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17 Posts
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13745
July 28th, 2005 03:00
loading new Ctrl + F11 image
Hello all,
As you can see from this
post and this
post, I've had a hard time upgrading my niece's brand new Inspiron 6000 from WinXP Home to WinXP Pro without wiping out everything else. I have finally managed to get everything I wanted done. I've performed the OS upgrade, installed Office XP Pro, gotten updated on all service packs and security patches and installed anti-virus, firewall and spyware utilities. I've even gotten her remote access software and wireless network connections set up for her to use on campus, so she is all set to go!
Now comes the hard part. To avoid having to do this all over again, especially since I will be 300 miles from her when she heads away this fall, I want to replace the current Dell PC restore image on her hard drive with a new image of her current configuration. I'm not really sure how to do this, and am hoping some of you can help walk me through it.
Here are my questons:
- How can I retrieve and copy the current image that's on the drive? I want to store this for safe keeping, just in case the new image I create is corrupted or something. I don't want her to be left with no valid image to restore with. So, what are the steps, and what utility do I need to make a copy of the current image? Also, what's the approximate size of the Dell image? How do I find out?
- What software do I need to create the new image, and have it be compatible with Dell's Ctrl+F11 utility to restore the hard drive? I think I read somewhere that Dell's image is Norton Ghost 2003-compatible. Is Norton Ghost 2003 the same thing as Norton Ghost 9.0?
- How do I actually go about creating the new image, and insuring that it mirrors everything on the drive? Then, how do I go about getting this new image into the special partition so that Ctrl + F11 can access it?
- Any words of wisdom, caution, etc in doing this?
I'm doing this to make things easier in case she has some sort of disaster she needs to recover from. I certainly don't want to end up creating the disaster myself. I am humbling myself before you all and begging for your assistance!
Thanks much in advance, -- Richard
Message Edited by Sabrewolf3 on 07-27-2005 11:11 PM
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Denny Denham
2 Intern
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18.8K Posts
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July 28th, 2005 04:00
If you upgraded to XP Pro the image which can be used with Ctrl-F11 should remain on the hard disk. It is a hidden partition 3-5GB in size.
To give your niece a readily available backup, you should clone the hard drive as it is presently configured. Instructions (and descriptions of some cloning programs) are here.
dg1261
623 Posts
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July 28th, 2005 19:00
Sabrewolf3, I've been doing exactly that on new Dells I prep for others. You'll find details about the restore partition and the Ghost image on my webpage at www.goodells.net/dellrestore, although I haven't explicitly covered how to replace the Dell image. The difficulty level will range from moderate to very difficult, depending on your technical background.
Here are a few details: your main XP partition should be partition-2; the restore partition should be part-3; the backup image is a Ghost 2003 image of part-2 (does not include part-1 or part-3); image size is appx 3-5GB; image is split into 2 or more pieces (because pieces are limited to 2GB); the filename of the first piece is fi.gho and the second piece is fi000001.ghs.
Outline of basic procedure:
Caveats to consider: 2GB files are hard to store on CD, though should fit nicely on a DVD; Ghost 2003 does not need to be installed--just retrieve/run the ghost.exe file from the 2003 CD; Ghost 9 is completely different from Ghost 2003 (they weren't even developed by the same company); AFAIK a Ghost 2003 CD is still being bundled ("for legacy systems") when you buy Ghost 9.
Dan Goodell
Sabrewolf3
17 Posts
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July 29th, 2005 00:00
Sabrewolf3
17 Posts
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August 8th, 2005 01:00
I went to Administrative Tools in Control Panel and into the Disk Management console. I can see both the Utility and Restore partitions in the disk manager, but I cannot assign either of them a drive letter. When I highlight the Restore partition and right-click, I am only given the option of Help or Delete Partition. The option to Change Drive Letter and Paths is grayed out, along with all of the other usual options.
So, here I am, stuck on the first step. How do I get the data off of partition # 3 when it's not visible from Windows Explorer? I tried to unhide it using GDisk32, but it says the partition is not hidden. That particular partition is FAT32, by the way.
What now?
-- Richard
dg1261
623 Posts
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August 8th, 2005 08:00
"I tried to unhide it using GDisk32, but it says the partition is not hidden."
... because it's not "hidden" in the commonly expected sense, it's hidden in a Dell-specific way.
The clues you want are in www.goodells.net/dellrestore/recover.htm. Get yourself a DOS boot disk (such as floppy, bootable CD, or bootable USB flash disk), boot to real DOS, and use ptedit to change the partition descriptor type from "DB" to "0C". (For your purposes, you'll leave the Windows partition active.) That takes care of step 1.
Remove the boot floppy, reboot to Windows, and continue with step 2.
Reread www.goodells.net/dellrestore/recover.htm and you should be able to figure out how to do step 3. (Recover.exe is restore-only, so grab ghost.exe off your Ghost 2003 CD to do a partition-to-image creation.)
Read www.goodells.net/dellrestore/fixes.htm and use dsrfix.com to do step 4.
Dan Goodell
Sabrewolf3
17 Posts
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August 11th, 2005 14:00
So, I was able to make the partition visible, and I have now copied the original restore image from Dell onto a backup hard drive. Now I need to make an image of the current configuration and place that into the IMG directory of the partition (which is now my D: drive). Of course, it's not that easy, is it? There are just under 10GB of space used on my drive now that I have all of my installations, patches, etc installed.
The partition isn't big enough to hold the image of all this data. I enabled high compression for the image in Ghost, and it makes the FI.gho file, and completes a full span file as well. Then it asks to create a 2nd span file FI.000002, and it says the disk does not have enough space to hold this file.
What are my options at this point? Do I need to just give up and write the image files onto CD-R? What about editing the partition sizes and stealing an additional 1 GB from the main partition and adding it to this partition? Is there a way to get the automatic Ctrl + F11 restore utility to work once I have resized the partitions?
Looking for advice on where to go next. Thanks in advance for all the help.
dg1261
623 Posts
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August 11th, 2005 18:00
"The partition isn't big enough to hold the image of all this data.
What are my options at this point? Do I need to just give up and write the image files onto CD-R? What about editing the partition sizes and stealing an additional 1 GB from the main partition and adding it to this partition? Is there a way to get the automatic Ctrl + F11 restore utility to work once I have resized the partitions?"
You have two options: either forget about Dell's DSR partition and eliminate it, or jump through some hoops to keep it working.
To keep it, you'll need to resize the existing partitions, making partition 3 larger at the expense of part.2. An extra 1GB may not be enough for future use, and perhaps not even enough right now with what you've added to part.2. With 10GB of data in part.2, I'd probably opt for a part.3 of about 6-7GB overall, which should give some breathing room if you want to refresh your image at some point in the future. Once you resize it and create a new Ghost image, run dsrfix. That will replace not only the proper partition descriptor codes, but will update the backup partition table to reflect your new partition layout. That will keep Ctrl+F11 and Dell's DSR procedure working with your new partitioning.
But all that's more work than most people would find worth the effort. After all, if you've got Ghost, why not use it the way it was intended? You'll save yourself a lot of steps--unhiding, rehiding, repatching, just to keep DSR working--plus you'll be safer storing your backup images somewhere other than on the same hard disk with the partition you're imaging.
I find it's useful to keep DSR working on machines I prep for others--when the neighbor's daughter takes her laptop to college, for example, it would be easier for her to use DSR if she had to, rather than trying to learn how to use Ghost. But for my own machines, which I reimage periodically, I don't bother with DSR.
Sabrewolf3
17 Posts
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August 11th, 2005 19:00
Message Edited by Sabrewolf3 on 08-11-2005 03:01 PM
Sabrewolf3
17 Posts
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August 12th, 2005 23:00
Ok, I'm desperate for help here. I have completed everything I want to finish on the laptop, it's spiffy and new, complete with a restore image in its new 7GB 3rd partition!
However, on a more serious note, I have completely hosed my main pc in the process. I have two hard drives in my main pc, the first drive is 20GB on a single partition and is my Windows installation. The 2nd drive is a 120GB drive that was split into 6 partitions.
As part of the process of working on this new laptop, after I made the laptop's 1st and 3rd partitions visible, I used Windows explorer to copy the contents of the laptop's 1st and 3rd partitions to a folder on my 120GB drive. I wanted a backup of the laptop's partitions, just in case I messed up somehow and wanted to return to virgin circumstances. Everything was all and well until I rebooted my main pc last night after finishing with the laptop. Now, none of the 6 partitions on my 120GB drive are visible to me in Windows. I can see them from disk manager in Windows 2000, but it's telling me 2 of the partitions are unallocated and the other 4 are healthy, but all unused space. I had over 40GB of data on that drive!
Did copying the Dell's 1st and 3rd partitions somehow overwrite the partition table on my 120GB drive? Copying those laptop partitions over as backups was the only thing I changed on my main pc, and it must be somehow related to my new problem. Am I going to be able to recover my data?
Looking for any clues on where to turn for help. Perhaps I bit off more than I could chew with this task after all.
-- Richard
rickmktg
2 Intern
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11.9K Posts
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August 13th, 2005 01:00
dg1261
623 Posts
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August 13th, 2005 02:00
"As part of the process of working on this new laptop, after I made the laptop's 1st and 3rd partitions visible, I used Windows explorer to copy the contents of the laptop's 1st and 3rd partitions to a folder on my 120GB drive. . . . Now, none of the 6 partitions on my 120GB drive are visible to me in Windows. I can see them from disk manager in Windows 2000, but it's telling me 2 of the partitions are unallocated and the other 4 are healthy, but all unused space."
Need clarification of just how you accomplished the above. Were the two computers networked? Or did you remove and cable together the hard drives? I'm assuming you merely drag-and-dropped the files and folders out of the laptop's temporarily visible partitions--were you working from Explorer on the laptop or on the 2K machine? Just dragging-and-dropping files and folders would have no effect on the partition table.
Sabrewolf3
17 Posts
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August 13th, 2005 03:00
Sabrewolf3
17 Posts
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August 13th, 2005 04:00
Sorry, I think I have been misstating one of the facts in my posts. My 120GB drive was divided into 2 partitions, a primary partition (a single drive letter) and an extended partition (consisting of 5 logical drives). Not sure if that makes any difference or not.
-- Richard
dg1261
623 Posts
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August 13th, 2005 05:00
Okay, thanks for the detail. That all looks like a pretty normal LAN file transfer, and I don't see anything obvious that should have caused a problem (. . . but of course that doesn't mean there wasn't a relationship).
I'd probably next take a look at comparing what the existing partition tables show to what Win2K has recorded in its [MountedDevices] registry key. (No, you shouldn't normally have to do this, but something's gone wrong somewhere, so we've got to methodically start analyzing what Win2K's seeing.) I don't mind taking a look if you want to email me the following three pieces of information:
(1) the DiskID on the second HDD. I think you already downloaded my dsrfix.zip, so reboot the Win2K machine to real DOS and use mbrsaver.com (bundled in dsrfix.zip) with the command "mbrsaver /81" to save a copy of the second disk's MBR sector. Buried in the file mbrsaver.bin will be the DiskID. (The "/81" should get us HDD #2 instead of the 20GB disk.)
(2) the contents of the partition tables. Download findpart for Win2K from http://www.partitionsupport.com/utilities.htm, then from within Win2K open a window to a command prompt and enter "findpart tables c:\fpart.txt" to capture a report of the partition tables into the file c:\fpart.txt.
(3) the contents of the [MountedDevices] registry key. From within Win2K, open regedit, and navigate to the key [HKLM\System\MountedDevices]. Do a File|Export, save as type 'text file', export range = 'selected branch', and name it something like "regedit.txt". That will record the contents of the registry key in readable form.
If you want to zip together those three files (mbrsaver.bin, fpart.txt, regedit.txt) and email to me (dangoodell at hotmail), I'll take a look and see if anything looks unusual. If you want to also include a Ctrl-PrtScrn screen capture of the Disk Mgmt window, that might be helpful--though I don't think it will show anything particularly revealing.
Sabrewolf3
17 Posts
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August 13th, 2005 06:00
Hi Dan,
Thanks for your offer to help. I have zipped up the 4 things you requested and sent them off to your hotmail account. I look forward to hearing from you (hopefully with good news!).
I hope I can repay you for your efforts!
-- Richard