leng
20th December 2006, 06:32 AM
For those who are interested, or who might end up in a similar situation, here is a review of the trials and tribulations I encountered attempting to recover a working system complete with user settings following a disk corruption of my Windoze partition.
The system in question has one IDE drive and 2 SATA drives. The IDE drive has a small rescue partition, a 30Gb windows XP boot partition (C:) and an 80Gb applications partion (D:). One SATA drive is my windows data drive and the other is Ubuntu linux.
About 10 days ago I decided to defrag the system, which has been getting progressively more sluggish. For this I used PerfectDisk 7, which worked OK on the E drive but complained about locking on D. Knowing C was also locked I kicked off an offline defrag of those two drives, which failed horribly. Post mortem, I have been unable to determine whether the catastrophy was caused by an already corrupt disk, hardware error or a bug in PD7.
Unfortunately, I did not have a particularly recent backup so I decided to attempt to rescue the corrupt drive so that I could use the settings wizard to back up the configuration (THERE SHOULD BE A WAY OF DOING THIS FROM ANOTHER RUNNING WINDOWS PARITION). The tools at my disposal were:
MS Recovery Console (from XP install disk/manufacturers recovery disk)
MS Repair Install (from XP install disk/manufacturers recovery disk)
PQ Partition Manager (no longer available, but the last XP compatible version)
PQ Disk Image (no longer available, but the last XP compatible version)
Acronis Disk Director (similar to Partition Manager)
Acronis True Image (similar to Disk Image)
Ubuntu Linux
Knoppix Linux (live CD)
Every one of these proved problematic in some way, some more so than others. Eventually I gave up attempting to recover the partition and settled to restoring the system to its delivery state. Even that was not as easy as it should have been but luckily I had a DiskImage of the (near) delivery condition of the disk.
Being unsure of the hardware, one of the first things I did was install a new 160Gb IDE drive as master and make the original a slave. I then cloned the old drive using Disk Director set to ignore errors. Most of my subsequent attempts to repair things were made using this duplicate. I will not walk chronologically through my personal descent into the Slough of Despond but I will highlight those features of the rescue software which hastened me on my way.
The most brutal lesson, however, was this:
There is no pit so deep that MS Repair Install cannot dig you deeper
The remainder, in no particular order of severity or irritation:
MS Recovery Console is so constrained as to be effectively useless as a general purpose tool.
If you install a second copy of windows on a disk with a bootable windows partition, several vital files are not installed in that partition. As a result, if you subsequently delete the original windows partition the entire disk becomes unbootable.
Disk Director will build a rescue CD. Unfortunately, it does not boot reliably.
True Image will copy all the partitions on a hard disk to another disk, ignoring errors. However, it will not do this with a single partition nor will it clone a disk into a sufficiently large empty space on another disk.
Partition Manager and Disk Image both come on bootable CDs. Unfortunately, you do not appear to be able to run the software once you have booted the CD. Fortunately, both can be used to produce 2-floppy rescue kits (the Acronis equivalents are about 6 floppies)
Ubuntu by default has read-only access to NTFS file systems. Adding the fuse libraries and utilities makes this read-write. The result appears to corrupt NTFS file systems (this might be my fault).
Knoppix comes with RW access to NTFS by default. However, occasionally it cannot mount NTFS partitions for no obvious reason. Also, files written to NTFS by Knoppix cannot be seen by Caldera DR-DOS (used on the Parition Manager and Disk Image boot floppies).
Disk Image is capable of writing images it cannot restore.
The rescue partition on my system did not appear to contain the factory image and failed when activated.
The mess installed as a fresh system by the XP home install kit does not have usable ethernet networking nor can it read 4Gb USB sticks.
If Disk Image or Partition Magic tell you there is an error in the partition table and offer to correct it, DO NOT SAY YES. If you do, the partition will become inaccessible to both PQ utilities.
MS Recovery Console will occasionally set an admin password for a previously unprotected Windows partition. Unfortunately, it will not tell you what it is.
Disk Director offers to fix disk/partition errors. What it actually does is run chkdsk /f in a window. The problem is that you cannot save the contents of the window or cut/paste from it, so if you want to record what files have been damaged you better find a pencil. So, the global lessons:
Back up often.
When backing up, turn on all the verification options no matter how paranoid and no matter how much they slow down the process.
Check that your restore procedure works.
Be prepared to deal with the situation where you entirely lose the ability to boot/access your system.
Be sure you know where all your original install media (and product keys) are located.
Oh, and if you have any regard for your sanity,
DO NOT RELY ON A SYSTEM RUNNING WINDOZE.
Edit: added grouse that I had forgotten
The system in question has one IDE drive and 2 SATA drives. The IDE drive has a small rescue partition, a 30Gb windows XP boot partition (C:) and an 80Gb applications partion (D:). One SATA drive is my windows data drive and the other is Ubuntu linux.
About 10 days ago I decided to defrag the system, which has been getting progressively more sluggish. For this I used PerfectDisk 7, which worked OK on the E drive but complained about locking on D. Knowing C was also locked I kicked off an offline defrag of those two drives, which failed horribly. Post mortem, I have been unable to determine whether the catastrophy was caused by an already corrupt disk, hardware error or a bug in PD7.
Unfortunately, I did not have a particularly recent backup so I decided to attempt to rescue the corrupt drive so that I could use the settings wizard to back up the configuration (THERE SHOULD BE A WAY OF DOING THIS FROM ANOTHER RUNNING WINDOWS PARITION). The tools at my disposal were:
MS Recovery Console (from XP install disk/manufacturers recovery disk)
MS Repair Install (from XP install disk/manufacturers recovery disk)
PQ Partition Manager (no longer available, but the last XP compatible version)
PQ Disk Image (no longer available, but the last XP compatible version)
Acronis Disk Director (similar to Partition Manager)
Acronis True Image (similar to Disk Image)
Ubuntu Linux
Knoppix Linux (live CD)
Every one of these proved problematic in some way, some more so than others. Eventually I gave up attempting to recover the partition and settled to restoring the system to its delivery state. Even that was not as easy as it should have been but luckily I had a DiskImage of the (near) delivery condition of the disk.
Being unsure of the hardware, one of the first things I did was install a new 160Gb IDE drive as master and make the original a slave. I then cloned the old drive using Disk Director set to ignore errors. Most of my subsequent attempts to repair things were made using this duplicate. I will not walk chronologically through my personal descent into the Slough of Despond but I will highlight those features of the rescue software which hastened me on my way.
The most brutal lesson, however, was this:
There is no pit so deep that MS Repair Install cannot dig you deeper
The remainder, in no particular order of severity or irritation:
MS Recovery Console is so constrained as to be effectively useless as a general purpose tool.
If you install a second copy of windows on a disk with a bootable windows partition, several vital files are not installed in that partition. As a result, if you subsequently delete the original windows partition the entire disk becomes unbootable.
Disk Director will build a rescue CD. Unfortunately, it does not boot reliably.
True Image will copy all the partitions on a hard disk to another disk, ignoring errors. However, it will not do this with a single partition nor will it clone a disk into a sufficiently large empty space on another disk.
Partition Manager and Disk Image both come on bootable CDs. Unfortunately, you do not appear to be able to run the software once you have booted the CD. Fortunately, both can be used to produce 2-floppy rescue kits (the Acronis equivalents are about 6 floppies)
Ubuntu by default has read-only access to NTFS file systems. Adding the fuse libraries and utilities makes this read-write. The result appears to corrupt NTFS file systems (this might be my fault).
Knoppix comes with RW access to NTFS by default. However, occasionally it cannot mount NTFS partitions for no obvious reason. Also, files written to NTFS by Knoppix cannot be seen by Caldera DR-DOS (used on the Parition Manager and Disk Image boot floppies).
Disk Image is capable of writing images it cannot restore.
The rescue partition on my system did not appear to contain the factory image and failed when activated.
The mess installed as a fresh system by the XP home install kit does not have usable ethernet networking nor can it read 4Gb USB sticks.
If Disk Image or Partition Magic tell you there is an error in the partition table and offer to correct it, DO NOT SAY YES. If you do, the partition will become inaccessible to both PQ utilities.
MS Recovery Console will occasionally set an admin password for a previously unprotected Windows partition. Unfortunately, it will not tell you what it is.
Disk Director offers to fix disk/partition errors. What it actually does is run chkdsk /f in a window. The problem is that you cannot save the contents of the window or cut/paste from it, so if you want to record what files have been damaged you better find a pencil. So, the global lessons:
Back up often.
When backing up, turn on all the verification options no matter how paranoid and no matter how much they slow down the process.
Check that your restore procedure works.
Be prepared to deal with the situation where you entirely lose the ability to boot/access your system.
Be sure you know where all your original install media (and product keys) are located.
Oh, and if you have any regard for your sanity,
DO NOT RELY ON A SYSTEM RUNNING WINDOZE.
Edit: added grouse that I had forgotten