Brussell's Blog

I recently upgraded to Windows 7 64-bit OS from a Vista OS. I’m loving every minute of it at the moment. One problem I have ran into that appears to be happening with others is the fact TortoiseSVN will puke randomly on updates from a SVN grab. You can see it especially on large SVN checkouts. I have read numerous posts on the matter and I am posting what actually worked for me.

First I make sure any folder that I’m using for a SVN checkout is not flagged for Windows Search Indexing. You can get to this property by right-clicking on the parent folder and select Properties -> Advanced -> Uncheck index for faster searches.

The next item to make sure of is adding the following apps to your Trusted & Exclusion rules inside your Anti-virus \ Protection program of choice.

• SearchFilterHost.exe  (C:\Windows\System32)
• SearchProtocolHost.exe  (C:\Windows\System32)
• TSVNCache.exe  (<TortoiseSVN_dir>\bin)
• TortoiseProc.exe  (<TortoiseSVN_dir>\bin)

For me, I use Kaspersky 2010. So I had to go into Settings -> Threats … then add TSVNCache and TortoiseProc to their own Exclusion rules telling it to not use <any> on each. I then went to the Trusted Apps tab on the same window and added SearchFilterHost and SearchProtocolHost both as TrustedApps and not take any action on either one. Your protection\anti-virus app may be different of course but the main concept here is to tell it don’t do anything if either 2 of those Tortoise apps are running. The same applies to the Windows Search Indexer, b\c I found that even though you tell the directory DO NOT INDEX, as we did in the first step, there is still things going on in the background which will still negate this whole processs if you just add the 2 Tortoise apps to your Trusted + Exclussion zone in your Anti-virus \ Protection app.

I tried not adding the 2 Windows Search Indexer apps to my Trusted \ Exclussion zones and the problem would only rarely occur, but it STILL occurred. It was only after adding those 2 with the Tortoise apps that the problem ceased to occur any more.

I hope this helps your situation, I enjoy Windows 7 and I can’t live without TortoiseSVN for my work.

-Brandon

I was diggin through some of my draft posts and found this nice tip I forgot to finish and post up, so here it is!

For anyone having the problem as stated in the title of this post upon booting into Windows or even from the Windows Installation CD to repair, reformat, etc. I have the fix all solution for you. I recently had a friend bring me their computer to fix, I thought to myself, eh worse case I just boot up with Windows XP CD and drop partitions, format and reinstall Windows. After updating all the patches worse case will take me a night or 2. Well, not so easy. Every boot of Windows, safe mode, normal mode, console caused a blue screen of death “BSOD” with the information of ntfs.sys 0×00000024. I thought, well geuss that file is corrupted so let’s just start a fresh. To my suprise even booting with the XP Installation CD caused the same BSOD with the same error. Now I’m intrigued at this point, so I use my old friend Google and find random postings about the same problems. Seems if you don’t have a floppy drive, which none of my computers have now, your sorta SOL. 

I luckily put together other random problem solutions can came up with a game plan. I pulled a new trick by downloading a Linux OS that runs straight from a CD-ROM that you can boot with and used some handy Linux commands to get the hard drive readable again. I shall now go over the process below: 

• First, grab you a copy of Knoppix Linux (at the time of this writing I used v5.1.1-CD-2007-01-04). This should be an ISO from one of the many generous mirror download sites on the main Knoppix site. Burn the Knoppix ISO file to a CD. Now you have a bootable Linux OS right on a CD! Boy I love Linux ;p
• Now, pop that CD in your drive and boot up with it. NOTE: Make sure you have the CD\DVD boot sequence in your BIOS set ahead of your Hard Drives. You will now be presenting with a screen saying something like hit a key, or hit return to boot with Knoppix. Go ahead this is what we want to do. Be prepared for a little wait as all the linux libraries and kernals load all your hardware and OS for you, remember it’s coming from the CD to your memory so it will be slower than a normal Windows boot session. Hopefully you should now be sitting in a nice Knoppix OS gui, sorta Windows like for those not familiar with Linux GUIs. BTW, welcome to Linux ;p.
• You should see a icon at the bottom taskbar that looks sorta like a MS-Dos command prompt icon, called Knoppix Console or something. Thats where we want to go, click it and you should be in a familiar DOS type console. Type in the command prompt the following: su  - This is the super-user command to get better access to the system, much like the admin accounts on Windows. 
• Now, type in the following command: cfdisk Use this utility to identify your hard drive mount. Normally, hard drives are named hda1, hda2, hda3, etc. My case was a little different due to hardware differences, mine was labeled sda1, sda2, sda3, etc. You want to find the one that contains your hard drive contents, it also might be easy to use one of the guis outside the command prompt such as Knoppixs File Explorer. 
• Once you have identified the mount “hda or sda” + 1, 2, 3, … you ready for the final command so exit the cfdisk utility if your still in it and type this in the command prompt: ntfsfix /dev/[mount] Replace [mount] with your hda1, hda2, or sda1, sda2 hard drive label. So for instance, mine was found in sda2, so I typed in: ntfsfix /dev/sda2
• You should now see a spit out of text but it should end up with a successful message, if not then look up how to unmount the disk mount from Google and then try the ntfsfix command again. You are now ready to boot back up with the Windows Installation CD!
• Close Knoppix down by doing the Log Out -> Restart commands from inside the gui. It should take it a few minutes again to shut everything down but end with a msg of remove the cd from the tray and hit [Return] to reboot the computer. 
• Place the Windows Installation cd back into the drive and hit [Return].  Now, once your back inside the Windows Installation CD choose “R” for repair a Windows Installation, and choose the one on your system currently. Get to the recovery console and run the command:  chkdsk /r  This will take a while so go eat, drink, be merry while all this goes on. 

After chkdsk has ran and finished, you should be fixed and back to a bootable Windows OS. I hope you take the time to back everything up now and then reinstall Windows b\c the problem is still probably laying around ready to do it’s damage again. Hope this tip finds it’s way to someone who is in desperate need of a fix for this problem. Sorry for the terrible formatting, it was really late when I was completing this fix on the PC and writing this tutorial in the down time.

Well I’m sure many of you have at least heard about CS3 if you haven’t already obtained a copy for use. But many out there, including me, have had nothing but problems with installation(s) of CS3. We use it here at work and let me tell you, one computer will install with ease, and the next 2-3 will bomb every time.

Some tips and steps I have learned the hard way myself over the past few weeks.

1.) If you bomb before even launching the installer, or weird exits with no notice you can try this. NOTE: I was on Vista when these happened. You can launch a command prompt (DOS) with Administrator rights, this is important. Get into your Windows\System32 directory and use the following 2 commands.

> regsvr32 jscript.dll
> regsvr32 vbscript.dll

2.) If you get all the way through the installer only to find at the end only a few common apps installed but the core apps selected failed. Then you may have the problem I have been seeing which involves Error Code 2, and many others. TIP: you can find your error codes in the log files contained in your c:\program files\common apps\adobe\installer. You’ll see a zip file there which contains the log files. Now the process I did may not work for you, it seems to be a hit or miss but I’ll go over every process I did to get it to finally work.

• * Uninstall all Adobe applications from the Add\Remove Programs section in your Control Panel. Yes I know, a bit drastic but you can try leaving some if you have the patients to sit there for all the repeat processes to figure out how to fix it.
• * Download the Adobe CS3Clean script. Search Google for the link to it on the Adobe Site. NOTE: You may have to download the Microsoft Windows Install Cleaning program to get it to work.
• * Run the script, I used the un-documented Method (4) when prompted. It only shows 2 options, but trust me there is Method 3 and 4 you can use, 4 being nuke anything with Adobe in it’s name off my system.
• * Repeat last step a couple times to make sure everything is in fact gone, Vista can be a little quirky with this sometimes.
• * Now heres the kicker ! I had to turn off all virus scanning and firewall software. I have McAffee  so I manually turned it all off, then went into Task Manager and manually stopped all processes that are not system core ones required to be running.
• * Once I did all the above I basically had a flawless install.

Hope all this helps you, I know it was a lot hours\days of figuring it out for myself but I eventually just followed my above steps and got it working every time.