Windows Vista -- Now I'm Angry, Too.

I tried to give Vista the benefit of the doubt. I really did. When I constructed my two workstations over a year ago, I thought I'd try to give Microsoft's new operating system a fair shake and an unbiased look without any MS-hating prejudice.

And aside from a few minor hitches, generally speaking Vista ran very well as both a 32 and 64 bit operating system in the 14 months I ran it, 24/7 on one machine in particular. I grew to like it. Having come from Windows 2000 without the benefit of ever having used XP, I was ready for something new and a little more fresh, and I actually liked the way Vista presented itself, and I enjoyed the extras in the Ultimate version. And the games look swell under DirectX10 with a fast graphics card.

So I wasn't a Vista antagonist until about 10 days ago, when it seized up in an unrecoverable fashion, and destroyed the hard disk drive of the computer it's running on, finally coming to rest in a permanent, irredeemable failure mode that requires a complete reformat and reinstallation.

Woe betide the Vista user who receives an 0x0000C1F5 STOP error blue screen on bootup. Apparently Microsoft has a problem deep in the bowels of one of its core file system drivers, CLFS.SYS, which handles the Common Log File System and is deeply tied to the NTFS disk management and hence, the entire operating system.

Microsoft's Knowledge Base article on this is unusually short and sour. That's because this is a *really, really bad bug* which affects every version of Windows Vista, and from what I have seen and learned in my research over the past 10 days, there is no way to recover from it.

CAUSE This issue occurs because the Common Log File System (Clfs.sys) driver does not fix the $TxfLog file when the file is corrupted. In addition to the Stop error message, Windows Vista may not start during startup until the offending disk is removed from the computer. Back to the top

WORKAROUND To work around this issue, use one of the following methods.

Method 1

If you have multiple disks installed, and the disk on which the $TxfLog file is corrupted does not contain Windows Vista, remove the offending disk from the computer.

Method 2

If you have only one disk installed, and if you have access to Windows XP or Windows 2000 installation media, restart the computer by using the Windows XP or Windows 2000 installation media. Next, format the offending disk, and then reinstall Windows Vista.

Note Microsoft is working on a fix to prevent this problem.

That's it! You cannot boot from the DVDs, either. Read that again: if you put the DVD into the drive and attempt to boot, Vista STILL REFUSES TO LOAD and you die with a 0x0000C1F5 error.

Mind still reeling? Mine is, and it's almost ten days later. If you see this error message, not only can you not boot from the DVDs to repair the Vista installation, you have absolutely no other option than to reformat the drive and reinstall the operating system. This is because the $Txflog files are part of the NTFS internals and are *completely hidden* from the Windows API -- they cannot be repaired from within Windows, any version! And even when the system is asked to boot from the DVDs, it still attempts to interact with the corrupt files extant on the existing hard drive and crashes in exactly the same fashion.

It's going to take at least 6 hours to get my system back into a workable configuration. I'm still conducting more research into this issue but I suspect that it has happened as the result of an update that was pushed down to Vista machines in advance of the release of Service Pack 1. I say that because the number of forum posts about this particular, very rare error condition have grown exponentially since my machine left town about 10 days ago.

I think my next workstation is going to be a Macintosh. I've just about had it with Microsoft. It's inexcusable to produce a product that cannot even be booted and inspected by its own installation disks in the event of a serious problem, but that's exactly what we have here.