March 1, 2005
Don’t Die Yet
I have written about my old PC before and how it continues to think about suicide. Well, last weekend I worked all day on Sunday on a project on this computer. In the middle of the day I started getting pop-ups telling me that user.exe in System32 was gone and I needed to re-install it. Learning from last time, I went into System32 and saw that no files were in there alphabetically after T anymore. Oops. The indexes must be corrupt again. Why does this keep happening? I figure the disk is going bad somehow.
So to run chkdsk you have to do it on reboot because C: is in use. Ok, here we go. I haven’t rebooted since July because I am afraid of it not coming back up. So on reboot — it doesn’t come back up. Error messages were flashing too quickly so I used the old camera trick. I took a series of photos to see the message. It said that that disk didn’t have a boot sector. I then used my BartPE tool to go in and it couldn’t see that disk either.
Hmmm. So next I took all the hard drives out to be sure they were still sounding ok. Check. Then I randomly unplugged all the drives except for the one that houses C:. I changed the jumpers to indicate this was a single drive instead of a master. Then I ran the Windows 2000 repair process off of a floppy boot disk. Sure enough, this now could see the drive. I ran a chkdsk and it filled the page with fixes it had corrected.
I reconnected all the drives and rebooted. All good! Whew.
This machine is telling me that it is going to die any day now. So I am on the replacement strategy search. At this point, my plan is to buy a new Dell Dimension 8400. Since I don’t need much in it except for power, it seems like it will cost about $850. Then my plan is to go to the old machine, install Ghost, and build images for the 3 drives that make up 5 partitions. Then what I want to do is boot into the Ghost recovery program on the new machine and restore the images from the old machine, which should recreate the hard drive on the new machine. Think this will work? Anybody ever tried it? This is my best shot I think at getting an upgrade to happen. I can’t just buy a new machine and reinstall all my stuff because I don’t have all the media anymore (my bad). Looking for suggestions if anybody has ever tried a migration like this.
Another option on the machine was one of the Dell PowerEdge workstations. They come with no OS and seem to be priced more around $500. Seems like a good deal.
Brandon,
Have you written or called the software company that makes the software that you don't have the media for? If they can identify you as a valid customer (product/license key, name & address, etc) they should send you a copy of the media.
My (limited) experience with imaging software has not been good. I have found that if I try restoring an image to a machine that was not an exact duplicate of the original machine (manufacturer, model, specs), the "cloned" machine did not work correctly. My work laptop beeps periodically throughout the day and I am just waiting for it to die on me.
One company is Microsoft and I have worked with them and they can't get me what I need because it is end of lifed. I have parts but I don't have or can't get all the patches and updates that are on the machine. One option is to try and get a basic install going and then patch the rest of the stuff as needed. Might work.
A lot of the other things I have the original media but I don't have all the updates archived and the vendors don't make them available anymore.
Its either that battle or the ghosting/copying battle. Neither are clean. It is just a matter of which is less pain. The ghosting seems like after I get through any hardware issues it will just work and I don't have to worry if I missed anything.
i've had similar (limited) experience with ghosting a hard drive: i've done it twice... once to immediate success; the other time i ran into similar probs to what Brian stated: hardware wasn't identical... but, the immediately successful operation was with Ghost 9.0, whereas the unsuccessful operation was not... so maybe, with Ghost 9.0, having identical hardware doesn't matter. :P
Brandon - don't see the size of your current drive? And, this is clearly a PC issue and not a Mac so I could be off-base... I'd buy a new/clean bare drive and config as slave (hopefully the same size as current main drive?) - put it into the PC and Ghost over (yes, use the latest - their algorythms are better for error correction/data recovery).
Then, either...
> Pull the drives and swap the Master/Slave configuration and verify you start up and all's well on the "new" Master
... or...
> Buy a shiney new Dell or Alien box and load the new drive in as Slave... boot up by it whenever you need it...
Just my thoughts.
Sounds like a great plan to me...as I surprisingly cannot come up with an alternative. HA HA! Good luck. On second thought, I think you should go wait upon your crippled wife instead.
As with most internet postings, I have no direct experience with what you are trying to do, however I will offer a completely useless opinion anyway (isn't the internet grand!)
My guess is with the imaging software route you have a 50/50 chance of getting it to work with new hardware. The issue is probably going to be when you boot up, it will have install a bunch of new drivers and such, and I don't know how smoothly that will work (are you up on all of the latest service packs?). Then you will have to search around for win2k drivers for your fancy new hardware (gigabit ethernet drivers, usb2.0 drivers, etc).
If the drive is the issue and not the machine it runs on, why not image the drive and stick in the new drive into the existing hardware (ala Todd's posting). That way you won't have to mess with drivers etc.
That Dell 8400 should treat you well. I recently bought one and put a gig of memory in it, and it runs very nice.
We ghost computers at work all the time. It's a very efficient way to migrate someone from an old system to a newer one and seems to work ok but there are always weird anamolies. For instance, photoshop hates to be ghosted. Other programs seem to work fine. Sometimes we get weird glitches in the OS that eventually lead to reinstall. For the most part, it works ok. I would recommend making an ISO of your drives if possible. Better safe than sorry.
Thanks to all for the opinions.
What did I end up doing? I ended up getting one critical piece of software from Microsoft. Then I carefully started copying program files from the old computer to the new one and rebuilding the registry manually for those apps. There were some shared files in the Windows directory I missed but I copied those once it complained. Eventually, after a few hours last weekend, I did my first build on the machine and it worked. There are still some tweaks here or there but its 95% there. Good enough. So the old machine is on standby in case I need anything else off it in the future. In another month, I will put her out to pasture.
In theory you could just load the old system's drive into a spare bay in the chassis and connect it as a warm standby inside your new box... but, that may be what you have been planning already...
i recently read your article on cdnow.com for the velvet revolver cd and i have recently bought an ipod and i completely agree w/ everything you said. i found that driver SbcpHid, and deleted it, then entered the cd in the cd drive while holding down the shift key. i then went into itunes to rip it but the music was still all skipping and messed up. please let me know if there is anything else i can do to get this cd on my ipod. email me back as soon as you can, thanks a ton.
i just posted the last comment and forgot to leave you my email address, sorry, its bradywurtz@yahoo.com
this tip may be of use for cloning old hd to new.
norton ghost9 in the recovery mode can restore
files or folders from the image file so instead of restoring the image just recover the files you
need to the os and as your not running the os
you dont get problems with locked files
this method can take some time but has helped
me on a number of times.
from brian perree. good luck.