Flutterby™! : Vistannoyance 2009-01-19 20:56:18.736254+00

Vistannoyance

2009-01-19 20:56:18.736254+00 by Dan Lyke 8 comments

Old Windows XP machine died. Dan bought external hard drive case to read data from old Windows XP machine, plugged it into Windows Vista machine. Clicked on folder to drag it over. Got several complaints about permissions, each time gave admin permissions, 'til eventually it told me it couldn't write a file.

Okay, open source directory, click on every non-grayed box I can find to make sure everyone has read access, do same with target directories and write access, same problem.

Finally get disgusted, plug drive into Linux box, copy data to Linux server, copy from Linux server to Vista.

What a half-baked half-finished POS Vista is.

I have had this issue with Vista and tried all kinds of things to fix the permissions issues, it seems to be tied to the source of the files as well as some type of DRM. ie: a USB mounted share would not work, but the same images from an internal hard drive worked great. And they had been places on both as a user as backups. The ability to boot Ubuntu solves MANY Vista and WinXP problems.

I had the same basic problem late last week with an XP -> XP transfer. I think the underlying issue is that Microsoft really, really sucks at filesystems.

They were executable and DLL files in a VisualStudio project tree. There's times when I really want "chmod -R a+rw *", and I'm not sure what the hell was going on, but...

I have a nice little LaCie NAS which is a mini linux distro. Moving from xp to vista, I just copied everything to the NAS from xp, then copied it onto vista. Transferring them directly was a pain in the butt even over the network, but putting a NAS between them worked well.

The SimpleTech NAS that Nancy had at work just failed, and I installed a Maxtor NAS with some pretty decent automated backup software for workstations. It seems to work really well. Nancy was checking backups on CD and found all kinds of WindersWonders like links to files, rather than the files, empty directories that should have been full. I hate computers.

I didn't have this problem when migrating from XP to Vista, including high res image and media files. I think the key was using the files and settings transfer wizard with a magic USB cable. It copied all the user accounts over from the old box to the new one. I soon got tired of the slow pace of transferring ~ 60 GB over USB, so I killed the wizard and did the rest by gigabyte sneakernet like you did. (No external hard drive case, though; just had the old drive sitting outside the open case of the new machine.) With the same user accounts on both systems, there were no permissions problems.

Yeah, last time I copied user accounts I ended up with some stuff that didn't behave right, two machines with the same user GUID or somesuch, and in going to a new Windows machine, the hope is almost always that it'll be a clean install. So I didn't bother to migrate that way. Maybe I should have.