No computer for awhile

[hansolo77]

Ok storytime...

So everybody knows by now about the fire we had. Well its been a slow recovery. my homeserver keeps crashing down because of hard drives dying. This week has been no different. Another drive died. After 2 days of waiting for the server to finish re-copying the reduntant files to new locations, i was finally able to run the WHS addon that tells me which drive location was mising. I removed the drive and hooked it up to my primary computer. I needed to run Seagate's SeaTools program on the drive so I could get the error code for proper RMA. I never got the chance for Windows to detect the drive so I tried to run it through Hirens Boot Cd's version. I got the error code, but there was no way to sumbit the RMA through dos. So I knew I would have to reboot and try again. But before I did, I wanted to try and wipe the drive before I got ready to return it. That was my mistake. I loaded up another utility which does a blind wipe on the drive. However, when I started it up, I selected the wrong drive! I stopped its writing procedures as soon as I noticed, but it had already wiped the first 1gb worth of data from the drive. That drive is my primary drive that is repartitoned into one 50gb chunk for OS use, and the remaining 450gb for Recoreded TV. This is also my boot up drive. So needless to say, it wiped the MBR and the partition tables from the drive. Now I have a computer with no boot drive or Operating System, and a dead drive from the server that I can't RMA for new one. Im just screwed on everything.

I tried to use a recovery utility on the partitions. It was able to find the location of the split, and wrote a proper table for me. I was then able to browse the drive with a linux utility. Luckily all the recorded tv stuff is on the other enf of the drive away from everything else. Unfortunately the only part of the OS drive remaining is 1 folder in the Program Files x86 path. I tried to do a recovery of the OS drive using the WHS recovery cd but it keeps kicking me out saying it can't find the server. So until I get that all figured out, I'm afraid I might be stuck with no computer for a while.

[GimmeClassics]

Sorry to hear all of this Han

I hope you can fix most of it and don't lose too much data! Good luck figuring it all out ! ....Doesn't sound too easy

GC

ps:....I read you might be stuck with no computer for a while > will adjusting / updating the hi-score threads you've started be any problem during this "no-computer-period" ?

[hansolo77]

It shouldn't be a problem. I can still access the forum from my Kindle and my Dad's computer in the other room (where I am now). Long as I have access to the internet, I should be able to continually update stuff. I just won't be able to participate in playing the games until I'm back up and running.

So here's where I am right now...

The WHS restore cd is still telling me that it can't find the server. I did a search and found a thread where somebody else was having this same kind of problem. It might have been something to do with the drivers on the cd not being fully compatible with the network card. So I disabled the onboard LAN in the BIOS and attempted to use my Dad's USB NIC dongle. When I booted up with that, the WHS restore cd actually didn't even discover the USB. So I'm out of luck on that. I don't have any other NIC's to install, so I'm going to have to rely on the onboard. My next task is to try and reinstall Windows 7 on the primary partition. After that's done, I'm going to try to reinstall the WHS console utility and try to do a direct restore from that. Theoretically it should work because all the correct drivers would have been installed and I'd be able to access the server directly. If I can get the restore to work, I should have a backed up OS drive on the server from just 2 or 3 days ago. I backup nightly around 2 in the morning, but the last couple of days the backup service was offline because of the failed hard drive. But I have high hopes this will all be resolved with a fresh temporary install of Windows 7. If all else fails, I'll have to start from scratch again with the fresh install. That's the most gut-wrenching idea of them all. When I think about all the data I had on my Desktop that I've lost. All the install paths for my emulators. All the programs like Photoshop, my Camera utilities, the Kindle utilities (and books sitting on the C drive I never transferred), all those notepad's I had cluttered on the desktop with important doctor phone numbers and stuff.. AND ALL MY PORN!! Lol just kidding about that. But this is a major pain and I really don't want to have to go back through re-installing everything. UHG!

[nullPointer]

Ugh ... Sorry to hear about it Han. That really sucks. A couple years ago I ran into a somewhat similar issue with a robocopy command that ran out of control and started overwriting a bunch of system files. What a pain.

Sounds like you've got the situation well in hand though, and I'm hoping that you'll work strike upon a good solution.

Best of luck man.

[hansolo77]

Well it may only sound like I've got it under control. In reality, it's a very different story..

I've got Windows 7 installed. I then installed the WHS Console software. Wouldn't you know? My idea was wrong. There is no way to do a restore of the drive through the Windows software. You absolutely HAVE to use the Restore CD. My theory is that it's because it does a complete restore, re-writing the MBR and Partition Tables, and the system state/registry. What the restore options give you are the ability to browse the backup and select individual files to copy back onto your computer if they had somehow become corrupted or accidentally deleted. So unfortunately, there's no way to do a complete restore from within Windows. I'm trying to do the copy one by one but it's coming up with a bunch of errors, saying I need permissons (I should have them, same username/password and it's an admin account). So I'm really only getting about 25-30% of the files. What I may just have to do is format the partition AGAIN and re-install Windows 7 AGAIN and just start from scratch. I posted a message over at the Microsoft Knowledge Base Support forums to see if anybody can give me some advice. But I'm really starting to feel like this is a lost cause.

DAMN MY IGNORANCE! Why'd I have to go and do a wipe on this drive?! And the worst part, the drive I wanted to wipe that isn't detectable in Windows is still sitting here waiting to be rescanned for RMA.

[Draco1962]

Sorry to hear you are going through a rough patch, but there is at least one good thing. You have a bicycle!

When life gives you lemons, make a margarita!

[nullPointer]

Hmm ... in terms of rescuing files you might be able to use a live Linux distribution (off of a disc or even USB drive if your BIOS will support booting from USB). One thing great about those live Linux distributions is that they could give a fart less about your Windows permissions. It might be worth a shot. If the files on your hard drive are at all addressable, it might just be the ticket.

If you're working purely with hard drive operations I like GParted. If that's not your bag, you could go in whole hog with something like Linux Mint (in this case the installation disc doubles as the live distribution).

Man - best of luck Han. Here's Hoping you're able to get everything back on track.

[hansolo77]

Well the problem is that the WHS backups are locked up archives, you can't just access the files directly. If it were that simple I would have connected the drive directly to the WHS and copied the files straight over. But since they're archived, you can only access the files after WHS extracts them to a temporary mapped network folder. Once you turn off the computer, the network share is gone and all your extracted files too. I wish there was some other way to do this. What I'm definately going to invest some time into after this is all done is getting a decent utility that makes backups that I can access. I had used Acronis True Image at one point. But that was before I upgraded Vista to 7. I made a complete backup image on 5 dvd's of my system drive. So if 7 didn't work it could directly restore everything exactly how it was before. After upgrading to 7 I got a copy of WHS and built my own server out of a computer case. My soul intention was to have a file server with redunancy backups incase of drive failure (good thing too hehe). The added benefit of having daily scheduled backups was just extra. But in retrospect, it hasn't really served me any benefit at all since I can't do a restore. There's gotta be something somewhere I can do to be able to get the Restore CD to access the server and do what it was meant to do. This is rediculous. Definately not the way I planned to spend my day off work.

[ClassicGMR]

Wish I lived nearby. I'd come by and help you out.

Having one of these units has become extremely helpful in recovering customer data on bad/corrupted hard drives I'm working on. Can usually find them for $5-$8 on eBay. Might be worth a shot or, if your father will allow you to install your drive into his tower, you can try and recover some data that way.

EDIT: Never mind. you posted just as I did. I see your files are locked and cannot be copied straight across.

[hansolo77]

Yeah I'm really surprised that the software doesn't work as advertised. It's supposed to be a simple thing.. boot up off the restore CD on the computer you're going to restore, connect network cables, connect to server, select most recent (or any other) backup, execute, an hour or so later come back to a fully working computer like you never left it. Unfortunately in my case, it gets stuck at the "connect to server" part. I wonder if there are any other alternatives that might work better? Like, if there's a backup program out there that will do an automatic (on schedule) backup with incremental updates, that you can choose to save the backup on another computer, and actually have the restore CD detect the computer for the recovery? If not, I might have to invest in another drive for backup purposes only. I hate having to go through this reinstall stuff. It only took like 15-20 minutes to install Windows 7 but it's taken probably 4 hours to download and install the updates! I haven't even started reinstalling programs yet.

So yeah, if anybody knows of a good backup utility that can do what I need, speak up!

[hansolo77]

Uhg this is torture! I can't do a restore from the WHS. Nobody over at Microsoft has given me any pointers. I was able to access the files though and started copying them over yesterday. That's a joke. Almost all of the files require permission to copy, and apparently they need more than administrative permissions. So I was able to copy a lot of the programs and stuff, just not things in the /windows/ path. The bad part now is that whenever I try to LAUNCH a program, it says it can't be found, or files are missing. So I have to, once again, download and reinstall those programs manually. Some of the programs seem to be all inclusive though without depending on files scattered elsewhere. But I have a feeling a lot of my emulator stuff is going to require manual reinstalls. I just hope the settings I've made stick and they just need files reassociated in the registry. The other bad part is that even though the files exist in the /program files/ path, I can't launch them because their shortcuts don't exist in the start menu! So I have to install those again too, or just remake shortcuts. It's going to be a long trip, but at least I'm back up and running. I'm able to get back into the GameEx community at least and not have to rely on my dad's computer or my kindle.

Anybody had any opportunity to do some quick research for me on alternative backup methods? I mean, you don't HAVE to, and I certainly don't want to push off the work for somebody else to do. I'm just curious if anybody has any methods that work(ed) well from them.

[nullPointer]

The trouble with backup methods is that you only really know how effective they are when you need to run a disaster recovery. It's no secret that I'm a big fan of Open Source software solutions (and preferably when they're free as in beer). To that end I've been very satisfied with Clonezilla.

As the name implies this is a full disc cloning utility similar to Norton Ghost. So I bought a USB drive a while back (it's getting a little long in the tooth at this point), but essentially that operates as backup storage for full drive/partition images. I've used these backups as a means of recovery before, but more in the way of, "Let's run a drill to make sure this would actually work." Thankfully I've never had to recover from an actual disaster in this capacity. I've never used it to clone a RAID array, but I'm assuming that such a thing is possible.

I'm sure there are fancier more elaborate means of backup but this has always worked for me. Backing up to a RAID array rather than a single disk seems like it would be a good decision (despite all of the many people saying RAID is not backup - hey if it's an additional level of protection why not use it). Likewise backing up offsite would be a great idea (although not really plausible in my case). My mom uses Carbonite on her laptop and swears by it, but personally I would have a hard time convincing myself to cough up the money for a subscription.

[Tempest]

I make full images of my OS drives. I used the free version of Macrium Reflect. Macrium allows you to browse your images in windows explorer, so if you only need to grab one file, you can.

[hansolo77]

All I ever backed up with WHS was my OS drive. I figured that would be the one you need to restore anyway. Stuff like the games are on their own dedicated drive. If I lose them, I'm hosed; they're on a 1tb drive and I ain't buying another 1tb drive just to have a backup. What I did for that is keep a DVD with all the roms and emulators. The artwork I can live without since they're easily obtainable now through emumovies. My other drive in the computer is just a temporary holding/storage drive where I put stuff like DVD's, things like software install files I've downloaded but not moved to the server, pictures from my camera I've not moved the server, etc. Nothing I can't live without should THAT drive die. The biggest thing to me to lose is the OS drive and of course that's the one that goes (by my own error).

Once I get this fully up and running again, I really need to find a good backup utility that can do automated scheduled backups to a specified location, and won't require anything special other than knowing where to locate those files. With the whole WHS setup, the disk needs to be able to access the server in a pre-defined network setup, and any customizations will stop it working. Renaming the server broke it. Having a locked password protected router broke it. I even think I may have changed the workgroup name (It's WORKGROUP now, but I think it's supposed to be Workgroup). I'm still hoping somebody from Microsoft Support will see my thread and offer the solution I need. If not, I'm going to have to find another solution. I don't mind reinstalling Windows before I can access the backup from the server. I just need to have some way to restore FROM that location that isn't simply copying files one by one.

In other news.. here's a progress report..

I've been trying to install drivers and what not, and updating program paths in the mean while. I've hit a major snag though and I'm REALLY upset about it. My tuner cards seem to be messed up. I never did anything like uninstall them from the mobo or unplug the cables, but for some reason all my channels are coming up with static. I mean 90% covered or so, they're still showing SOMETHING beneath it all, but it's completely unwatchable. The audio is fine though, so it's not like it's interference. I think it's the drivers, but I've tried fixing that. First Windows used their own drivers. Then I installed the ones I had backed up on the server ON TOP of them. After that was when I first tried to use the tuners. So I backtracked, uninstalled the drivers and put checks in the boxes to delete all software on the computer related to them. After rebooting, I let Windows install the drivers again. Before doing anything else, I checked the tuners, and they're still showing static. So I did the whole uninstall and reboot again. This time I disabled the automatic driver install and installed only the ones I had backed up on the server. Wouldn't you know? They STILL have static. Something is messed up somewhere. This is another reason I hope Microsoft can come through with a restore solution for me. There must have been some trick or something I did YEARS ago that fixed this problem, but I can't remember. Anybody have any suggestions?

[hansolo77]

Woot! I'm back!

Somebody was finally nice enough to take the time to reply to my problem over at the Microsoft Support Forums. Turns out I needed to get a copy of the NIC drivers but for the 32 bit Vista version. Kinda weird that's all it needed but it did the trick. Just put them on a usb jump drive and everything started working brilliantly. I still need to do some checking to make sure but in a quick glance it looked like it was a 100% success. I take back everything negative I ever said about WHS.

[nullPointer]

Dude! I'm glad to hear that! You know MS may take a lot of flack among the elitist neck beard FOSS crowd, but I've typically found their support (as well as their products) to be excellent. What a relief Han!

[Tempest]

Great news!

[KRC]

Woot! I'm back!

Good to have you back, even though you weren't gone that long

[Draco1962]

Glad you got it sorted! Welcome back!

[hansolo77]

I was really amazed how easily and quickly the whole restore process went. Once it detected the alternate drivers on the USB, it was very quick to move on to the next screens and start the restore. And with my gigabit NIC on this computer, the server, and a gigabit router, the whole restore took only about 20 minutes for 50gb of data. I did have to go back and rename my server again since all my shortcuts and links were associated to the old name. But that was a simple fix. Now it's like I never left!

Only problem I'm going to face now though is the fact that I'm still 1 drive short on my server, and I only have about 23gb free space remaining on it. That means I can't do anymore backups until I get a replacement drive. So now I'm back to square one as far as trying to get the RMA process started. But I feel so much better and relieved that it's all said and done and I can now go on with where I left off. I think when it's time to try and wipe this drive again, I'm going to just unplug all my other hard drives and just use this one drive during the wipe so there's no possible way of screwing up again.

[hansolo77]

Crap crap crap! I hate coming home from work and finding my computer dead. Looks like my primary hard drive on my primary computer bit the dust today. I'm ok to a point on that, because I now know how to get a restore to work via the WHS. Unfortunately, the drive was partitioned into 2, and the 450Gb of the 500gb available were set aside for recorded tv from the media center. So if I'm unable to access that partition, I'm going to be out of a lot of stuff I recorded, like Warehouse 13, and Falling Skies. I haven't seen any of those shows yet for this season, and I have like 10 episodes each. I could always download them though. But this is all sucky sucky sucky.

Until I get a replacement drive for my master/boot partition, I'll be out of the loop. I can't really do any of the high score stuff on my Kindle. My dad has a computer in his room though, so o should be able to at least get the next gotm started... we'll have to see.

[GimmeClassics]

Hi Han,

I'm sorry to hear you have problems with your computer. I've sent you a PM about updating the hi-score threads you've started > if it's not possible for you to update / create threads at the moment please do tell me. I'll ask Adultery or one of the other admins / mods to help me out.

Thanks.

GC

[hansolo77]

Hey all, I'm half way back..

Would have been back sooner, but I'm having a lot of work related issues. First of all, anybody who lives in the USA or Canada pretty much know what July 4th is all about. For those that don't, look it up (Independence Day, Canada Day). That means everybody's either outside grilling for their cookouts, or they're going to the Deli cause they're lazy and they wanna buy my ribs and chicken wings, and our potato/macaroni salad. Or people wanna buy stuff to make subs. Needless to say, the last EIGHT (yep, that's right) days have been absolutely hell for me. Plus on top of that, our company has developed a new scheduling system that was designed to not only allow us to view and manage our schedules from home, it was also being promoted as a new sure-fire way to make customers happy by having a better management of bodies during high traffic times. Unfortunately, that new schedule system went live THIS WEEK of all weeks, and needless to say, it's broke. They have MINOR's (one of my friends in particular) scheduled to work 8.5 hours with no scheduled lunches. They have people coming in at odd times like 1:45 instead of 2:00 and leaving at 3:15 instead of 3:00 or 3:30. Those quarter hours are just their to prevent the necessity of the store management to be required to give you a break. How? Because they have people coming in at 1:00 and staying until 3:45, thus no break unless you work at least 4 hours. Plus one of our girls was only scheduled to work from 5:30pm till 6:45. Whats up with that? An hour and 15 minutes... And today, we had only one person scheduled to be working between 5:00 and 6:30. The busiest time of the day, on a holiday evening when we've been sooo busy already. ANYWAY.....

I've completed a sector scan on the drive that died. The first partition is 100% safe (C:\ drive, ie; Windows). The second partition is apparently 99% safe (E:\ drive, ie; Recorded TV). Of the entire drive, the sectors don't start failing until around 20,000 remaining. I'm not sure exactly how many of the final 20,000 on the drive are bad and how many are safe. I've been running a utility on it for the last 4 days/nights that does a read/write/read/verify pass on each sector until the sector is verified as working. If it doesn't complete a verify after 2 passes, it marks the sector as unrecoverable and swaps in a spare sector from the drive's spare sector pool. It does this intelligently, not literally, by making changes in the drives 'firmware' to say when you hit "This Sector" use "This Sector" instead. So far, after the 4 days of "regeneration" it has recovered over 3,000 sectors. I can now pass those sectors when I re-perform the sector scan. But, like I said, I have no way of knowing how many of the 20,000 sectors are truly bad, and I won't know until the process has completed. If I'm only at 3,000 sectors after 4 days, 20,000 is going to take more than 20 days to recover (if they're all bad). I don't have that kinda time to wait. So what I'm going to do is just continue the process for as long as possible until I get a replacement drive. Hopefully it'll recover some data I wasn't able to copy over before, but if not, I'm just going to swap it out with the new one. One thing I tried to do, but didn't really seem to help (maybe I did it wrong?) is use HPA (Host Protected Area) which essentially hides a specific region of sectors from being accessible from Windows and other programs that aren't designed to directly access the HPA. My theory was to just hide those 20,000 sectors, thus preventing Windows from accessing that part of the drive altogether. It doesn't seem to be working though. I think what I might have to do is just repartition the drive and leave the last 100mb or whatever as unpartitioned. The problem with that though is that I don't know how to re-partition on a sector level. Windows' built in Disk Manager only does it by apparent free space megabytes. Anybody know of any program/utility that will let you repartition on the fly a drive using sector ranges rather than space?

So yeah, been a crazy week so far. The drive dies, the work sucks, and I just haven't had the time/energy to really do much more than just scan the drive. But I'm closer to a solution, which is good.

[Draco1962]

Not sure about sector ranges vs. size/space but Partition Magic is one program I have used in the past and does a pretty good job.

[hansolo77]

Yeah I remember using Partition Magic years ago (like 15+ it seems) but don't remember how it works exactly. The problem with just choosing by size/space is that there's no real way to say "I WANT THESE SECTORS". If it just arbitrarily decides where to split the partitions, it won't solve my problem. What if it puts the "unused partition" at the beginning of the drive instead of at the end, or somewhere in the middle between the 2 I can use? I'll have to do some research and see what I can find. Hiren's Boot CD (EVERYBODY SHOULD HAVE THIS BTW!!!) has a utility I glanced at called "DiskGenius" which does things with partitions, but I didn't play around with it long enough to really see if it could do what I need.

Thanks for the suggestion though Draco. Nice to know somebody out there cares and wants to help!