[Bug 923] We should add default Explorer registry entries to avoid FS corruption (was: WINE DESTROYED MY SYSTEM!)
http://bugs.winehq.com/show_bug.cgi?id=923 ------- Additional Comments From z_god(a)wanadoo.nl 2003-21-06 06:29 ------- Bug comments restored from Gmane.org: I've had wine on my Red Hat 7.2 system for a while. I finally got around to experimenting with it last weekend (7/21). I used Wine Configuration in KDE to set up my account and tried to install Cooper Luxicon lighting design software. I could get it to install in start up, but it locks up at the open file screen. I haven't been in Windows all week. This evening (7/28) I booted up in Windows to get some business work done and discovered that Wine had deleted my entire C:\Program Files directory and replaced it with what appear to be Wine DLLs. I've never seen these files before in this directory. Now my C:\Program Files directory only contains: !$!$!$!$.cfr System ado msadc OLE DB Common Files !$!$!$!$.msr dao2535.tlb dao350.dll odbc Data Sources System ado $!$!data.ie5 msadc WindowsUpdate Skins Visualizations Where are all of my programs files? Everything's gone! What kind of demented programmer would do this without warning the user and giving him a chance to back up the files somewhere else? I'm really f****d. I have no way of restoring half of those programs and I can't get my work done. I was depending on being able to finish a project that's due tomorrow. I can lose my job over this! Needless to say, I'm not going to trust Codeweavers software again. ------- Additional Comments From tony_lambregts <at> telusplanet.net 2002-07-28 23:05 ------- I'll bet you ran explorer.exe, and since you think your system is ruined I can understand that you are ticked. I just want to ask you this. Do you always run alpha software your system without backup? Take a look at the README file that should have come with wine. In it you will find this.
>> Wine is not yet complete, so several programs may crash. Provided you set up winedbg correctly according to documentation/debugger.sgml, you will be dropped into a debugger so that you can investigate and fix the problem. For more information on how to do this, please read the file documentation/debugging.sgml.
You should backup all your important files that you give Wine access to, or use a special Wine copy of them, as there have been some cases of users reporting file corruption. Do NOT run Explorer, for instance, if you don't have a proper backup, as it renames/cripples several directories sometimes. Not even other MS apps such as e.g. Messenger are safe, as they launch Explorer somehow. This particular corruption (!$!$!$!$.pfr) can at least partially be fixed by using http://home.nexgo.de/andi.mohr/download/decorrupt_explorer
Now hopfully this little program can fix this up for you. The Moral of this story: There is no such thing as too much backup. ------- Additional Comments From jfh6 <at> humboldt.edu 2002-08-01 03:54 ------- Maybe your work has some sort of backup of your files already. Don't bash Codeweavers because they aren't as perfect as Microsoft :-/ Next time you want to use Wine, just make a fake windows directory that Wine uses and it will be all gravy. Just follow these easy to understand instructions: http://www.winehq.com/Docs/wine-user/no-windows.shtml ------- Additional Comments From andi <at> rhlx01.fht-esslingen.de 2002-08-01 13:12 ------- Well, yet another luser who seems to be unable to do the first thing people are expected to do (especially with alpha software): reading the most important file, the README file. (due to that amount of damage, I can understand such a reaction a bit, though) To my parent: "Don't bash Codeweavers because they aren't as perfect as Microsoft :-/" Oh dear, I just hope you don't believe that.;-) If anything, it is *Microsoft* who is not as perfect as CodeWeavers here, since that filesystem corruption is being caused by *Explorer* renaming directories to zilch due to relevant registry entries not being available (most likely because people told Wine to use the Windows partition, but at the same time they forgot to tell it to also make use of the Windows registry entries !) Wine has zero, zilch, nada responsibility here... To the bug submitter: did my little script help ? Anything it didn't manage to fix ? ------- Additional Comments From pharouff <at> comcast.net 2002-08-01 21:34 ------- Thank you for the responses. The fix appears to have worked. I still need to reboot into Windows to try it out, but it looks like everything is there. There are still two files that did not get fixed by decorrupt_explorer, maybe someone knows where they belong. C:\Program Files\!$!$!$!$.mm2 C:\Program Files\!$!$!$!$.msn As for the other comments, I did see the warning about Explorer, and I never attempted to manually run Explorer. But what happens when you try to install a program that automatically attempts to register the software via the internet? MOST programs do this now. The program I was trying to install is free vendor supplied software from a lighting manufacturer who registers the users. This might explain why the program locked up at the time that it did. Everything seemed to be working great, then BAM! It was probably trying to start the registration process. As for backing up, all the new files were stored in my $HOME directory on the Linux partit! ion. I wasn't expecting it to screw with the Windows partition. While I understand this is ALPHA software, I was expecting this release to be more stable than the last, not less (especially after the glowing reviews I had read). Anyway, if your response is correct, the cause was Windows and not WINE. While I no longer believe it was your fault, I still feel that this is still a CRITICAL BUG that requires as a minimum some work around for protection. I tried the installation twice. The first time I used the temporary Windows directory approach. I know that after this attempt, my C:\Program Files directory was still intact, because I went looking for the Office files it was requesting. When that attempt didn't work, I followed the suggestion that pops up in the debug box and tried a second time with native Windows. I haven't done any programming since about 1988, so needless to say I don't understand the intricacies of c, perl, java, etc. But if you don't have e! nough information to fix this problem yet, there should be a way to add a temporary check to block any system calls to start Explorer and return an error like "Program Not Found" to the calling routine (or better yet redirect it to Netscape, Mozilla or Konqeror). So maybe some programs crash at this point, but at least it doesn't screw up the partition. If nothing else, get rid of the suggestion to try native Windows installation! This was my biggest mistake. After this experience, it's my opinion that any program that appears to run then locks up under fake Windows probably needs Explorer. While I'm impressed with the progress you've made since I first tried WINE last Christmas, I feel that, basically, WINE is completely unusable until this is fixed. Ever since Windows 98 came out virtually all Windows software uses Explorer. You can't avoid it. Bill Gates would have us believe it can't run without it. ;-) ------- Additional Comments From andi <at> rhlx01.fht-esslingen.de 2002-08-05 14:30 ------- C:\Program Files\!$!$!$!$.msn probably is C:\Program Files\Microsoft Network (Some) Explorer (component) gets run in the background by a lot of programs. Oh, and again, this is ALPHA software. This is synonymous with "don't expect ANYTHING, except for the sky to fall" ;-) The real "fix" (or rather: workaround) would be: Someone would have to figure out which registry keys are being read here, then they should be added to the default wine registry. And if then people won't even add the default wine registry, then we'll *really* know whom to blame ! :-) ------- Additional Comments From dclark <at> akamail.com 2002-08-05 17:57 ------- I would note one other apparent behavior. From my very unscientific vague recollections of postings about this, including personal experience, the corruption only seems to occur on shared Windows partitions. For example, back when I was using a shared partition, installing the program Viewmate invariably corrupted the filesystem (I tried it several times). When I recently switched to a "fake" EXT3 Windows partition, I reinstalled Viewmate from scratch, and no corruption occurred. -- Configure bugmail: http://bugs.winehq.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are the assignee for the bug, or are watching the assignee.
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