Re: FIXMBR redux

Tech-Archive recommends: Fix windows errors by optimizing your registry

From: *Vanguard* (reply-to-newsgroup_at_to-email.use-Reply.obey-signature.invalid)
Date: 06/04/04 

Date: Fri, 4 Jun 2004 16:48:45 -0500

William B. Lurie said in news:40BDECA0.6020903@nospam.org:
> Sharon F wrote:
>> On Wed, 02 Jun 2004 07:40:05 -0400, William B. Lurie wrote:
>>
>>
>>> For one thing, I'd like
>>> to take Recovery Console out of the picture, and not by
>>> reducing its delay time to zero, but just remove that option.
>>> If any of the MVPs told me how to do that, I missed it.
>>
>>
>> It was at the end of my other post to you:
>>
>> "To remove the recovery console, delete the cmdcons folder from the
>> root (usually C:) and edit the boot.ini file to remove the reference
>> to it."
>>
>> You can also delete the cmldr file that is added by the recovery
>> console installation - also in the root folder.
>>
>> William, the term image is used interchangeably for a cloned hard
>> drive and for an image set that is restored using the imaging
>> software. Usually which type of image is being discussed is noted
>> very early in a discussion so that both parties are on the same
>> page. This is why I made the effort to define the distinction at the
>> beginning of my previous message.
>>
>> Vanguard picked up on what I was trying to say and did a great job
>> expanding on the two different meanings. Thanks, Vanguard!
>>
> Sharon, it's indeed unfortunate that the software designer,
> in PQ, chose to leave the words 'copy' and 'image' mixed
> up. What they call a "drive image" is indeed a bunch of code
> which their own recovery program is supposed to convert to
> a clone or exact copy or duplicate of the original. Neither
> they nore anybody else has made it clear to tired, muddled old
> me, why that two-step capability is necessary or even desirable.

If you were to save exact bit-for-bit-by-sector of your drive, your
backup media would have to be as large as the source drive you were
backing up. For an 80GB hard drive, you would need another 80GB hard
drive (you cannot mix media types, like using DVD to save this type of
image since the file systems and formatting along with the controller
support are different). Saving an image fileset which contains a
logical description of the physical definition of a partition means you
can compress it (to reduce how much backup media space you will need),
skip unused sectors (which DriveImage will do but not Ghost) but simply
record that they were skipped, and you can use a completely different
type of backup media, like CD-R[W], DVD-+R[W], tape, another drive (even
using a different interface), and so on. The recovery program will use
the file system needed to read the image fileset to perform a physical
write based on the logical information from those files.

A *clone* of a disk is what you were thinking of and will do a
bit-for-bit read of each sector on the source disk and lay down that
same exact data onto the target disk. So obviously your same media-type
clone disk has to be the same size or larger than your source disk.
Even if it were possible to save a *clone* of a hard drive onto DVD-R[W]
discs, would you really want to take the time writing to slower DVDs and
having to swap and store something like 20 of them when you could've
save an image fileset on half or less of that? DriveImage writes its
boot program on the first CD/DVD so you can boot from that and restore
using that media so it is still very convenient to use the image fileset
as opposed to using a clone or ISO image but the restore will take
longer because of the slower media onto which the image fileset was
saved unless, of course, you save it on, say, another hard disk. For
disaster recovery (that is external rather than using mirroring), I
prefer NOT to use hard drives because they are mechanical devices. Try
to explain to your boss that you cannot do a restore because the media
is okay (platters) but the interface controller on the hard drive or the
actuator for the head assembly doesn't work anymore. You can destroy
the removable media, too, but you could destroy CDs as well as you can
destroy the platters in a hard drive, but with removable media you can
get another drive to replace the faulty one. Disk images (clones or
image filesets) on hard disks should only be for short-term backups,
like maybe a week, for quickest recovery but not considered your
long-term recovery media. I've experienced a joker dropping a hard
drive and losing our recovery disk (but we had the older recovery
removable media to fall back on).

> So I went back to where I was a month ago, when I tried making
> what PowerQuest describes as a "copy". I installed my Slave
> drive as Master and formatted it anew, as Active and Primary,
> and empty. I then jumpered it as Slave, put it in Slave
> position, put my Master on as Master, and used Drive Image 7.0
> to "Copy One Drive to Another This copes the contents of
> your Drive directly to another drive". Actually, I copied only
> the first (Master) partition of my Master Drive to the Slave.
>
> I used Partition Magic to verify that the Slave Drive contained
> very close to the same number of bytes as the Master OS. I then
> shut down, jumpered the Slave Drive as a Single Drive, put it in
> Master position on the cable, no other drive present, and booted
> up. It got to where I was when I did this same thing a month
> ago, so at least it's reproducible. It booted through BIOS, to
> the place where I could select XP Pro or Recovery Console, I
> picked XP, and got the black Windows logo screen, and then after
> the usual wait, the light blue Windows logo screen, which should
> say "loading your personal settings"........and there it hangs.
> So Windows copied nicely, and all my data and files and programs
> and applications copied nicely, but it doesn't get to the "Loading
> your personal settings" place. Those words are missing from the
> light blue screen, and that's where I was when one of the MVPs
> (who shall remain nameless) convinced me that I should not use
> the "Drive Copy" path, that I really wanted the Image.

Boy, sure sounds like what you did should have worked. The only thing
that comes to mind at the moment is disk signatures. Each disk has an
area where a unique signature of hex bytes get written to it. Windows
NT/2000/XP will use the signatures to identify the device. That is why
you can configure a partition on a disk as C:, insert a new hard drive
in the physical scan chain that positions it before your old drive, and
C: will still be seen as the partition on your now second hard drive. I
haven't much investigated how DriveCopy works. I would've thought that
it would copy ALL bytes across ALL sectors (rather than work within the
bounds of partitions). That would mean it would include the track 0
along with the MBR in which the disk signature is written. But if
DriveCopy doesn't touch the MRB (or track 0) then the second drive will
still have its disk signature that it had before when it was not drive
C:. The boot.ini file (other than for Recovery Console or some other
parallel installed OS) denotes where to find Windows based on physical
parameters (drive and partition), and that works because, as you've
mentioned, you got past the boot procedure and get into the OS load
process.

> Well, he couldn't get me past that road block, in the XP
> boot-up procedure, Sharon, maybe you can? Or maybe I need the other
> piece of software that somebody just suggested here.

See if using the /SOS option in boot.ini on the line used to load the
instance of the OS that you select. See
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/info/bootini.shtml for a reference of
boot.ini setup and options. However, it sounds like you are getting
farther than the driver load screen will show, anyway.

Do you get the same hang if you try to boot Windows into its Safe mode?
I have found, especially after some hardware changes or driver installs,
that Windows will hang during the device detect phase. So I boot into
Safe mode and then reboot again but into normal mode.

> By the way, I searched for cmdcons folder on C:\ and can't find
> it. Yes, I told it to seek hidden files. I did find it in boot.ini,
> however.

See my other posts in response to you not finding the cmdcons folder.

There is one other point that I would like to mention. When saving an
image fileset (not making a clone), do not save it on an NTFS partition
on a hard drive. While Symantec says they support the saving of the
image fileset on NTFS partitions, I have encountered problems with that
on many occasions. The restore will fail at some point, usually around
75%, and then abort with a message that it cannot file the image file
that it was just reading okay up to that point. One cure which often
helps is to NOT use the Caldera DOS that Symantec uses for the bootable
floppies (and for the bootable first CD in an image fileset saved to
that media type). They recommend creating an MS-DOS 6 or Windows 98/ME
bootable floppy as the first floppy in their 2-floppy boot set. When
Caldera DOS caused DriveImage to fail, I often could get a Win98 boot
floppy to work (but then I had to restart the entire restore). This is
not a problem of an NTFSDOS driver not working under Caldera DOS but
working under MSDOS6 or Win98. DriveImage doesn't need that driver but
it will still make BIOS calls through the underlying DOS. Hmm, this
isn't some really old computer that requires a disk overlay manager in
the bootstrap area of the MBR, is it?

The other cure is to not save the image fileset on an NTFS partition on
a hard disk and instead save it instead on a FAT32 partition (you don't
have NTFS on non-hard disk drives so it isn't an issue on those other
media types). This only addresses the problem if DriveImage should
abort for you at some time. However, if the image restore completes
okay then I would assume the entire process completed without any write
errors to the restore disk. 

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