Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2010 July 27

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July 27

Data Lost After Restore?

I am running Windows XP and recently restored my C: drive from a Norton Ghost backup image. Unfortunately I forgot to backup several important files on the C: drive which were created after the backup image. Are they now irrevocably lost, or is there some way to retrieve them? Any help appreciated. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Callerman (talk • contribs) 01:23, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

They are probably gone, gone, gone. You can try an undelete utility but I would not expect it to work, given the way disk imaging works. --Mr.98 (talk) 02:16, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

A typical undelete utility (such as Recuva) won't work because there will be no record of the files in the restored filesystem metadata. But I think Norton Ghost only copies used clusters, in which case it's just possible that some or all of the file data survives in the unused clusters. PhotoRec might turn something up. If these are text files or word processing files and you can remember key phrases, you might have some luck searching the raw disk contents for those phrases. One program that can search raw disks is HxD (not that it's necessarily the best, I just happen to have used it for this purpose in the past). Finally, there are various computer forensics tools that might help, but I don't know anything about them. I think they're rather expensive. -- BenRG (talk) 04:06, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

I would immediately cease use of the drive to maximize the chances that the information is still in existence. There are advanced techniques that can be applied at the magnetic parity level for non-filesystem recovery. At that point, though, it is a question of how valuable the data is --- as such recovery services can run in the thousands of dollars (US). I have had much success with Drive Savers --rocketrye12 ^{talk/contribs} 09:38, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

If you pay professionals, they will just run the software that I already mentioned and charge you ~$1000 for it. No professional data recovery lab can recover overwritten data. See Data recovery#Overwritten data. It's true that you should stop booting from the disk, since the boot drive is frequently written to and every write has a chance of overwriting the data you want to recover. Ideally you should make a raw image of the drive and use the image for further recovery attempts. Norton Ghost can probably do this, but it would need to be configured to copy all clusters, not just used clusters (since you only care about the unused clusters in this case), and ideally you would want it to make a raw image rather than using its proprietary image format (all the tools I mentioned will work with a raw image, but I don't know how many support Ghost images). Your next best option would be to install the drive as a non-boot drive in another computer and do the recovery there. You could use a USB external enclosure for this; they cost $10–$40. -- BenRG (talk) 20:37, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

How to remove a hacker from an iphone 3GS

How do i remove a hacker from my iphine 3GS and keep them out? Ladeyangl (talk) 03:30, 27 July 2010 (UTC) someone is hacking my iphone editting my pictures posting them my msms emails ims diary online. It is awful and vety embarrassing. I hv no computer and i am on disability so i need to be able to use this. Please find what specific steps i need to take what product to buy or who i should contact. Apple att and the police havent been helpful. Thank you. You are very welcome to email me. Ladeyangl (talk) 03:30, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Apple doesn't have to help you. They might've sold the device, but if it's out of warranty they don't have to help you at all. I would say consider backing up your data and resetting the phone. Chevymontecarlo - alt 05:43, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Changing your password to the online diary might do the trick. Or possibly disabling mobile uploads/downloads on that service. If you can provide the service's name, we could look into it. To clarify, is the phone in your possession? --rocketrye12 ^{talk/contribs} 09:35, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Spaceward SuperNova

Is it a program like Photoshop or is it a program on Supernova, a 16-bit minicomputer formerly made by the Data General Corporation? Or is it a chromokey used by television stations?
119.12.117.103 (talk) 04:17, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

You'll have to be a bit more specific in your question but this may be of use. --rocketrye12 ^{talk/contribs} 09:33, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Problems reading CDs

For some time now the my PC has had occasional problems reading CDs. The CD drive doesn't have a drawer, but instead has a slot in which you poke the CD. Usually the CD spins a few times and Windows Vista pops up a window asking what you want done with the music/data/blank disk. However, with some disks the drive just hunts around for a minute or so before ejecting it without explanation. Usually, I find that rotating the disk and trying again solves the problem, though there is the odd disk which just refuses to play at all. The problem appears to be restricted to this PC (ie. the disks play quite OK in other devices). One interesting thing is I have noticed the problem is more common with newer CDs. So, is my CD drive at fault and is there some way I can see an error message to help me find out what the actual problem is? Is my CD drive more sensitive than usual, perhaps due to its slot design? Or has there been some changes in CD manufacturing in the last few years that might reduce the quality of CDs (particularly music CDs)? Astronaut (talk) 06:24, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Is this a new problem? In other words, did it read CDs fine in the past but now has problems? If so, it's obvious to me that the CD drive is dusty inside. It's very common. CD drives are very unreliable. Try blowing into the slot with compressed air. There are also cleaning CDs (i.e., CDs you put into the drive that supposedly clean it, although I have never tried them and I doubt that they work). If those solutions don't work, then you should replace the drive. The cheapest new drives cost about $20.--Best Dog Ever (talk) 07:35, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

CD/DVD readers/writers don't last, I've never had one working like new for over 3 years. Luckily, they're so cheap that you should rather just replace yours for a DVD writer which you can probably find for $20. These things are as cheap and common as kettles and toasters, and last just as long (probably designed like that on purpose). Sandman30s (talk) 11:08, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

I'm surprised you both say CD/DVD drives are unreliable and don't last. Every other drive I've has has lasted at least as long as the PC. Anyway, it is just an annoyance at the moment. The problem would be getting a replacement slot-loading drive to fit inside my Dell laptop. I would have to get it from Dell and I bet they're not $20 now it is out of warranty. Astronaut (talk) 12:52, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, but I agree with them too. The fact you can put them back in again and it might work does suggest it's the drive that's having the problem. Although it's possible to get a bad batch of CDs, that'd be limited to just the pack you bought, another pack should work without any issues and from what you've described it suggests to me it's multiple CDs by multiple manufacturers? Optical drives don't last forever though and largely this is because they have fast moving components and the lifespan of objects with moving components is largely defined by however long those components work. Because you have a slot I assume it's not really covered and therefore more dust could get in? Because it can read the CDs after a few tries I'd go with what Best Dog Ever said about trying to clean the drive, but if that fails I can't see any option except for replacement. It's unfortunate that it uses non standard parts, although Dell should be still able to give you a price. Sadly I doubt it'll be anywhere near $20 though. ZX81 ^talk 13:29, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

About a decade ago, I stopped taking CD drives apart because they became so cheap and it's such a pain. Here is what is involved: [1]. What model of Dell is this? I doubt that you have to buy a slot-loading drive. I'll have to look up pictures of the case to know for sure, though.--Best Dog Ever (talk) 16:21, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

OK you didn't say it was for a Dell laptop, you said PC. AFAIK you don't have to buy a Dell specific one, you can buy anything and slot it in there. But you're right, laptop components do cost more than PC components. If it's really that big a problem to replace, it might be worthwhile to investigate making (ISO) images from your disks on another computer, then mounting them on your laptop. Sometimes, and this is weird, I find that copying all the files from a DVD works rather than trying to install directly from the drive, which spins up and spins down all the time during installation and this tends to get less reliable as the drive gets older. So weirdly enough, you might be able to make images from that same 'faulty' drive (some software uses more reliable DMA methods to read disks) but have a problem installing from it. Sandman30s (talk) 19:10, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Very Serious Virues Problem

I am just hit with a terrible virues/malware problem. Almost any program I run, I get a awakard popup saying this or this .dll or .exe or is trying to sent your credit-card info to remote host etc. What should I do ? 12:49, 27 July 2010 (UTC)-- Jon Ascton  (talk) 12:52, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Are you sure this is actually a virus? Perhaps it is scareware encouraging you to buy a (fake) virus/malware scanner for $$$. Astronaut (talk) 12:57, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, Astro. That's just what it is. I was almost going to add this. I wish I could show you screenshot etc. but even mspaint isn't working due to it. Almsot every program I hit, I get a window saying this .dll etc is trying to steal info, and then a so-called security tool shows up (a sort of adv. as you said). It also shows as a red and blue shield icons in status bar (tool-tip shows only "7486986564"). What's the solution ? -- Jon Ascton  (talk) 13:10, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Can you download and run Malwarebytes? Exxolon (talk) 13:51, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Are you sure that will help and not increase the trouble ! Because sometime back I tried something called STOPZILLA that I now doubt is the root of all evil !

Malwarebytes is a reputable program that is designed to eradicate bogus and harmful software - I've used it myself. Exxolon (talk) 14:20, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Make sure to download Malwarebytes from its official site, malwarebytes.org. If this fails, I advise saving your important data to another drive (and planning to gingerly treat those documents like poison in the future) and reformatting your hard disk and starting from scratch; see this FAQ. Comet Tuttle (talk) 16:58, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

To be on the safe side you might consider reinstalling Windows from the original CDs (or the recovery partition on your computer if they didn't give you CDs). Make sure, of course, to backup everything, and don't run anything that you've backed up until you've reinstalled the new computer, updated, and installed an anti-virus program. Rather than fighting hidden infections, it's sometimes quicker to just reinstall the OS. Shadowjams (talk) 18:23, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

How could he be sure that the malware will not be just copied to and from the backup onto his HD again? 92.29.116.34 (talk) 22:36, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

You could never be 100% certain, but since most of what he'd backup would presumably be videos, pictures, sounds, and other non-executables, there would be little to worry about. If the backup disc was found to have some unexpected .BAT or .EXE file, however, he would be unwise to run/install said file. :) Matt Deres (talk) 16:53, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

My HD has got thousands of freeware exe files on it, all neatly categorised. So your assumption is wrong, and doing what you suggest would be bad advice. You must be the person who wrote the so-called "virus faq". 92.29.119.4 (talk) 22:48, 30 July 2010 (UTC)

Excel "Find" function in VBA oddness

I'm trying to write a small code snippet to find the column number of a cell which corresponds to a date. I'm using the "Cells.Find" function and feeding it a formatted string to find.

Private Function pFindColPos(sText As Variant) As Long

Dim lResult As Range, oRg As Range

Set oRg = Cells.Find(What:=sText, _
                     LookIn:=xlFormulas, _
                     LookAt:=xlWhole, _ 
                     SearchOrder:=xlByRows, _ 
                     SearchDirection:=xlNext, _
                     MatchCase:=False)

If Not oRg Is Nothing Then lResult = oRg

pFindColPos = lResult

Set oRg = Nothing

End Function

Public Function NextMonday() As Date

Dim D As Integer
Dim N As Date

D = Weekday(Now)
N = Now() + (9 - D)

NextMonday = N

End Function

Private Sub Worksheet_Activate()

RelevantDate = CStr(Format(NextMonday, "dd/mm/yyyy"))

Col = pFindColPos(RelevantDate)

Application.Goto Range(Col), True

End Sub

"pFindColPos" is trying to find the cell matching the input string, and return the range. "NextMonday" returns the date of the next Monday as of today. The final idea is simply to Goto that cell.

Now, the worksheet column headers appear to have values like "29-Dec-08" but clicking on the cell and looking at the formula bar shows the real value is "08/12/2008", i.e. they are formatted. I don't think it matters, but the dates are text aligned vertically.

01-Dec-08	08-Dec-08	15-Dec-08	22-Dec-08	29-Dec-08

Now here's the weird thing. If I run a Find on "08/12/2008", it works. If I then record a macro whilst running the same Find, and use the code from the resulting macro (which I did, it's used in "pFindColPos") it doesn't find anything. Does anyone have any idea what's going on here? Rixxin (talk) 16:05, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

This is probably not the right thing, but it sounds like the cell's format type is Date type (hence the 29-Dec-08 autoformatting), and you are searching for a string. I suspect that is confusing Excel in one of the situations (Excel is very persnickety about date fields). Have you tried it after explicitly saying that those columns/rows are String fields? --Mr.98 (talk) 21:38, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

I know what you mean because it was the first (and obvious) thing I considered. The fact remains that the actual value "underneath" the formatting is DD/MM/YYYY, and searching for a string like "20/01/2008" using Ctrl-F Find works, but the same operation when recorded as a macro and run doesn't work! Something is getting lost in translation here, and I suspect it's to do with what Excel interprets my input to be when I use Ctrl-F to be somehow not just a string. I hate Excel sometimes.--Rixxin (talk) 09:21, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Excel drives me batty regarding dates, because there are *very* specific custom formats I want to use (YYYY-MM-DD, which is sortable in a simple way), and it always decides that it knows better than me, despite me going back and pleading with it not to treat it as a date, but as a string. I suppose the easy way to test whether this is what is happening is to have your macro make the data something like "xx-08/12/2008" and see if it searches correctly then in both instances, with Excel presumably treating it like a string all the way through. This would just be a diagnosing exercise, not a long-term fix, but it would at least help isolate the problem? --Mr.98 (talk) 12:29, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure how relevant it is to the problems you're having, but the line

If Not oRg Is Nothing Then lResult = oRg

should be

If Not oRg Is Nothing Then Set lResult = oRg

because you've said Dim lResult as Range, so lResult is an object type. With Set the assignment will set the Value property of whatever lResult points to (probably Nothing) to the Value or oRg. Actually I don't know why you use lResult at all (and I'm not sure why the line above doesn't cause an error when lResult is Nothing) - why not just use pFindColPos = oRg.Value ? AndrewWTaylor (talk) 18:30, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

AndrewWTaylor, you are correct. It's because I was still fiddling with it while I was posting this. That wouldn't work. Mr.98, I gave up on this and used a more convoluted method involving formulae to give me a flag on which was the "next Monday" date. Thanks for trying though!--Rixxin (talk) 12:45, 30 July 2010 (UTC)

Screensize

I have a 15" monitor. Sometimes when I view sites like this the text gives me problem. You see the body of text is wider than my screen and inorder to read the complete line I have to move the mouse to-and-fro on the horizontal bar, which is rather troublesome. Is there any setting in my browser itself (IE) that can fit the text-body to my screen's physical width so that I could read it without much botheration ? -- Jon Ascton  (talk) 19:08, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

In IE8 you can go to Page, Text Size and set it to smaller or snmallest, but seriously, why squint and struggle with that monitor when (second hand) 17" is so cheap? Sandman30s (talk) 19:15, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Folk can always make a web page wider than your monitor. IE does automatically reformat text to fit the window width available UNLESS the web page itself says not to. I don't think that there is a "ignore the web page formatting" option, though on wikipedia you may be able to do something with style sheets. One think I do occasionally is copy the text and paste it into notepad with word wrap on. -- SGBailey (talk) 19:49, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Glancing at the page, the width is set to a minimum because of the image bar at the top. By not loading images, it is possible to only see text and get word-wrapping to work. -- kainaw™ 19:58, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

I don't know if this is available in IE6, but in many browsers (and some other applications), you can expand and shrink the presentation by holding down the Ctrl key and rolling the scroll wheel on the mouse. There are likely menu options to do the same. The layout stays the same, but you might be able to shrink the presentation to fit the screen with it still being readable. Press Ctrl-0 (Ctrl-zero) to restore the normal size. -- Tom N (tcncv) talk/contrib 20:20, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

"I don't think that there is a "ignore the web page formatting" option" — in Firefox you can have stylesheets either be ignored or have custom stylesheets that override existing settings. Presumably a Greasemonkey script could also be devised that checked for maximum widths? I don't really know. I suspect anything one does here will be a bit clunky if ones minimum resolution is 800x600 or whatever this seems to be (that particular site is only 900 pixels wide, which is pretty moderate by web standards).--Mr.98 (talk) 21:57, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Here are some ideas:

• If you have Internet Explorer 8, you might dig into the Developer Tools, find the problematic page element and set it its width to "auto" or something like that. But you might have to learn about CSS and HTML to be able to usefully explore the web page elements.

• You might look for bookmarklets that solve formatting problems or annoyances. For example, Bookmarklets for Zapping Annoyances has a bookmarklet called "zap style sheets" that removes style sheets. However, on the page Jon provided as an example, the page elements have inline style attributes that specify the width, so it doesn't solve the problem for that page.

• Internet Explorer lets you specify a user style sheet. This will add to the existing page style, it doesn't completely turn it off. (Unless you use a style sheet with a lot of !important rules -- a special override flag -- for everything you want to override.) However, to use this option, you have to make your own CSS style sheet or find one that solves your problem. If you want to try it out, save the following text into a block.css file:

 * { display: block !important; width: 100% !important; }
 img, td, th { width: auto !important; }

Then go to Tools, Internet Options, click the Accessibility button, check the "Format documents using my style sheet" box and browse to the block.css file you made.

You can search for user style sheet to find other possible style sheets you can use. Or you can learn more about CSS and HTML to try making your own.

• (I know another web browser isn't a solution you asked for, but Opera has a Fit-to-Width option that forces text to fit into the browser width so you don't have to scroll horizontally. Opera also has some user style sheets to choose from, instead of forcing you make or find your own user style sheet. If you ever want to play around with another web browser in the future, you might consider trying those features out.)

--Bavi H (talk) 03:39, 28 July 2010 (UTC)