XP and/or Quickbooks Permissions Problem!

That should not matter once he copies the file to his hard drive. User protection should only apply to the XP machine not the machine the file came from.

I was starting to wonder the same thing. Also QB 2008 is not the most stable program on the planet.

On 5/5/2011 12:34 PM, Laura wrote: ...

Indeed; as noted in another thread I had kinda' whiffed on the fact he had gotten a copy off the Vista drive and was concentrated on the thought he was having trouble doing that...

If, indeed, the file is causing such symptoms on a local drive it would seem the problem is with it or w/ QB (and I've no experience w/ any recent version of QB; I quit updating years and years ago (like 10))

This is what I recall the situation to be:

1) I replaced the PSU in a Vista machine that would not run at all, with no improvement. 2) I pulled the boot drive from that machine and mounted it as a slave in a working XP (SP3) machine. That machine still booted up fine, and I could look at most of the files on the Vista drive, except that a few folders were blocked from viewing - saying permissions were insufficient. This kept me from doing a copy & paste from those folders. 3) Among those folders was the folder containing the Quickbooks files I wanted, as was shown by a windows explorer search I did that worked probably because I specified to include system and hidden files. 4) I did a copy/paste of those files FROM THE LIST IN THE SEARCH WINDOW to my c drive. 5) They appear on my drive okay, but when I simply highlight one of the qbb and/or one of the qbw files, windows explorer crashes as I stated in earlier post. I do not think this happens when I highlight other folders & files on my drive. Never did. Of course I have not tried every single folder and file. 6) I am pretty sure that I can always stop this from happening by unchecking the Data Execution Prevention checkbox for windows explorer under 'Turn on dep for all programs and services except those I select:' This works for a while until said checkbox returns from nowhere as checked, and I repeat the unchecking to make the problem go away. 7) I have tried removing all file sharing. 8) I have tried modifying permissions for the entire folder I created to hold the copied Quickbooks files. I chose 'all'.

I hope this makes sense to someone. Does not to me.

J

On 5/5/2011 1:47 PM, Jethro wrote: ...

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I don't know the details but what I'd wonder is whether doing that from the explorer window set something in the registry or elsewhere...

I'd go back and try to take ownership of the files (actually the folder) to rid them of any vestiges of protection _on_the_Vista_drive_, THEN do the copy.

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Well that's just it - I was reluctant to make any change whatsoever to the original Vista drive. I wanted to preserve its integrity.

J

Did you try to launch QuickBooks from that drive the standard way? If you can launch it you could then likely do a back up and then restore to the XP machine.

Well, you've not got anywhere this way... :)

Are you sure the Vista drive has any integrity to preserve might be another question to ponder...the question of what caused the boxen to die; was it malware or hardware? Or, even w/o malicious code if QB had the files open while the disk was going south or the OS had integrity issues the files might have issues from that. Oh...that makes me wonder: are the dates on the backup same as the working file? If so, one might expect both to have same problem(s). Would there be any other backups of older date(s) by any chance?

But w/ that restriction I'd look at the Linux bootable CD that won't know/care about any Windows protection at all. That should get you as clean a copy as you're going to get.

Just for clarification--did you use the XP safe mode and try the take ownership thingie on the XP copies or just the file protection bits, shares, etc.? I wasn't clear from the description. If not, I'd change the order of things I'd try to that first.

Well no - because the drive was Vista and the Vista machine would not boot. Ergo I could not do what you suggest which is a good idea.

Is QB installed on that drive, though...I'd try START/RUN/Browse_to_that_image and see what happens if it is which is, I think, what Ron is suggesting.

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Ah now we are getting somewhere. The file or the folder it is in likely has issues with the NTFS table entry for the file. A copy of the file will simply copy the issues.

If you can get the file open in Q/B via some other method than using explorer save a backup and save a portable company file.

Unplug the vista drive, not needed.

From this moment forward never go back to the copy or the folder the copy is in.

First try to restore the backup to a completely new folder on the machine. If that works great. Run a verify on the file. If there are no issues, you are now good to go and can delete the copy of the file and the folder it is in. Go to your C: drive and right click to get properties, tools tab, check now, auto fix, IIRC it won't do it until you reboot, so reboot.

If you have issues with the backup file, do the same with the portable company file. Run verify. If it passes great. If not try a rebuild. If you have to go the rebuild route, print some reports to be sure they match what you had before. Not that rebuild makes errors, but it sometimes doesn't catch everything. Again, get rid of the unneeded bad file/folder and run a drive check.

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If that doesn't work -- and presume won't or would have already been there/done that altho guess it's always possible another perturbation could be the final one that works....

I'd try a hex editor (a tool that will open a non-ASCII file w/o munging on any non-displayable/printing characters or insert any of its own formatting into the file) and make a copy from it. Hopefully that would be a clean version sans any OS marks and if the problem isn't within the file data itself from malware or other damage, should then be able to use in QB by normal routes.

If that doesn't hack it, the idea of the Linux access that ignores Windows protection would still be at the top of my list if it is, indeed, still in the file system somehow where the problem is.

If it's actually that the file itself is corrupt, that's probably not recoverable.

Still haven't heard if Jethro has done a malware scan and/or whether any antivirus software is still active, etc., etc., etc., ...

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No reason you can not launch the program from the slave drive. Find the file that launches the program, it is an EXE file. On my pro 2010 version it is QBW32pro.exe that will launch QuickBooks. You may be asked which company file and can select from a list,

That's surely worth a shot; only thing I'd wonder would be if the location of the image on the mapped drive different than the install would cause problems w/ registry entries, dlls, etc., ...

Don't know and, of course, if it doesn't OP's no worse off than already is...