Robin Smidsrød

Have you ever experienced that the system service Media climbing to the top of your application list on the Battery tab on your Android device? I had this particular problem, and it took me a very long time to actually figure out what caused the problem. I had read on forums that it might be because of corrupted files, but the only solution presented was to go through every single file on your memory card and verify that it was indeed working. That sounded like a very time-consuming way to solve the issue, and I imagined there had to be a better way. And there was.

I unmounted the memory card from the phone and inserted it into my computer. Then I copied all of the files I could read on the memory card (there was apparently some file system corruption, so some files were unreadable) onto my computer hard drive. I then ejected the card from the computer, reinserted it on the phone and formatted it completely. Once that was done I ejected it from the phone again, put it back into the computer and copied all of the files back onto the memory card. Finally I put it back into the phone again.

As far as I can tell everything is working as it should now and the MediaScannerService is no longer draining excessive battery power. Win!

Another alternative instead of copying all the files and formatting the memory card is to run the traditional Windows chkdsk program on the entire memory card, which should also be able to fix the corrupted filesystem. Regardless of which method you decided to use, you should have something that works again. It does indeed seem like file corruption wasn't the problem (as mentioned on the forum), but FAT filesystem corruption issues.

Before I actually tried this approach, I actually ran the memory card through a level 5 (recover good sectors) recovery on SpinRite, and it didn't make any difference to the problem. I'm glad the solution I found worked for me.

I recently upgraded my main computer to a new shiny Intel Z68-based motherboard with a 2nd generation Core i7. A really nice piece of hardware, I'd say.

But while I was setting it up I had some very odd problem. When I plugged everything in and wanted to boot it, it just didn't want to boot any devices (but the EFI BIOS loaded without problems), it reset instead.

At first I thought I had a power problem, so I went out and bought a bigger PSU. But it still reset instead of booting. Then I called a friend and he thought the SATA controller might be busted. So he suggested unplugging everything and trying one part at the time.

After doing a lot of cross-testing I figured out that it was the USB cable to my APC Smart-UPS 1000 that stopped the boot from processing. So obviously either my UPS or motherboard firmware is incompatible with each other. Luckily I was not dependent on having the UPS USB cable connected, so I just disconnected it to avoid the problem. With that component disconnected everything worked as expected.

Moral of the story: Test with one component at the time if you're experiencing difficulties.

Yesterday I helped my father to install his new computer with Windows 7. For several reasons I shall not mention, it was in the best interest to take the hard drive of the old (broken) computer and copy all the data from it to the new. What he (and me) wanted was to keep all the settings and other stuff and just reinstall his programs. That meant copying the entire AppData folder under his user account in addition to his normal files.

During this process obviously all files had kept the old SIDs, and as they weren't matching his new SID (on the new computer) I was having problems accessing the files. Lots of stuff didn't work. I was getting "No access" messages left and right when I tried to change the permissions of those copied files. That is when it dawned on me that even though his user account was registered as an administrator, it wasn't able to change the permission bits on those files.

To avoid having to mess around forever to reset permissions to default inherited ACL on all those files (around 30000 or so of them) I dug a bit around on the Internet and found out that there is a command in Windows 7 called icacls.exe that works very much in the same way as chmod on Linux, just that it supports NTFS ACLs.

After reading around I found a forum post that mentioned it, and was redirected to Microsoft's knowledge base article on icacls.exe. After looking over that one I found this command line that solved everything.

cd C:\Users\username
icacls * /reset /T

The /T switch makes it run recursively. /reset, as the KB article explains, replaces the ACL on each file and folder with the default inherited ACL that just uses the ACL on the parent folder.

The last thing that was required was to run this command inside a cmd.exe shell with elevated privileges. You can do that by finding the Command Prompt icon in your start menu and right-clicking "Run as administrator".

Be aware that mucking around with ACLs, if you don't know what you're doing, can seriously break your system in more ways than you can think of. It can also open you up to various attacks because of more relaxed permissions.

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A very good dissertation about what kind of writable optical media is the best.

His suggestion about Taiyo Yuden DVD+R I'm sure going to follow.

Recently I've had lots of issues with Verbatim DVD-R (MCC 03RG20), probably because of a slightly old firmware on my burner. And as he explains in the article this seems to be because of the lack of information on new media on how to burn DVD-Rs.

Thanks for a good article, keep up the work!

Jaja, nå er tydligvis ingenting sikkert lenger.

Tenk deg en eller annen tvilsom person på stranda om sommeren med et slikt filter på videokamera eller fotoapparatet sitt...

Egentlig er det ganske overraskende at vi ikke har sett dette før, når man leser om hvordan teknikken virker. Jeg antar at det er fordi CCD-brikkene i digitale kameraer ikke har vært så kraftige før de siste årene...

Å legge dette under "digital entertainment" er vel kanskje litt feil, men det kan jo tenkes at folk vil ha mye morsomt med dette...