blowing any more motherboard ports. So, the 2 port SATA
card goes into the machine, and I do an "internal" drive
test using the SATA card. If the SATA card is blown during
testing, no sweat. It's not damaged my Southbridge, so we're
all friends and the like.

And that's what computer store tech support uses. They use
old kit that they can afford to blow up, to test "customer ****".
In fact, some customers coming in, will be quite blunt about
it, saying "I know you only charge $25 to test a video card,
and there's a good chance this one will blow your motherboard".
And the staff will laugh, because that's exactly the risk. They
need to collect enough $25 fees, to pay for the next motherboard,
and also pay the staff wage. Well, in my case, I use the plugin
PCI Express x1 card with two SATA ports on it, for testing
"suspected bad" hard drives. That's to reduce the financial impact
and try and avoid the more egregious domino faults (sticking a
drive I really needed, into a port that blows it up).

Paul

I wish I read your message before I put the #3 hd back in to test it.
So it looks like I have a domino fault and screwed up my hd.

Remember we tested my place because of the red light on my surge
protector some time ago and I bought receptacle tester and my entire
mobile in ungrounded. The only grounded outlet is in the bathroom of
all places. As for testing etc it still doesn't explain how the external
Mrimg backup hd worked and the clones don't?

I thought it might be the hd itself so I put #3 clone back in and
it's not responding and doesn't have the icon to safely remove.
How can I put the external Mrimg backup hd in and it reads it
and I already made (1) clone on the 8500 but it stil doesn't read
the drive even with the clone hd in now?

This is strange behavior for the 8500 where it reads one but not
the other and I've change the case, plug, power cord and hd. I
thought for sure it would read #3 because it was just cloned. This
makes two different hd's and two different cases etc that aren't
responding as they should. Sometimes the icon for removal appears
and sometimes it isn't there. Sometimes it says installing drivers
and says its ready to use but there are no popups to open the files
which normally happens. It goes just so far then stops or not at all.

Yet the external Mrimg backup hd didn't have any problems
whatsoever. This is odd, if one can the other should and I also tested
it with the Patriot Key as you suggested and it had no problems.

I don't have any left over hd's except the 780 clones, the original 780 hd
and the unknown hd, should I try that? But if its the domino effect won't
it screw that drive up as well? Are you saying that I've permanently lost
(2) hd's because of this? I can't copy over them?

By SATA your referring to another computer? I have the 780 of course
and there's the 8200 but its all boxed up although I believe it was in
running order but would we really need it for something like this?

How did this all start? I was doing textbook cloning when all of a sudden
all this out of nowhere and I shown you screen shots all along the way
and there's nothing that even hinted at a problem like the ones I've been
having. It started when I was rebooting and the screen went black and
it came up with the invalid OS message and ever since I've had this problem.

Robert

Robert in CA wrote:
I wish I read your message before I put the #3 hd back in to test it.
So it looks like I have a domino fault and screwed up my hd.

Remember we tested my place because of the red light on my surge
protector some time ago and I bought receptacle tester and my entire
mobile in ungrounded. The only grounded outlet is in the bathroom of
all places. As for testing etc it still doesn't explain how the external
Mrimg backup hd worked and the clones don't?

I thought it might be the hd itself so I put #3 clone back in and
it's not responding and doesn't have the icon to safely remove.
How can I put the external Mrimg backup hd in and it reads it
and I already made (1) clone on the 8500 but it stil doesn't read
the drive even with the clone hd in now?

This is strange behavior for the 8500 where it reads one but not
the other and I've change the case, plug, power cord and hd. I
thought for sure it would read #3 because it was just cloned. This
makes two different hd's and two different cases etc that aren't
responding as they should. Sometimes the icon for removal appears
and sometimes it isn't there. Sometimes it says installing drivers
and says its ready to use but there are no popups to open the files
which normally happens. It goes just so far then stops or not at all.

Yet the external Mrimg backup hd didn't have any problems
whatsoever. This is odd, if one can the other should and I also tested
it with the Patriot Key as you suggested and it had no problems.

I don't have any left over hd's except the 780 clones, the original 780 hd
and the unknown hd, should I try that? But if its the domino effect won't
it screw that drive up as well? Are you saying that I've permanently lost
(2) hd's because of this? I can't copy over them?

By SATA your referring to another computer? I have the 780 of course
and there's the 8200 but its all boxed up although I believe it was in
running order but would we really need it for something like this?

How did this all start? I was doing textbook cloning when all of a sudden
all this out of nowhere and I shown you screen shots all along the way
and there's nothing that even hinted at a problem like the ones I've been
having. It started when I was rebooting and the screen went black and
it came up with the invalid OS message and ever since I've had this problem.

Robert

From my perspective, it would be quite easy to miss some
symptom happening in front of you right now.

The only time an enclosure tends to go nuts, is if Seatools is running
and it overwrites the firmware on the enclosure chip :-) And that only
happens with particular Cypress brand controllers.

Most of the time, plugging in USB devices doesn't cause anything
other than ENUM problems. (That's the area of the registry that
keeps track of where drives were placed, from one boot to the next.)

The 8200 doesn't have SATA ports, as far as I know. It's the kind of
machine that might have two IDE ribbon connectors and a floppy disk
ribbon connector, for a total of three ribbons.

I have an adapter, that converts ribbon signals, to SATA, so you
can easily convert from one to the other. Then, if there is trouble,
only the adapter gets fried. Similar in a way, to how a 2-port
PCI Express SATA card isolates hardware. The form factor of these
has changed a bit over the years. You can see SATA data on one side
(next to a 1x4 power plug), as well as female IDE on the other end.

https://www.suntech.cz/data/P/z/V/phpPzV8qW_386x386.jpg

*******

The "#3 drive" you're worried about, is it a boot drive ? Is it
a clone of one of the other drives ? Does it belong in the 780 or
the 8500 ?

Let's say for a moment, that drive #3 contains 8500 partitions.
You could:

1) Remove all drives inside the 8500, unplug the external enclosure.
2) Install the drive internally in the 8500.
3) Insert the Macrium boot CD.
4) Boot up Macrium.
5) Do the "Boot Repair" procedure from the CD menu.
While you are doing this, Macrium will be working with
the drive, showing you the partitions, plus updating some
materials.
6) Shut down Macrium, reboot with the hard drive (which, if there is
anything on the hard drive, now it will boot).

For this exercise though, we want 8500 materials on the drive, if
testing in the 8500. If the drive is for the 780, we should be
testing in the 780.

This can help you determine whether the drive is good.

Paul

I still don't get it, everything was performing normally
textbook fashion when this happened. There was no
warning at all and you still haven't addressed the invalid
OS and maybe that is causing the USB problem and also
the backspace key?

I do not have Seatools running and its been some time since
I used it.


The #1 hd is a clone of the 780 and is bootable
The #2 hd is a clone of the 780 and is bootable
The #3 hd is the first clone I did of the 8500 and should be bootable.
The #4 hd is the 2nd clone of the 8500 but did not complete.

I'll put #3 inside the 8500 and let you know the results.

Robert

I put #3 hd in the 8500 and restarted it to insert the Rescue CD
but it would not read the CD and I tried several times. It just goes
straight to the login and then I got this.

https://postimg.cc/8fJxW3wz

Then after pressing enter/escape it finally went to the desktop. We
need to resolved this invalid install issue. As you saw for yourself'
the 8500 is licensed so I don't know why I'm getting this or why the
external HD are messing up when it was fine or why the Rescue CD
doesn't load.

The external hd case had no issues on the 780 but I replaced everything
including the hd and it still won't fucntion yet the Mrimg hd and flask key
do?

At present #3 is on the 8500 and I'll leave it here for the time being until
I hear back from you.

Robert

Robert in CA wrote:
I put #3 hd in the 8500 and restarted it to insert the Rescue CD
but it would not read the CD and I tried several times. It just goes
straight to the login and then I got this.

https://postimg.cc/8fJxW3wz

Then after pressing enter/escape it finally went to the desktop. We
need to resolved this invalid install issue. As you saw for yourself'
the 8500 is licensed so I don't know why I'm getting this or why the
external HD are messing up when it was fine or why the Rescue CD
doesn't load.

The external hd case had no issues on the 780 but I replaced everything
including the hd and it still won't fucntion yet the Mrimg hd and flask key
do?

At present #3 is on the 8500 and I'll leave it here for the time being until
I hear back from you.

Robert

I discussed one obscure reason for Not Genuine, and that is
if the time clock is off by large amounts, from the correct time.

There is a second thing that might be playing a part.

You changed the BIOS CMOS battery, the CR2032.

The SATA port could have been set to AHCI or RAID, in the BIOS,
before the battery change.

Maybe the XPS 8500 shipped with the setting at RAID, the 1TB
drive was set up as a "RAID Ready" volume by Dell. I don't
know if RAID is a build-to-order option for your machine or not.
If it was, the 1TB drive could have RAID metadata loaded in the
last track of the drive. This is a special area, that is
inaccessible to Macrium.

This requires a lot of explaining, with not a lot accomplished
by the write up.

I don't even know of an "easy" utility that can present the
status of the 1TB drive in plain english. I've worked before
with RAID, to help people out, using my own systems here, and
to "unbugger" my disk drives later after the experience, I use
the JMicron port on this machine.

I'm on my way out the door right now. My attempts to write a
coherent answer, have failed me at the moment. so I erased
that section for now.

Paul

I spent the day with the same two guys who installed my mini-split
system and they came back to clean it and in the process I slammed
my finder in the sliding door pretty good but I digress.

So your saying changing the battery is causing all of this? If it changed
the Bios can we change it back?

I still have #3 hd in the 8500 so am going to try the rescue CD again

Robert

I tried the Rescue CD again it recognizes it when I put it in the 8500
but not when I restart it.

https://postimg.cc/8J1Yp2Df

Robert

Paul wrote:
Robert in CA wrote:
I put #3 hd in the 8500 and restarted it to insert the Rescue CD
but it would not read the CD and I tried several times. It just goes
straight to the login and then I got this.
https://postimg.cc/8fJxW3wz

Then after pressing enter/escape it finally went to the desktop. We
need to resolved this invalid install issue. As you saw for yourself'
the 8500 is licensed so I don't know why I'm getting this or why the
external HD are messing up when it was fine or why the Rescue CD
doesn't load.

The external hd case had no issues on the 780 but I replaced
everything including the hd and it still won't fucntion yet the Mrimg
hd and flask key do?
At present #3 is on the 8500 and I'll leave it here for the time being
until I hear back from you.
Robert

I discussed one obscure reason for Not Genuine, and that is
if the time clock is off by large amounts, from the correct time.

There is a second thing that might be playing a part.

You changed the BIOS CMOS battery, the CR2032.

The SATA port could have been set to AHCI or RAID, in the BIOS,
before the battery change.

Maybe the XPS 8500 shipped with the setting at RAID, the 1TB
drive was set up as a "RAID Ready" volume by Dell. I don't
know if RAID is a build-to-order option for your machine or not.
If it was, the 1TB drive could have RAID metadata loaded in the
last track of the drive. This is a special area, that is
inaccessible to Macrium.

OK.

1) I don't really know why it's not genuine.

2) I don't know of, or see a reason why, a RAID issue
would upset it. You did get it to boot, so it can't
be that far from correct.

3) What I'm trying to avoid here, is going in circles.
(Like having one disk Not Genuine, then a second disk
Not Genuine, and so on. Don't want this.) This means,
ideally, I'd like to understand what tipped it over.
But the powers that be, don't make this easy. They will
give error codes for things like "you didn't have permissions
to check this problem" or the like, error codes ending in 5.
But for the information that counts, they're not going
to give it to you.

We can do things, to "try to make it activate", but again,
this is Whack-A-Mole. If you just flail about, that's not
progress that's happening.

The advice here, is sound, as far as it goes.

https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/e...genuine-issues

Time and date not correct on the system,
or time zone not matching actual location.

All required Windows Updates not installed
(most recent Daylight Savings Time patch).

Software or driver corruption of the OS

Viruses and malware

Note: This article supplies only ONE possible solution to a
specific WGA issue where the BIOS flag has been set, it
does not apply to all WGA issues. === True enough...

...
rename tokens.dat tokens.bar === cmd.exe, elevated to administrator
slui They include steps for stopping
... sppsvc, which would otherwise protect
tokens.dat from changes.

To me, just running "slui" as Administrator
should be enough. If tokens.dat is not valid,
why would it keep the file around ???

As long as you're booting #3 without the original 1TB
in the machine, there should not be a "spread" of
the issue from one disk to the next. There *can*
be a spread, if a license key is installed too many
times, which I presume also involves counting
the number of times a user uses "slui".

The theory was, that Royalty OEM OSes should not be
quite as ticklish when it comes to counting "slui"
invocations. That's because SLIC activated OSes
should "auto-activate" - the determination should
be do-able using local information. It's not the
same as COA key validation, where the key must be
sent off to the server.

*******

Summary:

Since #3 is in the machine right now, you might
as well Administrator "slui" test it, and reboot to
give it a trial. You can use "slmgr /dlv" to check
license status, or mgadiag (the command you tested
the other day and pressed the "Copy" button)
is an alternative. You can issue commands like that
from an Administrator Command Prompt.

Now, if this doesn't work out, I don't know what to
try next...

Paul

I went into the BIOS but didn't know whether to put
CD/DVD on top so the rescue CD would load or to open
BIOS setup?

https://postimg.cc/ctZdSxLq


What should I do?

Robert

I just read your link,.. jeeeeeez it sounds like I'm in for hell.

I will need to re-read what you want me to do.

I also have the unknown hd I would like to try at some point to see if it boots.

Right now my finger is hurting me too much to continue.

Robert

Robert in CA wrote:
I went into the BIOS but didn't know whether to put
CD/DVD on top so the rescue CD would load or to open
BIOS setup?

https://postimg.cc/ctZdSxLq


What should I do?

Robert


If you want to use the rescue CD, then having
it first would help.

Having the CD first is a good choice as a general
practice anyway. The prompt that appears on the
screen "press any key to boot", can be used as
a selector (if you don't press a key, it falls
through to the next item in the list, which
could be a hard drive).

Paul

Robert in CA wrote:
I just read your link,.. jeeeeeez it sounds like I'm in for hell.

I will need to re-read what you want me to do.

I also have the unknown hd I would like to try at some point to see if it boots.

Right now my finger is hurting me too much to continue.

Robert

You could apply a bit of ice to keep the inflammation down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RICE_%28medicine%29

"Although cooling delayed swelling,
it did not hasten recovery from this muscle damage."

If you don't have ice, there's always a frozen bag of peas
as a cooling means.

It's been a long time since I was athletic enough
to need to know that stuff.

Paul

I went to change the boot order but the first time the
arrow keys wouldn't respond so tried again and the
second time they did although didn't change the boot
order per say but allowed me to select CD/DVD.

I clicked fix boot problems but it didn't have the (4)
check boxes the last time we did this. I got as far as
selecting which partition it boots from. I know it isn't
C: and I think it's D: (already checked) but not sure if
its FAT32 or not? So I'd rather check with you first to
make sure before proceeding.

https://postimg.cc/rRscnzMt

https://postimg.cc/8JKg6DMk

https://postimg.cc/hf7Rfkjg

https://postimg.cc/JyMfYtQ4

I did put ice on it then iodine then bandaged it. When
I put the iodine on it, Oh boy. It feels allot better now.
The home is also very cool. The mini-split systems
(Klimaire) are great and good for the computers too.

Robert