Three frustrating days.     

Arrrghh!!! This one was really horrible for a while. Sorry this is a bit long, but the job did take nearly 3 full days. Some people who fix systems may find it of interest.

Symptoms: The system was delivered (complete with peripherals and original software). It is quite a new system P4 running XP home. Described symptoms were:
1. Broadband connection could not be established.
2. Canon MPC-190 scanner/printer did not work.
3. Control Panel, Windows Explorer, and other XP windows would not fully load.

The Connection problem was quickly solved by deleting the old and building a new connection. XP SP2 was already installed - so just downloaded and installed a few post-SP2 Windows updates & also installed the latest Avast! anti-virus updates - ran a full anti-virus scan (just in case) - nothing found.
The MPC-190 was not connected (via USB). Control panel appeared to be working fine. The printer software was reinstalled - but when it was reconnected - absolutely nothing was displayed when the USB cable was reconnected in several of the available USB ports. Nothing seemed to be amiss with USB using Device manager and other USB devices (like my flash drive) worked fine. Tried another USB printer cable and almost decided to advise the owner to take the printer back. But as it came from the markets - I took pity on the owner and decided to pursue things further.

Did a Google search and found that the MPC-190 driver was incompatible with SP2! The owner did not even know that SP2 had installed automatically - that's broadband for you. Although there was no reference to the problem on the Canon web site (I certainly couldn't find one) they had apparently produced a patch which I was able to download from another source. Now for the Catch-22. I could not install the patch as the driver could not be re-installed under SP2 as the printer needed to be plugged in during the install process, and as soon as it was plugged in – the process halted!

Now things really started to fall apart. I decided to uninstall SP2. The patch uninstalled O.K. but the printer still could not be installed. Also the system was now asking for an administrator password which the owner did not know..... At this point I rashly decided to reinstall Windows XP 'Over the top' of the previous installation. This has normally been no problem in the past.

The reinstall went well until about 1/2 way through, then the system re-started and setup started again from the beginning. Serious trouble now - no working operating system. Very tenacious that Windows setup program. Doesn't matter what you try - it just wants to continue from where it left off, get half way through - reboot and start again.

At that point I started to consider trying to back up data & settings. Should have thought about that much earlier. Tried DriveImage 2002, but that only does images and not files when run from the recovery floppy disk, also it managed to delete the Disk drive partition. As I was now working from DOS, downloaded and tried 'NTFS File Reader' from http://www.ntfs.com/products.htm A great utility that allows you to read & copy NTFS files from DOS but it will only write to FAT32 (or lower). No FAT32 partitions on that system..... Tried XP Quickboot from http://www.bootdisk.com/txtfiles/xpquick.txt But no go. Nothing I tried would allow backups or stop the faulty re-install.

Time for the Big Guns. Use the XP recovery console...... Ran a repair from the recovery console using the great (but 7 incredibly laborious A4 pages) of procedures from http://www.digitalwebcast.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=8658-0 BUT - you need the admin password {:-((
The previous URL pointed me to http://www.petri.co.il/forgot_administrator_password.htm and I eventually downloaded EBCD (Emergency boot CD from http://ebcd.pcministry.com/ ) one of the recommended solutions from the ‘forgot password’ site. You download and create a bootable CD which brings up a Linux system which in theory allows you to copy files as well as recovering passwords and much more. Although I was not able to work out how to copy files, I was able to null the Admin password. A big step forward. Thanks Linux!

Ran a repair from the recovery console per the digitalwebcast site above - through the 7 pages of command line typing. Got to the end but XP would not boot without activation. Would not even start in Safe mode... And a network connection could not be found.

Ran the repair process again - but this time I stopped 1/2 way and reloaded the NIC driver and was finally able to backup important data. Whew!

Then finished the repair and was able to recover using an earlier restore point. And was then able to activate XP (via my network router) as for some reason the system could not be activated via a direct connection from the NIC to TransACT modem.

Finally we had an XP SP1 system back again and I was able to install the MPC-190 printer which worked fine using the original Canon CD - for some reason I was not able to install a later printer driver downloaded from Canon.

Reinstalled SP2 and the printer driver patch. Back to the original problem - not only would the computer not recognise that the printer had been plugged into the USB port. But it also killed things such as control panel and My Computer/Windows Explorer. So rather hard to install other software which might have helped. But with the printer disconnected I was finally able to access Windows Explorer and install the Canon Patch. Still no go {:-((

At that point I was able to find a wonderful thread on Whirlpool at http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=228589&p=2 Five pages of accumulated wisdom on exactly this problem. One member reported "edit the file MPNETIPC.INI, change 127.0.0.2 in this file to 127.0.0.1, this will fix your problems. The file should be located in \windows\system32". Never did establish why he knew this, but it finally fixed the problem! The MPC-190 Printer and scanner functions now worked well as did all the other XP services......

Conclusion:
Canon make nice hardware but I think their software can sometimes be rather suspect. I have had problems with two different Camera drivers. Canon's web site is very poor. They were well aware of the problem and had produced a patch - but I could not find either an admission of a problem, an explanation or their own patch. Windows XP SP2 was not entirely blameless. Apparently the 127.0.0.1 is the standard 'loop back' address,  and Canon were using a somewhat less standard 127.0.0.2 which was being blocked by the new SP2 firewall. Apparently when the printer is used in a networking role - Canon decided to use an address which is normally used in 'loop back' testing.
Thank goodness for another computer to access Google and the Whirlpool forums!

 

John Saxon             5 Feb 2005


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