All you Linux-heads and Mac-heads, you may go to the next post now. Nothing to see here, move right along…
For all you who remain, I’ve got a nagging problem that is driving me rather around the bend. Background: I have a Dell server (which I use for a workstation), with a RAID array (I believe it’s RAID 0), running Windows Vista, patched up to date. What is bothering me is this: I keep the computer on 24/7, but of course it occasionally hangs or needs rebooting for various other reasons such as updating. When I reboot, most often than not the machine wants to run CHKDSK before starting up again. When it does, it invariably says that there is a problem with the file gameuxmig.dll. It fixes the problem, then reboots, and service goes on normally until the next reboot.
I have AVG Anti-Virus Free, latest version, and XoftSpy XE, also latest version, both with malware files up to date. Neither of them has caught any viruses on my machine.
I thus decided to Google “gameuxmig.dll” to see whether there was any information on what kind of file it was. There are a shedload of references, but most of them seem to trace back to anti-virus sites that may or may not be legit (as I don’t recognise them), so I refrain from following the links.
I also tried to google CHKDSK to see whether there were any online pages I could visit to learn about how it works and what the various error messages it throws mean. No luck there, either. I got lots of Q&A sites, where if you pay for guidance, or trawl through hundreds of questions from the clueless, you might find what you need to know. I did not get any useful sites.
My question to you, dear techie friends (or friends of dear techie friends) is this: What is gameuxmig.dll? Where does it come from (I think it’s part of Windows, but can’t be sure)? What does it do? And why does it always go wrong on the disk and have to be corrected by CHKDSK?
I may try Bing, or Yahoo!, or some other search engine to see whether they give any further useful information. And, as for CHKDSK, I went into the Windows technical pages and looked for technical information about what CHKDSK does and what the messages it turns up mean. No dice there either.
Wit’s end, here any references, steer to references, or suggestions for more useful search terms gratefully received.
One big question. Does it do this only after a crash or after a manual shutdown-and-restart too?
I’d recommend malwarebytes.org. I’ve had very good luck with it.
As for that DLL, I’m not entirely sure myself. It appears to be part of the Migration Wizard within Vista itself.
Here’s the link:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/itprovistamigration/thread/91df843c-2ed0-48a5-b629-2222f00be996
One last question. Do you have SMART turned on for your two drives? I wonder if one drive is giving SMART errors, the other isn’t, and the RAID controller knows this, but the OS isn’t checking SMART so you’d get no messages. Just a thought.
I don’t think that either of the internal drives has SMART turned on. I found a utility called “CrystalDiskInfo” that reads SMART information and presents it to you. Also it’s freeware, always tending to be a good thing. It can’t see either of my internal drives, but can see my external one. It’s possible that it can’t see RAID arrays, though; any thoughts on how to look at a RAID drive for SMART information?
I think that in the end I will have to make a list of everything I want on my computer, do a final backup, then reformat and rebuild the computer, probably with newer and bigger internal drives. This will of course take weeks, but I think I’ll have a healthier computer in the end.
It’s starting to make me wonder whether I want to participate in the “cloud”, as there wouldn’t be any fears about losing data on the local drives (while the fears about losing contact with the cloud would remain…)
Cheers, again! I owe you a drink/dinner/Coca-Cola/something! I’d love to visit St. Louis sometimes as I’ve never been there. If I do make plans for that I’ll be sure to give you advance warning.
If you are using a card to do the RAID, then it is probably in the RAID control panel. (Usually something like Control-A when it is detecting the drives.)
But it may not check that. Depends on the controller. I swear by my Promise controllers myself so not too familiar with other brands.
I like the cloud… sort of. I have way too much data to store it all in the cloud. However, for my desktop backups, I have considered using Carbonite or one of those services to backup my local data.
My server though is a bunch of RAID 1 drives. And let me say, Mirroring a 2-TB hard drive takes FOREVER…
A bigger issue I see is doing RAID 0 in the first place. While striping the two drives together gets you faster speed, if one of them goes belly up, all the data is gone. 😛
My new PC has an SSD for it’s boot drive. But a regular hard drive for data storage. That seems to be a fairly good setup for me.
Oh, and as for you visiting. Would love that. But yeah, advance warning is always good! *grumbles about his work*