Image Restore Part II

[OldGuy]

After 8 hour of making an image to a USB drive and 10 hours of
restoring the image to the blank drive I am now working on that laptop.
And yes the image restore booted when the successful clone did not.
Subsequent clone attempts failed right up front using several clone SW
packages.

1) fortunately had a Macrium Reflect Free 32bit boot CD.
2) unfortunately when the MRF CD was created it did not remind or help
gather the Network or other drivers that might be needed when
restoring.
So even though I had an image on my LAN I could not use it. That would
have been much faster than using the USB2 drive with another Image.
The restore using the USB2 was supported and work but was very slow.
Bottom line, although it took hours, I did not have to feed a bunch of
CD apps or download a bunch of app to manually restore the laptop or
download all the old eMail.

3) MRF create a partition on the blank HDD to match the image so I have
unallocated HDD space to bring on line.

Question: what is the best way to verify that the installation is good
and stable?

Acronis Drive Monitor reports SMART as excellent (OK) for the new
drive.

 

[Paul]

After 8 hour of making an image to a USB drive and 10 hours of restoring
the image to the blank drive I am now working on that laptop.
And yes the image restore booted when the successful clone did not.
Subsequent clone attempts failed right up front using several clone SW
packages.

1) fortunately had a Macrium Reflect Free 32bit boot CD.
2) unfortunately when the MRF CD was created it did not remind or help
gather the Network or other drivers that might be needed when restoring.
So even though I had an image on my LAN I could not use it. That would
have been much faster than using the USB2 drive with another Image.
The restore using the USB2 was supported and work but was very slow.
Bottom line, although it took hours, I did not have to feed a bunch of
CD apps or download a bunch of app to manually restore the laptop or
download all the old eMail.

3) MRF create a partition on the blank HDD to match the image so I have
unallocated HDD space to bring on line.

Question: what is the best way to verify that the installation is good
and stable?

Acronis Drive Monitor reports SMART as excellent (OK) for the new drive.

If you used Macrium Reflect Free, and it didn't die along the way,
then the operations you were doing must have succeeded. Good software
won't tolerate an error in an operation like that, unless you
specifically tick a box that says to "skip busted stuff". If a
disk is really sick, you tick such a box, so that the transfer
will finish in a finite time.

There are some suggestions here, for comparing disks.

http://forums.storagereview.com/index.php/topic/25683-how-to-compare-two-partitions/

There are some programs listed here too. The Wiki lists are normally far
from complete, so they don't have everything. The programs
here, some just compare two files byte by byte. But some also
compute CRC or a checksum, as a means of doing hash comparisons
on the files. Which in the end, for a well chosen hash, has the
same effect. Either method would work. So what you want is a tool
that will compare a whole directory. And hope it'll accept "C:\"
and "D:\" as directory specifications. Some programs specifically
reject such, and they would make you compare the folders
like "C:\Program Files\" to "D:\Program Files\", one top level
directory at a time. I've run into programs that won't
accept "C:\" as a specification.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_comparison_tools

Have fun,
Paul

 

[OldGuy]

Found

SFC /option

A MS app. The MS website implied that SFC was for Vista upwards but it
does exist on XP Pro too. Start / Run/ Cmd / "SFC /SCANNOW"
And other options like scan once at boot.

I will try that as soon as some things I am doing now finish and report
back.
Hopefully that will cover the OS part of it and provides a full report.

Gottoworkon my sticky keyboard too. The
spacebarworksonthefeftsidebutnotheright. lol

 

[Paul]

Found

SFC /option

A MS app. The MS website implied that SFC was for Vista upwards but it
does exist on XP Pro too. Start / Run/ Cmd / "SFC /SCANNOW"
And other options like scan once at boot.

I will try that as soon as some things I am doing now finish and report
back.
Hopefully that will cover the OS part of it and provides a full report.

Gottoworkon my sticky keyboard too. The
spacebarworksonthefeftsidebutnotheright. lol

Yes, you can run sfc /scannow. Good luck getting
it to run for you, as it has a few quirks.

As near as I can tell, it uses more than one information
source. And it didn't seem to consult a Microsoft server,
during the run (not a lot of network activity,
which would imply checking against a master list).
It should use your i386 folder on the installer CD,
as well as some cache that has Windows Updates or similar
in it. When I did my test, I didn't break down the process to
that level. If I was doing it now, I'd probably run
Sysinternals Process Monitor, and eliminate all doubts
(you can record file I/O with that).

If you have the original i386 folder from the install
stored somewhere, there are a couple registry entries
you can change, to point the tool at that info source.
If you have the CD, it may work if the CD is the same
drive letter as it was at some previous time. If the
tool can't seem to see the CD, then you might have
some registry editing to do. Just to give an idea
of what it might take to get it working.

You would think the design would make more sense, if
you could provide a source drive letter on the command
line, with the other parameter. That way, there'd be
no ambiguity about where to look for the i386 folder.

Paul

 

[OldGuy]

Problem is I am not sure what it actually does.

MS says it fixed a problem since Win2000.
i.e. if SFC found a problem it would fix by installing an older version
of the file rather than the same version.
I cannot find anywhere what it does with Win XP Pro but since XP came
after Win2000 I guess it is fixed for XP.

 

[Paul]

Problem is I am not sure what it actually does.

MS says it fixed a problem since Win2000.
i.e. if SFC found a problem it would fix by installing an older version
of the file rather than the same version.
I cannot find anywhere what it does with Win XP Pro but since XP came
after Win2000 I guess it is fixed for XP.

I've run it, and nothing seemed to break here.

Paul