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How bad did I mess up my HD? (Read 7271 times)
rneal701
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How bad did I mess up my HD?
Jan 2nd, 2007 at 1:25pm
 
Here is my tale of woe, and some questions....

I have a Dell PC with XP SP2, Ghost 10, 2 500GB hard drives configured as a 500GB Raid-1 Array (a Dell Datasafe setup) using some sort of Intel RAID controller.

The Hard drive was configured with a 300GB or so C: partition, and a 180GB or so D: partition. There is also a Dell partition of some kind and a hidden Ghost partition.

The D: partition was too small to do incremental backups with Ghost, so i got an Seagate external eSATA 500GB drive to do backups to, and wanted to reclaim the D: partition and consolidate it with the C: partition.

Here's what I did.

Made a manual Ghost full backup (not a disk copy) to an external USB drive.

Made a manual Ghost full backup to the eSATA drive.

Deleted the D: partition and the C: partition using the Windows startup CD.

Created a new C: partition, assigning all the available space.

Did a quick NTFS format of the new C: drive, and canceled out of the Windows install after the format was complete.

Then I tried to restore the eSATA backup. Made a driver disk, booted Ghost from the recovery CD, gave it the drivers, it could see the eSATA drive and the backup. All seemed well.

Started the recovery and went to bed.

Next morning, it was stuck at 75%. It never finished.

Tried to recover from the USB drive, Ghost cannot see it.

Deleted and re-added and reformatted the C: partition as above, and started the Ghost recovery from the eSATA drive. All looked good, but it hung at 64%.

I rebooted, and was surprised to see Windows XP startup normally. Everything seemed to work. I copied off some critical files to another PC, and ran chkdsk. It found lots of errors, but they mostly looked like temporary internet files.

I ran chkdsk with /f to fix the errors, and it made me restart. Had some trouble shutting down, so I just powered off.

It started back up, ran through the chkdsk, fixed some index entries, deleted some, and put some "orphaned" files somewhere. They all looked like temporary internet cache files.

XP continued to boot up normally, and everyhting critical seems to work fine.

My questions are...

1. Why did Ghost hang up on the restore? Does it have something to do with restoring to a larger partition?

2. How screwed up is my system? Is it reliable or suspect?

3. Should I try something else to get the eSATA backup restored properly to completion?

I think I have some kind of CD from Dell that will put the system back to it's initial state, presumably with the C: and D: partitions as it came from the factory. Is this what I should do to do the restore, and then figure out some other way to consolidate the C: and D: partitions?

If you are still with me after this long post, thanks for reading and thanks very much in advance for any advice or suggestions.



 
 
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Brian
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Re: How bad did I mess up my HD?
Reply #1 - Jan 2nd, 2007 at 3:25pm
 
rneal701,

I'd try a restore from the USB HD. Did both images pass "Verify" ?

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/YaBB.cgi?board=general;action=display;num=11441...

Quote:
I think I have some kind of CD from Dell that will put the system back to it's initial state, presumably with the C: and D: partitions as it came from the factory.


Dell supply a WinXP CD and not a custom recovery CD. The hidden Ghost partition is for recovery but you have some work to do before it will function.

http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/index.htm


How much of your C: and D: drives is "Used space"? Which Dell computer do you have? Any bad sectors with chkdsk?

 
 
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Brian
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Re: How bad did I mess up my HD?
Reply #2 - Jan 2nd, 2007 at 3:46pm
 
One other thought. Delete your C: partition so that you will have around 480 GB of Unallocated Space. Restore to this space using the Custom option and tick "Resize drive to fill unallocated space".

Restoring into that Microsoft partition "may" be a problem.
 
 
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Brian
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Re: How bad did I mess up my HD?
Reply #3 - Jan 2nd, 2007 at 4:20pm
 
You should be able to see your USB HD from the Recovery Environment after you have deleted the C: drive.
 
 
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rneal701
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Re: How bad did I mess up my HD?
Reply #4 - Jan 2nd, 2007 at 6:42pm
 
Brian, thanks for the inifo and suggestions.

I did not try the USB with the C: partition deleted. Will give that a try.

The original C: drive I backed up had about 150GB used and about 200GB free.

The image on the eSATA drive I was trying to restore did verify when it backed up and when I restored it.

The "Resize drive to fill unallocated space" option wasn't available when I did the restore. Maybe because I was restoring to a formatted partition?

Chkdsk is not reporting any bad sectors, but here's what it says now (after previously running it with the /f option):

C:\>chkdsk
The type of the file system is NTFS.

WARNING!  F parameter not specified.
Running CHKDSK in read-only mode.

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
File verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)...
Index verification completed.
CHKDSK is recovering lost files.
CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 3)...
Security descriptor verification completed.
CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the
master file table (MFT) bitmap.
CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the volume bitmap.
Windows found problems with the file system.
Run CHKDSK with the /F (fix) option to correct these.

362948512 KB total disk space.
146460036 KB in 164429 files.
    67332 KB in 10409 indexes.
        0 KB in bad sectors.
   309676 KB in use by the system.
    65536 KB occupied by the log file.
216111468 KB available on disk.

     4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
 90737128 total allocation units on disk.
 54027867 allocation units available on disk.

C:\>

I see it is only reporting 346GB total size, which was the size of the original C: partition before I combined the C: and D: partitions.

Interestingly, Disk Management shows the C: partition as 462.46 GB NTFS and healthy.

Thanks again.

P.S. I had read that other thread about the USB drives not being visible. I had unplugged a USB card reader that looks like four removable drives so that there was only one USB storage device attached (also have USB keyboard/mouse).  Maybe that changed the drive letter and it was confusing Ghost?
 
 
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Brian
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Re: How bad did I mess up my HD?
Reply #5 - Jan 2nd, 2007 at 7:21pm
 
rneal701,

Thanks for the extra info. I wouldn't trust your current OS. I think deleting the partition and restoring into Unallocated Space is the way to go. eSATA or USB.

Quote:
Boot to the CD
set the Time Zone
click Recover My Computer
You will probably get a message about No recovery points found. Click OK.
click Open another location
Navigate to your recovery point
click Recover My Computer
put a dot in Custom (not Express). Click OK.
Next
choose the Unallocated Space on your HD. Next.
tick Verify recovery point before restore
tick Check for file system errors after recovery
tick Resize drive to fill unallocated space
put a dot in Primary partition
tick Set drive active (for booting OS)
tick Restore original disk signature
tick Restore MBR
Next
tick Reboot when finished
click Finish. Yes.


The restore should take an hour or two.
 
 
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