simbientuser19 March 2008, 4:25 PM
Two months after acknowledging a serious data corruption bug in Windows Home Server, Microsoft has admitted it still has no fix and no ETA for one.
Microsoft has admitted it still has no fix for a data corruption issue Windows Home Server users are encountering.
The software giant first acknowledged the problem on December 21 last year, providing a list of programs that could cause data on a Windows Home Server to become corrupted, including Windows Vista Photo Gallery, Windows Live Photo Gallery, OneNote 2007, OneNote 2003, Outlook 2007, Money 2007, SyncToy 2.0 beta, QuickBooks and uTorrent.
It says customers have also reported problems with the following software (though Microsoft has not yet been able to replicate the problem first-hand): Photoshop Elements, Zune Software, Apple iTunes, TagScanner, Mozilla Thunderbird, Adobe Lightroom, Intuit Quicken, MS Digital Image Library, MP3BookHelper, ACDSee, WinAmp, Windows Media Player 11, Microsoft Office Excel and Visual DataFlex.
Two months later, Microsoft still has no fix for the problem avaiable, saying that its engineers are still working on it.
The problem is thought to relate to software saving "alternate data streams" to files, which are incompatible with the "Drive Extender" method Windows Home Server uses to pool multiple disks and make them appear as one giant disk to the operating system.
Alternate data streams are a little known method of saving data to a file in a way that the operating system can't see it (and therefore it can't be tampered with by any software, even bit-level file editors). It's used for storing DRM or copyright protection info, file metadata and other types of data the user never needs to directly access and is important to be preserved safely.
Microsoft makes a utility available to test whether any file or directory of files has hidden Alternate Data Streams in it.
For now, disgruntled owners of Windows Home Server are being given this advice by Microsoft:
- Do not copy data files that contain alternate data streams to Windows Home Server shared folders.
- Do not use applications that use data files that contain alternate data streams when those data files reside in a shared folder on a Windows Home Server-based computer.