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Garnet's Annual 2005 System Restore And Disaster Recovery CD Creation TipsGarnet's Annual 2005 System Restore And Disaster Recovery CD Creation Tips
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Tech Tips By Garnet
The past few days have been gruesome... My laptop over the last two or three months has been getting slower and slower. Several times I am at a client, and I go to wake it up and I have to wait several minutes for things to stabilize and the machine to become usable. I've tried running various spyware scanners, like Microsoft's Antispyware program, but none of them ever found any problems. I generally practice good computing hygiene and didn't really think I had any of them anyhow. Windows just tends to degrade over time if you do a lot of installs and uninstalls, although Windows XP has been much more stable that previous versions of Windows. As a developer, I would usually have to reinstall other versions of Windows at least once every six months.
I was almost to the point of thinking about buying a new laptop, you know I don't need much encouragement there. But I couldn't quite decide to break away from the Sony name brand, these Sony's have been really rugged... A cheaper machine, such as an Averatec, that ends up only lasting half as long might be more expensive in the long run...
So I decided to give my machine one more chance, and decided to go through installing the operating system and everything from scratch, have everything freshly installed.
I did this operation last year when I bought this machine. Most machines come with some kind of disaster recovery CD to take it back to factory condition, but of course it doesn't have all the additional software you want to add to the machine. So I finished installing all my must have apps, and doing all the upgrades and patches and service updates, (it's a short list probably only 60 items long!) I made my own set of disaster recovery CDs that have all my software like office, and development environments, and such, all pre-installed. It normally takes me a whole day to get a machine setup with everything I need.
Since I have my own custom made disaster recovery disks, I could have gone back to use that set of disks, and I can get my machine going again in about two hours of swapping CDs. I have made custom sets of disaster recovery CD's for all my laptops that I travel with. These could be especially vital to have when I travel overseas and don’t have my whole library of software to bring with me... But I decided to not use the ones I made last year. This Sony laptop subnotebook came with XP Home edition on it, and I fudged it around to force it to have a couple of the features of XP Pro (like IIS web server), but it was never really satisfactory....
I have XP Professional as original boxed software, legally purchased and all, but I was never able to get the laptop to accept the upgrade. Sony screwed up their machines somehow to try and force you to buy a more expensive machine with XP Pro installed, instead of allowing you to buy a home machine and upgrade it yourself. I was really angry last year when I found out about this, spent a lot of time yelling at Sony about it, and wrote a whole bunch of editorials about the problem. (See http://www.chat11.com/Related_To_Sony)
After I applied the power of wiki to the problem, Sony was embarassed by my editorials and complaints, and they finally released a solution to the problem. Or so they said... This week I restored my machine to factory condition, and tried the XP professional upgrade according to what I remembered of their solution, and of course it didn't work.... Jerks...
So I decided this week to start from scratch and install XP Professional to start, and then add all the Sony apps over the XP pro from the recovery CD. Fortunately that processed worked.... Back on Tuesday.... I've been at it ever since trying to get everything straightened out... I got the XP pro upgraded with all the sony drivers, and sony apps, spent hours applying dozens of Microsoft upgrades and patches, to get to the latest security level of "service pack 2". I went to install my legal copy of Microsoft Office, and found the install kept hanging! That's a show stopper. Time to start over again.
So I tried it again, but didn't upgrade XP first. I installed XP pro, sony drivers, sony apps, office, some other stuff, then started applying upgrades and service patches. Got everything upgraded after spending a whole day at it. Then I started running into Microsoft patches that were failing to install. Another show stopped... Time to start over again.....
In the middle of this process I also decided to look into what I would do to create a new set of Disaster Recovery disks. The program I used last year was called InstantRecovery?Create by Novastor, and it worked well. I remember last year I surveyed half a dozen backup programs, and I only found one backup program that was a reasonable solution. Most the the backup programs required you to reinstall the operating system, reinstall service packs, and then you could install their backup and recover your complete system backup. I don't think that's a reasonable solution. With Microsoft now requiring probably over 5 dozen security patches to be applied to an pre-Service Pack 1 version of XP, like came with this machine last year, it can take a whole day to get your machine in condition to restore the backup.
The big problem that backup programs have running on top of Windows is that Windows is big and monstrous and needs to load lots of files, and have lots of them open while it is running. The files might even be actively changing while you are in the middle of making the backup, as well as when you are trying to make the restore. How do you restore from a backup versions of those files that might be different than what is currently running? In other words, how do you replace your 4 cylinder engine with a 6 cylinder engine while you are driving down the highway without stopping at the side of the road? It ain't easy, hence the you have to reinstall a bunch of stuff yourself before using their backup program.
InstantRecovery?Create was a cool solution, it got around all the problems by being a Linux program on a bootable CD. Instead of booting Windows, and running the program on top of Windows, you would boot the CD, which would bring up Linux, and their application, which could then access your hard drive on a sector by sector basis. Since Windows wouldn't be running, it wouldn't be mucking around with the hard drive, or keeping files open or locked. Their program was free to operate without interference. I was able to make a set of 6 or 8 backups CDs that would serve to restore my machine back to original condition, along with having my Office, and Paint Shop Pro, and DevStudio?Create, device drivers for printers and PDAs and other peripherals I commonly use. If my machine takes a complete dive, I could take about 2 hours to run the disks through the machine one by one and be back in business.
I could have used that solution again this year. But I ran into a snag. Since I was having problems getting all my apps happily reinstalled this time around, I figured I might need to make more than one disaster recovery backup before I'd get finished. I didn't want to sit here and have to feed disks through the machine one by one, I wanted to make the backup onto an external 400GB hard drive, or maybe onto an Iomega REV cartridge...
No dice though. InstantRecovery?Create couldn't see the external drive because it was NTFS format. I tried every external drive I could put my hands on, and they all are apparently NTFS. I gave up on the Rev drive, since their Linux apparently didn't come with the right drivers for the Rev drive, which isn't surprising because I don't think it had been invented yet. And I couldn't use a network storage because I hadn't bought the "Professional Edition". Ooops....
Also, another problem is that I was notified a month or so ago that NovaStor?Create was dropping support for the InstantRecovery?Create program.... Of course I could feed my machines CDs one at a time, but I didn't want to do that until I get to my final configuration.
So back to the drawing board. I visited the www.NovaStor?Create.com website, and found they had a new program NovaBackup?Create 7.2, and I downloaded a free one month trial of it.
Remember the problem with open files and making a backup? Well, they have a third party solution you can get for that, called Open File Manager. It's another $50, but offers a two trial. I think together you'd end up shelling out $100 for a complete solution, but that isn't too bad.
I had some technical questions, so I called the Novastor tech support and one of their techs talked to me for about half an hour, he even called me back when my phone connection dropped. I told him what I was trying to do, and ended up finding out that if my machine only used XP pro native drivers for the USB (instead of OEM add on drivers), their disaster recovery CD probably wouldn't be able to see my peripherals. Ooops... It sounded like I'd have to be back to blowing CDs of everything anyhow.
I tried a disaster recovery backup anyhow, and it made some backups onto the external firewire drive, and later copied them to the Iomega rev drive. I also went through their process to create a disaster recovery boot disk, which requires you to have access to an original copy of Microsoft Windows XP, the DR recovery disk from Sony probably wouldn't have the files in the right form. I then held my breath and tried the disaster recovery boot, and surprisingly, it was able to see my Iomega drive. So I tried restoring the backup just to see what would happen. An hour or two later, my machine seemed to be back in it's original state.
Meanwhile, I had to go back and reinstall everything again because of the previous problems I ran into. This time after I spent just a few hours, I made a disaster recovery backup, this tying up the machine for about 3 hours. Then I went a little farther, installed a few more apps, then let the computer sit for three hours to make another backup.
All in all I made about 5 of these backups. I had to go back to previous backups another one or two times before I finally found the right steps to tip toe through all the installations and upgrades. Along the way I found more problems with Microsoft upgrades that argue with each other, for example: http://www.chat11.com/Critical_Update_For_Office_XP_On_Windows_XP_Service_Pack_2_KB885884_Causes_Problems Critical Update For Office XP On Windows XP Service Pack 2 KB885884 Causes Problems Another problem I ran into, with installs seeming to hang I wrote an article on: Microsoft Windows Installer MSIEXEC Command Line
During the last couple of days, I decided to also upgrade my Roxio Easy CD Creator software. I was using version 6.0 previously, and decided it was time to see their latest program. So I went to staples, found version 7.5, and really impressed to see that it included a program called BackupMyPC?Create, a product that claims to create a disaster recovery backup, without needing to reinstall Windows. I scanned the box requirements, decided to buy it, figuring it might save me the need to buy a solution from NovaStor?Create.
No such luck. Imagine my surprise when I get the program home, install it, go to create a trial disaster recovery backup set, and discover that the program requires FLOPPY DISKS! What a joke! I haven't seen a laptop in years that includes a floppy drive. In fact with my last full size laptop purchase, a Sony GRX laptop, I had the laptop for over 6 months before I realized the machine didn't have a floppy disk drive built in! A friend brought a floppy over to me, and I spent like 10 minutes looking at my machine, puzzled why I couldn't find the floppy slot, I was sure it had to have one!
I visited the Roxio tech support forum to see if there was a solution to get around needing floppy disks, and the first message at the top of the forum was someone complaining about this very issue! Someone from Roxio responded that floppies were needed to be able to boot the machine before restoring the disaster recovery backup. I guess they've never heard of bootable CD's, which have only been around for several years...
I called the Roxio tech support to complain. Or at least I tried to. I ended up at a prompt telling me that I could press 1 to create an EasyPay?Create incident, or press 2 to listen to the benefits of paying to talk to technical support! The heck with that! I'd already wasted $90 of my $100 budget to find a solution to create disaster backups of my machine, I'd be really crazy to want to spend another $20 or $30 just to make a complaint to them about this ridiculous limitation.
So I called Sales, and ended up transfered to the same idiotic EasyPay?Create prompt.
So I called Sales again. This time I was getting angry, and I started taking down names. The Roxio sales girl, named Katya, couldn't understand what it was I wanted her to do. I only had to tell her five times that I wanted her to find me a human in tech support to talk to, and that I wasn't going to accept being transfered again to a robot asking me to enter my credit card number. She still wasn't sure what I wanted her to do, so I then asked to speak to her supervisor.
He was a nice enough guy. He put me on hold a couple of times, and came back and suggested that I go and buy a USB floppy drive to make the floppies on. I told him that my experience was that often laptops wont actually boot from such floppies, unless they are the hideously expensive ones sold by the laptop manufacturer. He realized that advice wasn't too great, and finally offered to send me a form to get me a refund of my money.
Finally today, several days and editorials after I started, I finally am happy with my machine. I did a final disaster recovery backup, made a copy of it to an Iomega Rev Cartridge (deleting one of my previous interim backups), and am finally good to go.
I downloaded email for the first time in several days, and discovered problems with rules and Outlook, and wrote another editorial: [Microsoft Outlook 2003 Lacks Command To Run All Rules]?Create.
Let's hope it will be another year before I have to go through this painful exercise again. Maybe next time I'll just buy a new machine....
See Garnet's Advice For Essential Steps For Setting Up A New Machine Or Laptop ... Or Garnet's Annual 2006 Bootable Disaster Recovery Disk Tips ...
If this page helped you, please contact me and let me know.
I spend a lot of time tracking down solutions to many problems and questions, and it takes a lot of time to write about the answers so you can benefit from them. But I hope this page helped you solve your problem, or answered your question, clearly and quickly. You can also contact me about your tech problems. If you can afford some donation to cover my time to look into your problem, please mention the amount you can contribute, and that will help me give proper priority to your request.
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You can also reach me privately with your questions at [my contact page]!
- Garnet
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