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Restore Failure

Question
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My oldest laptop is an IBM T20 - anemic by modern standards but I keep it running (XP Pro) and up-to-date. Why? Well, it's handy when enjoying a long soak in the tub, and if I were to get it drenched it wouldn't be a great financial loss.
I recently found that I couldn't do Windows updates or MSE updates, tracked it down to a defective disk structure on the C: drive, and repair attempts with CHKDSK partially clobbered Windows. I decided to just do a full restore from WHS from a time prior to the flaky behavior.
The restore reported that it couldn't find any network drivers for the Intel PRO/100 wired drivers. It could deal with the wireless card, but there doesn't seem to be any way to provide the WPA information so I think I'm limited to wired connections.
Attempts to find drivers on the web to put on a thumb drive were for naught - everything I found was in the form of an EXE file that actually installed the drivers; there was no facility to dump them to a folder.
Then I decided to read what WHS was actually telling me, and it suggested that there would be a recovery drivers folder within the Windows directory, and that this folder could be copied to the thumb drive. How reasonable and intelligent! So I did that.
To my surprise, while the drivers do, in fact, get picked up correctly when prompting the recovery process, they don't seem to work correctly. I either blue screen quite early after recovery starts, or the recovery goes for a while, with the progress bar maybe 20% done, and then things just hang in perpetuity. At this point, due to the partial recovery, there's no NTLDR.SYS and the machine is non-bootable. I've tried enough times to think this is not a sporadic problem.
I've got a cheap USB nic on order, and perhaps that will be the ultimate solution, but I'm curious if someone has a feel for what may have failed in what I thought would be a routine restorative process. It's no big deal to reinstall WinXP from scratch, but I'd obviously prefer to just drop in a WHS backup image.
Art
Friday, August 13, 2010 10:59 PM
All replies
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Saturday, August 14, 2010 2:32 AM
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Thank you - In the absence of any other suggestions, I'm going to try the USB first, just because it's so easy, and if its drivers are similarly unrecognized I'll give this a try.
Apologies for asking something that turns out to be in the FAQ.Art
Saturday, August 14, 2010 3:41 AM -
Thank you - In the absence of any other suggestions, I'm going to try the USB first, just because it's so easy, and if its drivers are similarly unrecognized I'll give this a try.
Also, in case you're using a RealTek NIC, you might want to check out this FAQ post as well.
Apologies for asking something that turns out to be in the FAQ.Art
Saturday, August 14, 2010 4:01 AMModerator -
in case you're using a RealTek NIC
Or even if it's not a RealTek one.
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."kariya21 [MVP]" wrote in message news:9d9ec3d1-bf8a-4d9c-a030-d752dc717b4b@communitybridge.codeplex.com...
Thank you - In the absence of any other suggestions, I'm going to try the USB first, just because it's so easy, and if its drivers are similarly unrecognized I'll give this a try.
Apologies for asking something that turns out to be in the FAQ.
ArtAlso, in case you're using a RealTek NIC, you might want to check out this <http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/whsfaq/thread/b14e3cf2-7b02-4569-8c26-c75b7a58d6e7> FAQ post as well.
Have a nice day!Saturday, August 14, 2010 5:01 AM -
Decided not to wait for the USB nic to arrive, and gave the ClientRestoreWizard a shot. It's so easy to pull drives from IBM / Lenovo laptops, so why wait? I stuck it in a USB enclosure an attached that to a much newer Lenovo laptop.
The wizard was easy to use, and it took about 35 minutes to restore the massive 20 gig C: partition - the only partition on that drive. Afterwards, I could see that the disk was readable and had the various folders that I expected.
Unfortunately, upon putting it back into the T20, it wouldn't boot - just got a flashing cursor rather than the expected XP bootup sequence.
I booted off an XP CD, went to the repair console, and confirmed that the disk could be routinely interrogated. I tried FIXBOOT and FIXMBR without success. The latter always reported a non-standard MBR and warned me about possible loss of partitions if I were to proceed. Several instances of that command, allowing it to proceed, never remedied that issue.
This is exactly the same symptomology as I reported a few months ago, when I couldn't restore my main desktop. I ultimately reinstalled Windows 7 and all my application, and retrieved the data with WHS. Interestingly, on that desktop, I had need a few weeks later to purchase another disk, and on a whim I stuck it into the desktop, did a full restore, and the resultant disk booted up just fine, although I had no need for it.
Could I be missing something obvious? Is restoring the C: partition alleged to be sufficient for a restore operation, or is there some more-global structure that I should be restoring?
Art
Sunday, August 15, 2010 3:14 AM -
Unfortunately, upon putting it back into the T20, it wouldn't boot - just got a flashing cursor rather than the expected XP bootup sequence.
I booted off an XP CD, went to the repair console, and confirmed that the disk could be routinely interrogated. I tried FIXBOOT and FIXMBR without success. The latter always reported a non-standard MBR and warned me about possible loss of partitions if I were to proceed. Several instances of that command, allowing it to proceed, never remedied that issue.
My guess would be that the original T20 system disk contained a hidden boot partition, a custom boot sector or maybe both. OEM Manufacturs like IBM use these solutions to enable system diagnostics or a factory restore. The hidden partition was not backed up (i.e. not restored) and/or the customized boot sector could not be properly restored by WHS. As a result of this the system can not properly boot. Fixing the MBR (means writing a standard master boot record) will not always resolve these kind of problems.
I think the best way out (if at all possible) would be trying to do a full "repair" of the OS installation using the orignal IBM/XP installation CD.
For this you boot from the XP CD, select ENTER ("setup Windows XP now): setup should then list your current installation. Selet it and choose "R" for repairing...
Not sure if you allready tried this?
- Theo.
No home server like Home ServerSunday, August 15, 2010 11:56 AMModerator -
As reasonable as that theory sounds, I believe it isn't the case - this was an upgraded system disk (7200 RPM) that I had done the XP installation from scratch.Sunday, August 15, 2010 1:28 PM
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Hi,
(*silence*)
Did you by any chance use an external disk managing tool (e.g. Acronis, Ghost) for formatting and/or partitioning that might have altered the disk in a way that WHS can not properly handle?
- Theo.
No home server like Home ServerSunday, August 15, 2010 9:02 PMModerator -
Hi,
(*silence*)
Did you by any chance use an external disk managing tool (e.g. Acronis, Ghost) for formatting and/or partitioning that might have altered the disk in a way that WHS can not properly handle?
- Theo.
No home server like Home Server
Negative - don't own any programs of that nature.The situation has gotten a lot more serious. I had need to restore a single file from on of the other machine's backups; I accidentally deleted part of that .htm file. Now, from all my machines, when I open the WHS console to open a backup so as to restore the file, the "Backup Details" screen for the T20 opens up. I can't close or get rid of it, even after opening the T20 backup that I don't particularly need. I'm really in a bind right now.
Art
Monday, August 16, 2010 3:45 AM -
The situation has gotten a lot more serious. I had need to restore a single file from on of the other machine's backups; I accidentally deleted part of that .htm file. Now, from all my machines, when I open the WHS console to open a backup so as to restore the file, the "Backup Details" screen for the T20 opens up. I can't close or get rid of it, even after opening the T20 backup that I don't particularly need. I'm really in a bind right now.
Art
I'll answer my own question - rebooting the WHS machine made that one go away. Back to the much-less-serious T20 issue. Maybe I'll try a full format of the disk, as there's nothing to lose.
Art
Monday, August 16, 2010 4:19 AM