Let the blog see the rabbit...

I got a slightly panicky phone call from my sister this morning because her laptop had suddenly decided to start asking for the Windows Vista install DVD.

It seems that a Windows Update went wrong and the computer suddenly decided that it was no longer activated. Rather than simply prompt to be activated, it wanted to be reinstalled from the install media. The dialog box appeared immediately after logging on. Once dismissed, you would be immediately logged off again, which means that an ordinary user now has no access at all to their files.

The computer, an Advent 5301, was supplied by PC World with no install media. There is the option to create a recovery DVD (actually, for some reason, it's two DVDs - despite the fact that one contains 4.1GB and the other contains just over 200MB, so it would all fit on one DVD) but I suspect this would just wipe and reinstall the system from scratch, and so would not be the install media that Windows was demanding.

With this in mind, I came round to my sister's with an Ubuntu Live CD, my laptop (OS X) and a USB caddy for 2.5" hard disks - the highest priority was to save all the user data. This was a beautifully simple task - I simply rsynced the entirity of c:\Users to my laptop. Having done this, I tried to perform a System Restore via the "Tech Guys" rescue partition that can be accessed by pressing F8 at boot time and selecting "Repair Your Computer". None of the system restore points worked and there was no option to do a non-destructive reinstall of the Windows files.

Had the computer been supplied with install media, this would simply have been a case of putting the DVD in when prompted and letting it get on with it. There's no excuse for PC World not supplying install media - including an OS install DVD (along with the other install media that was supplied) would have cost a matter of pennies.

Instead, I had to do a destructive reinstall, create the user accounts, then go back into Ubuntu and copy the Users directory back over the top (in fact I moved the "empty" Users folder to "Users-old" and created a new one which I then rsynced the contents back into). This, I discovered, prevented users from logging on. For some reason known only to Windows, it decided to display both directories as being called "Users" - sheer insanity. I suspect that the "genuine" Users directory was really called Users.{####-####-####-####} (the hashes being replaced by some cryptic string of characters) in the way I've seen Windows do in the past. If so, why didn't Ubuntu show this? If not, what was special about it? Back I went into Ubuntu, swapped the directories back again, went back into Windows then manually copied the contents of Documents, Pictures and Music into the user profiles, each time being told I had to have Administrative permission to do so. Getting such permission was simply a case of clicking "OK" twice - a meaningless gesture that provided no extra security. If it's going to force me to jump through these hoops for security reasons, it could at least have the decency to ask me for my password in the way that OS X does for such events.

Having got the user files restored, I then had to reinstall all the software that was on the computer previously.

A combination of Microsoft's, PC World's and The Tech Guys' decisions have made me waste a whole afternoon on a problem that didn't need to exist in the first place. It wouldn't have been hard for The Tech Guys to provide an option to run the Windows System File Checker to replace any damaged files. It would have cost virtually nothing for PC World to provide install media with every laptop they sell. Microsoft don't need to implement such strict piracy controls that they cause problems for entirely legitimate users who have done nothing wrong. If they are going to insist on reinstallation under certain circumstances, this could be done over the Internet using the Windows Update system.