What is IDE/ATA Hard Drive? IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) is a standard electronic interface used between a computer motherboard's data paths or bus and the.![]() Five tips for restoring an unbootable hard drive. Have you ever tried to restart a machine only to find it won't boot? For whatever reason, you get a warning message informing you that disaster might well have struck.. Well, don't panic yet. There are a few tricks you can try that may get that machine booted. All is not lost until you know, with 1. Here are some tips that can help you to get that drive booted and your machine recovered. Boot from a restore disk. With many operating systems, restore disks can be created and used to deal with such disasters. The problem with this usually arises because the user hasn't made a restore disk. ![]() ![]() I always tell users that one of the first things they should do when they get a new computer or install a fresh operating system is create a restore disk and then put it somewhere safe. That disk can really save your hide — especially in cases such as an unbootable drive. Now, every operating system approaches the restore disk differently. For example, some Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu 1. Live disk as a restore disk. So even if you didn't create a restore disk, you can just download the same release that's installed on the machine and use that as your restore. Use the install disk. If you didn't create a recovery disk in Windows, but you have the full installation disk, you'll be okay. Those disks include recovery tools that can be accessed by pressing R at the Welcome To Setup screen. The tools let you fix boot problems, restore the hard drive from image, diagnose memory, and perform system restore. Note: The system restore typically can work only if the system restore partition is intact. Get to know Bart. PEThere are tools.. Bart. PE is a huge challenge to build. ![]() How To Install Windows 7 To USB External Hard Drive Transforming a dish with one new ingredient feels magical, like you’re the Ratatouille rat chomping on a big mouthful of cheese and strawberry. UPDATE: I have released a new graphical user interface utility to reset the files permissions. I was running Vista with two NTFS partitions (C: and D. This guide explains how to start factory OS image restore utility on a Dell laptop with Windows Vista. Running this utility will erase everything from the hard drive. Editors Note: Microsoft has a KB Article recommending against using Advanced Format Drives with Windows Home Server, however as the author demonstrates, with the. Find and contact HP Customer Support, download drivers, manuals and troubleshooting information for HP products, including pcs, laptops, desktops, printers, tablets. HP SIMPLESAVE PORTABLE HARD DRIVE USER MANUAL ABOUT YOUR HP SIMPLESAVE DRIVE – 3 About Your HP SimpleSave Drive Features LED The power/activity LED is located on. Don't use Windows Backup. Okay, I'm now very late to this party, but let me say: don't use Windows Backup (Backup and Restore). I attempted to use it to. I went to the Recycle Bin folder to recover it. But the file was not there. Luckily the file was. ![]() But once you have it, you have a serious tool for fixing serious problems. Bart PE creates a complete, preinstalled Win. You to run check disk on your drive, which could easily solve your problem. Rebuild the MBRIn many instances, the problem is a corrupt master boot record (MBR). ![]() If that's the case, the MBR needs to be rebuilt. This process will vary, depending upon the operating system you use. With Windows 7, the necessary tool is Bootrec. Windows Recovery Environment. If the operating system uses Grub 2 and the boot loader was lost after a Windows installation (with the intent to dual- boot), there is a tool called Grub. If no Windows environment is on the machine, grab that Live CD and you'll have all the tools you need to rebuild your Grub boot loader. The specific tool you want is grub- install, and to rebuild the grub menu, update- grub. Remove the drive. If all else fails, pull out the drive from the machine, attach it to a machine known to run, and see if the drive can be seen at all. It is possible that the reason the drive will not boot is due to physical damage. If the drive can be seen but not accessed, most likely the partition table has gone corrupt. ![]() But if the drive can't even be seen, especially using a Linux machine to view it, the drive might well be physically damaged. If the drive can be seen and accessed, the problem is probably the MBR. I would highly recommend that at this point, you copy your data over to another drive — just in case. What has saved you? There are plenty of ways to recover that unbootable drive, but the techniques above have always brought me the most luck. What about you? If you've found a more reliable or efficient way to recover a drive that refuses to boot, share it with your fellow Tech. Republic readers. Additional resources. Don't use Windows Backup - virtualdub. Okay, I'm now very late to this party, but let me say: don't use Windows Backup (Backup and Restore). I attempted to use it to clone a Windows 7 installation onto a new hard drive, after running into some problems with cloning utilities, and it failed so utterly badly that I'm glad I never tried using it to actually do backups. Let me start with the backup process. I opted to do only a critical partition backup because I was only concerned with cloning the system partitions. The data partitions I could copy peacemeal myself, but the system partition is harder to clone correctly without messing up symlinks, hardlinks, ACLs, and alternate streams. We're long past the point where you can just do a straight file copy of the Windows folder - - doing that nowadays will cause the Win. Sx. S folder to pop open with a giant SPROING and spray duplicate file confetti all over your new drive. Either a very smart file backup tool or a partition imager is needed to get everything over correctly, and Windows Backup at least knows how to do this. Now, when you ask Windows to back up only your system drive, it . The result was that Backup would not allow me to create a system recovery image without including my D: drive. I've since heard that services on other partitions will cause this, which in my case would be my Perforce server. This is a pretty lame requirement to have since (a) the forced inclusion of other drives is inexplicable in the UI and (b) this is still no guarantee that the services will work as they may have data on other drives anyway. Fortunately, C: and D: combined was only 1. GB, so that easily fit on my external HDD and wouldn't take too long. Go do something else while it backs up the partitions, pop in a CD- R to burn the recovery boot disk, done. Then, I tried to restore the backup onto the new HDD. What a mess. My frustration can be summed up in one word: 8. That's the inscrutable error code I kept getting whenever I tried to restore the image, along with a vague mention of not finding a suitable disk and eight things I could do that might maybe work to resolve the problem. Apparently, a 5. 00. GB hard drive doesn't have enough space to restore a 1. GB C: partition and a 5. GB D: partition. Adding to the frustration: System Image Recovery doesn't tell you up front what drives it did find. You can dig around in one of the Advanced buttons to find them, which is how I verified it was seeing the disk. It doesn't tell you what's in the backup and thus how much space you need, just that it couldn't find drives big enough. Thus, if you thought your backup was 4. GB and it's actually 5. GB, the only way you know this is either by trying bigger drives or looking directly in the XML file. You don't specify which drives to restore to. Instead, you tell it which drives not to use, and it repartitions and reformats all the rest, defaulting to all drives except the one holding the backup. I can't convey how horrific this is. You can't specify which drive to use as the primary. Several times, it mentions that you need to ensure that the BIOS correctly selects as the boot drive the one that you want the boot partition restored to, and if the wrong drive is used, you need to change the BIOS boot setting and try again. Oh, and it doesn't tell you which drive it thinks this is. You can't choose to only restore some of the volumes in the backup. Either you manage to restore all of them, or not. Apparently, the UI is just a wrapper on top of the wbadmin. API with minimal error reporting capabilities. It's scary that people might be backing up servers with this. Anyway, back to the error. HRESULT, where the leading '8. A search in the Platform SDK headers reveals that the name for this error code is VSS. From the description, it appears this error code basically means . Not having any more detailed error or log messages, my best guess is that the restore utility was attempting to recreate the extended partition that the D: logical partition was placed in, with its original size. This would have the annoying consequence that despite the backup only having 1. GB of partition data, it would still require a 7. GB drive to restore to. It would also be consistent with reports that you can restore a C: image to a smaller HDD by shrinking the partition prior to backing up, since in that case there isn't an extended partition to muck up the works. This is a serious limitation since the target drive cannot have even one sector less than the total partition sizes, which is bad considering that a . They don't usually print the max LBA on the retail box. Truth be told, I wasn't expecting much from the start, and all of this was just confirmation. What is disturbing is how fragile this restore process is despite the UI that makes it look like a reasonable backup solution. At least in the days of NT 4. NTBACKUP would be a bit of a rough ride - - heck, it still tried to get you to use tape. With this, though, people get fooled into thinking they just boot their recovery CD with their replacement drive, only to be stymied by a cryptic error whenever they try to restore. Comments. Comments posted: If you want to move your Windows install to a different drive (of at least exactly the same size), the easiest is to just do a full sector- by- sector copy. Boot the computer with something like System. Rescue. CD, check which drive is which with fdisk - l /dev/sd. X (put in a,b,c,etc. Unfortuantly both seem to have evaporated since Power. Quest was borged by Symantec. Using them on Windows 7 is probably bad karma, depending on how much NTFS has changed since they were last released. Torkell - 2. 5 1. Yeah, the error reporting is really awful. I selected the partition with the boot files (for some reason lenovo put the boot stuff in its own partition) and the system and left it do the dirty work of resizing and fitting the partitions. As an added bonus, it also aligned the partitions for optimal ssd usage! Actually these days two . There is an IDEMA standard for that titled ? That explains a lot. I was wondering what happened to Partition Magic. It was awesome back in the day. Ultimately, Macrium Reflect is what I ended up using, after EASEUS failed (no 4. K alignment support) and Windows Backup utterly failed. It mostly worked, except for one big hitch: when the USB- SATA adapter hiccuped and went offline, Reflect didn't notice the drive didn't exist anymore! The activity light went out on the adapter and Process Monitor it showed that every single Write call was failing, but Reflect kept chugging away. In the end what worked was imaging online from the laptop and then writing that to the new drive from the desktop. Phaeron - 2. 5 1. I just used it for backup, not for restore, so I'm happy until now unlike you ; -)Seriously: I think the backup towards VHD is great! With win. 7 you should even be able to boot right from the VHD if the bcd database is setup accordingly. But what I am really missing is a tool like vhd. There seems to be none which could be used e. Sadly, partition handles are funky enough in Win. Phaeron - 2. 5 1. Good old ghost. 32, I still have it on my winpe pendrive, never failed me copying paritions or whole disks. Windows Backup on the other hand, could not even create the backup file, because my boot partition, that 1. MB hidden one, had not enough free space on. I could only figure this out by googling a lot, not because the backup program told me. Gabest - 2. 5 1. Somebody recommended systemrescuecd and dd.. If you can also mount the backup vhd, you're all set. Alex - 2. 5 1. 0 1. I use Drive Snapshot from time to time: http: //www. Windows Backup is only useful in . It has its share of problems, and some parts of it I despise, but it has not once failed me when it comes to its actual job: restoring an image. I've recently even tested restoring a True. Crypt whole- disk- encrypted restore, and this worked too (albeit wasn't easy or snag- free, see link). Roman (link) - 2. Acronis does it's job pretty well, but it's quite expensive, and for some reason it's slow as hell when doing full image restores or disk- to- disk copies (and this happens both running on a live system, or when booted to Win. PE - Process. Explorer shows 2- 3 second bursts of activity, then 2. I/O, no CPU, no nothing). I have a copy of Acronis, but I avoided using it because it's a heavyweight install. Phaeron - 2. 7 1. Acronis is the best backup- tool I ever used! Here is the process. Install acronis, I recommend version 1. Create a bootable media image and then burn to CD. You start with a blank installation of windows, a one time pain of installing windows and drivers with the latest updates. Create blank restore system backup ( boot with CD from step 2 ). Install all applications you typically use as part of the core system and set all the settings . Create a full restore system backup ( boot with CD from step 2 ). Highly recommend using a fast small SSD as main system HDD and keep all other files on a secondary drive. You now have a very streamlined process. At any point, you can reimage your machine back to the backup state. When major updates come along or the system configuration changes, I typically update my backup file. Restore last good image. Incorporate updates. Create new restore point. I name my backups core. My restore file is 2. I have a lot of applications which are disk hogs. The restore process takes about 6 minutes for me which is super fast. Do not create backups from windows, this seems to create a problem with acronis and causes slow restore which takes a lot of time. When installing windows and doing backups, stay offline as much as possible. All you need then is the boot cd to create backup and restore points. With a ten minute or less restore process, I never worry about anything going wrong with my machine or trying out new applications. It takes longer to uninstall some applications than to restore the system. Newer versions of acronis are too buggy for me and slower than version 1.
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