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A bit of help... (Read 31448 times)
Sparky
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A bit of help...
Mar 19th, 2009 at 9:12pm
 
By trade and education I am a computer professional but I haven't worked with backup utilities very much. I used ghost a few times back about 10 years ago and haven't really had to since.

I am now face with an interesting predicament. About 4 months ago I got a new PC from a company that included a 450 gig hard drive and a 30 gig Solid State drive. Guess which drive they put the OS on? One clue... its starting to run low on space due to updates and such.

I am running Vista 64 Home Edition and I found out about the utility to let you shrink the HD on the fly. So I split the big drive into two. It kept all the other stuff in tact and I now have 2 225ish gig partitions one empty and one with most of my stuff on it as well as the solid state with Vista on it. What I want to do is get Vista onto the empty partition which i will dub W: and make it the primary boot drive without a bunch of fuss. I would rather not re-format and whatnot if I can avoid it. So in the words of the nearly immortal Scooby Doo.... REEEEEELPPP!!!
 
 
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Re: A bit of help...
Reply #1 - Mar 19th, 2009 at 9:43pm
 
Sparky,

A brief answer. Ask for more details if needed. What software do you plan to use?

Delete the partition dubbed W: You want unallocated space here so Vista doesn't see a partition when the image is created.

Create an image of the Vista partition, writing the image to the remaining partition on the large HD.

Remove the 30 GB HD from your computer. Configure the 450 GB HD as the boot drive.

Boot from the restore CD and restore your image to the unallocated space.

Boot into Vista.
 
 
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Re: A bit of help...
Reply #2 - Mar 19th, 2009 at 10:23pm
 
Okay Im not sure which software to use at this point and thanks for pointing out to delete the partition. I would probably have caught that or at least should have from having formatted so many hard drives in my tenure. I was thinking of using some sort of bootable CD with either DriveImage XML or something. I can't get the darn thing to even think of working in Vista on the fly. It just doesn't want to lock the drive or VSS. I may have to use the Ultimate Boot CD though because I only have one copy of xp which happens to be a Dell Restore. I am sure there are alot of routes I could choose at this point but wading through all of this is a tad daunting though I don't mind putting the work in at all.
 
 
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Re: A bit of help...
Reply #3 - Mar 19th, 2009 at 10:24pm
 
PS: What kind of software combo would you recommend?
 
 
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Re: A bit of help...
Reply #4 - Mar 19th, 2009 at 11:25pm
 
Sparky,

You can use IFD (Image for DOS) as a one month trial. It's one of my favourites.

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/image-for-dos.htm

Download and double click makedisk.exe to create a boot CD. Don't tick any of the Select Options. Ignore the Additional IFD.INI Options.

Using the CD is fairly straight forward. In general, use the BIOS (Direct) choice instead of BIOS. It's faster.

Any questions?
 
 
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Re: A bit of help...
Reply #5 - Mar 19th, 2009 at 11:52pm
 
I forgot to mention, when you restore, you can tell IFD what size Vista partition you would like. It's on the final window. You can choose anything from 30 to 225 GB.
 
 
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Re: A bit of help...
Reply #6 - Mar 21st, 2009 at 5:33pm
 
Okay I got the backup made and I am ready to restore it. The problem is now the it wants to delete everything on the secondary hard drive ie) the 450 gig one or at least the screen it runs into says that they will be deleted and I don't want that either.
 
 
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Re: A bit of help...
Reply #7 - Mar 21st, 2009 at 5:40pm
 
I see why now.... hrrm.... I dont have any media large enough to store the large files on to house them to do a backup/restore without wiping out a hard drive at least not using this anyway. I do thank you for all of your help Brian Smiley It is very much appreciated. I guess I have to find something that i can write onto a partition of a hard drive without killing the other partitions if that is even possible.
 
 
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Re: A bit of help...
Reply #8 - Mar 21st, 2009 at 8:56pm
 
Sparky,

Stand by. You have made a mistake somewhere. Your image should be around 20 GB which should easily fit on the 225 GB partition. It will be restored to unallocated space so there is no problem there. Where have you gone wrong?
 
 
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Re: A bit of help...
Reply #9 - Mar 21st, 2009 at 8:58pm
 
Sparky wrote on Mar 21st, 2009 at 5:33pm:
The problem is now the it wants to delete everything on the secondary hard drive ie) the 450 gig one or at least the screen it runs into says that they will be deleted and I don't want that either.  

Are you restoring to the 225 GB of unallocated space? None of your files will be deleted. You must be choosing the wrong partition.
 
 
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Re: A bit of help...
Reply #10 - Mar 21st, 2009 at 9:47pm
 
I just ran through a practice restore and you don't get a message about deleting files or partitions if you restore to unallocated space. So you are not restoring to the correct area.
 
 
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Re: A bit of help...
Reply #11 - Mar 22nd, 2009 at 12:35am
 
Okay here is a step by step of what I am doing:

I boot into IFD and start the restore process.
I pick the location of the file which is on a partition of the drive I want to restore to. I pick the options of BIOS Direct and then I get to the screen where it says that the other two partitions on the drive will be deleted. I hit next at that screen and I get a message saying that the image file is on the disk I will be writing to are you sure you want to do this and I stop there because I am not wanting to screw anything up.
 
 
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Re: A bit of help...
Reply #12 - Mar 22nd, 2009 at 12:43am
 
OK. I thought you had a 450 GB HD divided into two partitions. One partition contained all your data. The other partition was empty and was to be deleted so you should only have one partition on that HD.

Quote:
the other two partitions on the drive will be deleted.

That's one thing I don't understand. You should only have one partition (225 GB) and 225 GB of "Free Space". Not two partitions.
 
 
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Re: A bit of help...
Reply #13 - Mar 22nd, 2009 at 12:44am
 
I think I may know what I did. Instead of backing up just the partition in question I backed up the entire drive. That may be what is causing my issues. While I am back on here though. One thing I am not sure how to work around at this point is when I do manage to get this thing backed up and restored, since the restore will be be the OS and such how will that effect the drive letters and whatnot? Considering all of the registry references to C: etc
 
 
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Re: A bit of help...
Reply #14 - Mar 22nd, 2009 at 12:49am
 
Brian wrote on Mar 22nd, 2009 at 12:43am:
OK. I thought you had a 450 GB HD divided into two partitions. One partition contained all your data. The other partition was empty and was to be deleted so you should only have one partition on that HD.

Quote:
the other two partitions on the drive will be deleted.

That's one thing I don't understand. You should only have one partition (225 GB) and 225 GB of "Free Space". Not two partitions.


Okay I can explain that. I have one solid state drive C: which is 30 gig and where the goofs that built my system decided it best to put the OS. Then I have a 450 gig hard drive F: which I used Vista to shrink into two halves. F: and W: I then split W: into a 100 gig and 132gig portion. The 100 gig I formatted and assigned a drive letter. I left the 132 gigs where I want to restore the backup I did of C: unallocated. The backup is stored on F:

So it looks like this:

Backup C: ----- stored on F: which needs to go to unallocated on the same drive different partition that F: is
 
 
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