Radica U-Create, by Mattel

The machine by itself is harmless, but when I installed the optional software that came with it, I had trouble.

First of all, the program was worthless to me and I wanted to uninstall it after I realized it was nothing we wanted on our computer.

My anti-virus program, Comodo, has been telling me that ucreate.exe was doing suspicious things on my computer.

Comodo shows activity on my computer even AFTER I uninstalled the program. (Click for bigger view.)

I tried to manually delete the files but they wouldn’t go away.  I got an “access denied” and “permission required” error.

I tried many tricks, using CMD, the command line tool, etc.  Here is what finally worked on my Vista machine:

Reboot into safe mode.  To do that:  Restart computer.  After you see the motherboard’s BIOS messages, press and hold F8 on the keyboard.  Windows asks what kind of safe mode you want.  I selected safe mode with command line.

Navigated to the folder using this command:

cd  C:\Program Files (x86)\Radica\UCreate\Music\

Delete UCreate.exe: 

del UCreate.exe

I still could not delete the folders, though, even in safe mode.  Rebooted the computer again, this time into regular mode.  Once in normal Vista running mode, I again tried deleting the folders using Explorer and that finally worked, too.  No more files or Radica folder on my computer.  It’s gone!

We can still play music on the machine, but I will not connect it to my computer again.  I thought I should put some notes online in case you have this problem as well.

After doing some maintenance work on the inside of my computer, I turned it back on and got the very unhelpful message from Vista:

BOOTMGR is missing

Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

Well, when I pressed the keys to restart, the error comes right back.  It’s an endless loop.  What the heck does this message mean anyway?  I found the problem and was able to fix it.  Read on for the solution.

Now there could be many causes of this error.  It could be corrupt files on your Vista installation.  I first reached for the Vista DVD and rebooted the computer and ran the repair tool from the DVD.  But the repair utility could not find my Vista installation.  The repair program offered no other helpful information.

Before this problem surfaced, I had opened the computer for an unrelated issue.

My computer had been overheating so I got into the case and removed the dust bunnies from the CPU heat sink.  That solved the overheating issue but then the computer would no longer boot up Vista.

The problem:  the hard drive SATA cable came unplugged!

Buried behind cables is a hard drive.

Anyone else notice how flimsy the connection is between a SATA connector and a hard drive?  These connectors pop out of my hard drives way too easily.  Just a small bump on one of the cables and the hard drive is no longer connected to the motherboard.

The solution to this problem was simply to reconnect the SATA cable.

After powering the computer back up, Vista loaded up just fine.

Another BOOTMGR problem

Hours later, the problem resurfaced.  I was running the Abit uGuru program to monitor the temperature of my CPU.  When I closed uGuru, Vista gave me the blue screen of death.  That was strange, especially since the CPU temp was normal.  When I rebooted the computer, the BOOTMGR is missing error came back.  I was disheartened by that but quickly fixed it.

I opened the case back up and disconnected my RAID drives by pulling the SATA connectors out of them.  Rebooted the computer.  The error was again gone and Vista loaded up, however I was missing my RAID drives.

Turned off the computer and reconnected the SATA cables to the RAID hard drives.  Powered up the computer.  Vista loaded up fine with no errors and the RAID storage was back.  All problems were resolved.

I made this fix a couple days ago and have had no more problems.  All of the BOOTMGR errors for me appear to be related to the SATA connections between the motherboard and hard drives.  Now that the connections are good, the computer is running well.

Conclusion

If you have the missing BOOTMGR message and you recently did some work inside your computer case, you might check that your hard drive is still connected to the motherboard.

Added Sep-2-2008

Vista says: The backup did not complete successfully.  The latest backup set can not be found.

Here’s a way to make Vista start over.

Edited Jan-23-2009

Added Aug-01-2008

how can you restore it to an older saved state?

Added Jul-02-2008

This article might help you find your saved games in Vista’s Virtualstore. Read

Edited Jul-30-2008

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Has your doctor been good to you?

Visit DoctorScorecard.com and share the experiences you have had with doctors, good or bad. Does your doctor meet your medical needs? Give your doctor a score! See what other people have said about their doctors.

DoctorScorecard

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