Wow! What a couple of days!
To start out, I finally received my new Seagate 320 GB SATA hard drive. I wanted to replace the two temporary drives I had in my development machine which I installed Microsoft Vista 64. Since the first drive was only a 40 GB drive, I had to install many of the applications over the last few weeks on the secondary hard drive. The plan was to replace both the small drives with this new SATA drive.
This seemed like a good time to try out the new backup program that comes with Vista, as it has a feature to backup your entire system. That sounded like the way to go, so I brought up the backup program and started the “Complete PC backup” option.
After most of the backup was complete, it died with a fatal error. Of course, it could not be a well documented error, it said something like:
“Cannot perform request, device I/O error: 0x007045d”
After hours of digging around on the Internet, I could not find any clues. Finally, I started wonder if it had something to do with the shadow copies (such as from the System Restore points). I decide to erase all system restore points (by disabling the System Restore functions) and tried the backup again. This time it worked flawlessly!
Prior to making the backup, I installed the new hard drive and built four partitions, one for each of the drives I had been using, one for storage of other files I had on another drive partition and one to store the backup (did not have room on the other drives to store the backup). The idea was to make the backup on the new drive and then disable all the other drives when I went to restore the backup. Well…
I rebooted the system to attempt to restore the backup onto the new partitions I made. The setup for Vista booted from my install DVD and I was at the Restore backup options. Insert big “oh no” here. The only option for a restore was to allow Vista backup to wipe out your target drive(s) of all partitions which it will then recreate to be exactly the same as the backup partitions and then it will restore your files. That would have been a problem it would wipe out the backup files themselves since they were on that drive.
With the option of using the backup gone, I had to resort to other means. You cannot merely copy the files from one drive to another when moving the Windows System. So, I grabbed the Seagate utility that is supposed to copy your partitions for you. That was one slow program to say the least! It took hours and in the end, the copy did not work.
Now was the time to revert to older methods, I threw in my Knoppix CD Live bootable Linux and tried to copy the partition. For some reason it was having problems. I check their site and downloaded the 5.0 Knoppix CD image and made an updated version. With this I copied the windows partitions from both older drives onto the new partitions on the new drive. When I rebooted, everything seemed to work fine. I had a few files in another partition that were not all there (one that I just copied files not the partitions), so I had to enable the old drives to grab those files. Big mistake! Huge!
After I booted, Windows did not like that two drives had the exact same volume ids and changed the ID on the new drive. I also noticed, with the old drives enabled, it booted from the old system and not the new one. After I copied the files rebooted (after disabling the old drives again), Windows came up with a boot error and offered to fix it. I tried the fix and when it rebooted, it put the drive C system volume as drive D and had no drive C. It was funny to see Vista open and log me in to a blank screen with no desktop.
This meant I had to copy the partition over again. After I finished and rebooted, I was back into the system and everything was looking good. Went into the drive management tool and all the partitions were there as they should be with the correct sizes. I then brought up Explore and was amazed to see the drive sizes had not changed in there, it had the old sizes and free space listed. I tried refreshing and rebooting, but no change. I had resized the partitions inside Linux and Vista did not seem to like that. Then I tried shrinking both partitions by a few megs and then extending them back. This fixed them.
If you need to copy a Windows system from one drive to another, you can find the step-by-step instructions using Knoppix at:
http://www.nilbus.com/linux/disk-copy.php
New things Learned:
Windows Vista adds an entirely new dimension to application logging and performance monitoring. In the Windows Management Console, under the Event Viewer node, you now have many different application logs along with performance tracking logs.
While browsing around the many logs (they have tons of details), I noticed the mention of RACAgenet. This is a new service that tracks the Reliability of your system. Up to this time, I had not noticed the “Reliability and Performance” node in the Computer Management console.
When I clicked on the “Monitoring Tools” node and selected the “Reliability Monitor”, it was like, WOW! That had graph of my system for the last month detailing every major failure, installing of applications and general information. Simply clicking on a day in the map showed the details for that day below. If I wanted to see what I did on a given day (as far as installing software), all the details for that day was a click away. At a glance I could easily see which days and software or hardware failures. Nice addition to Windows!