Reimaging, Again

As I blogged before, the external CD/DVD drive that I originally bought with the tablet PC bit the dust and we replaced it with a different brand. The next time I needed to use a bootable CD, I found out that my PC can only boot with a select few CD/DVD drives, and my replacement was not one of them.

Tim and I were going to install BootIt™ Next Generation on my PC but ran into problems and decided to just reimage the PC again. Fortunately, our friend Bruce let us borrow his external CD drive that works as a bootable drive for my PC. However, after trying several different bootable disks and getting varying results—sometimes a successful boot but usually not—we are thinking that Bruce’s drive may be getting flakey. Also, Tim read online that both USB plugs have to be connected to a powered USB port for the Targus PADVW010, the drive Bruce loaned us, to work properly.

That was not the fatal problem, though. After spending quite a bit of time researching creating a bootable SD for my PC (again), I happened to look at the contents of the recovery disk that came with my PC. I was browsing around in files, and when I looked in RECOVERY.TXT, I saw this: “THIS UTILITY WILL NOT WORK IF YOU HAVE FORMATTED OR CONVERTED YOUR C: DRIVE AS NTFS!!!!”

My boot partition was NTFS. Sigh.

WARNING: The following notes may not be completely accurate because we tried so many different things.


Today, Tim ran the Western Digital (WD) tools from a CD to reformat my new WD 320 GB hard drive as FAT32 so that we could use the Toshiba M200 tablet PC recovery CD to put an image onto the drive. He specified just a 10 GB boot partition so that the format would go quickly. For this part of the procedure, Tim had installed the 320 GB drive into the second hard drive slot in his Dell PC because we couldn’t get the WD tools to work on my PC.

Then Tim put the WD drive back in my PC. However, the USB cables and my PC’s power cords interfered with each other, so we had to attach a powered USB hub to connect them all.

We booted up with the Toshiba recovery CD that came with the M200 and we saw the prompts to start the recovery. We had previously been able to get this far. After the initial warning screen and our acceptance of the installation, a pause (a couple minutes?) had us a bit worried. But then a Norton Ghost screen appeared. Yippee! We had reformatted with a 10 GB boot partition, but the recovery disk overwrote that with an image size of about 38154 MB, of which 2545 MB was used.

After the recovery disk finished its work, we booted the recovered hard drive in my PC and got past the initial Windows startup questions. Then Tim removed the hard drive and put it back in his Dell PC. He ran Image for DOS to create an image of this clean recover configuration. That image is on an external hard drive as a small, nice, clean backup that I can use even without Bruce's CD/DVD drive.

Once we had the 10 GB baseline partition, we then made a copy of it, and began updating Windows (e.g., got Service Pack 3). That took at least three reboots and update steps.

Normally we would want BootIt Next Generation to be the partition manager, but due to my PC's apparent BIOS limit of 137 GB, we can’t make partitions above that point, so over half the drive is unused.

We found that we could see the unallocated space with Image for Windows, but we couldn’t do anything with the space. Image for Windows sees all four primary partitions being used and no extended partitions. One possible solution might be to make one primary partition into an extended partition. Then Windows might allow us to get to the rest of the space.

We had hoped to get farther along today, but once again we’re giving up for this weekend. We still hope to find a way to create a partition for me to store my data separate from my programs.

NOTE: The WD tools will not boot from CD on my PC.

Converting .ISO to .IMG... Maybe

I don’t know if this really worked, but I want to save my notes since I had such a hard time figuring out how to use WinImage. I had already seen what looked like a complicated process for creating a bootable SD, so when I realized that my PC came with an “SD Memory Boot Utility,” I decided to try it.

However, it wanted a floppy disk .img file, and I had a .iso file for a CD. I read online that sometimes just changing the file extension would work, but the utility still didn’t recognize the file after I changed the .iso extension to .img.

Here’s the procedure I followed that failed but appeared to have promise.

1. From WinImage, open the ISO file and extract the contents to a local directory.
2. From WinImage, choose New, File. Since I wanted a size bigger than any listed, I chose a DMF option.
3. Choose Image, Inject a Folder, and select the folder containing the extracted files.
4. Chose File, Save As, and select .ima. Something I read online made me think that .ima and .img files are equivalent.

The above procedure didn’t work, though, since the root directory I wanted to create contained more than 16 entries. The WinImage help says, “DMF format has only 16 entries in the root directory…” I couldn’t find enough entries that I thought might not be needed, so I went on to another path… probably another dead end.

Automatic Backup, Finally

Tim started playing with FreeNAS and installed a terabyte FreeNAS server at my place. Maybe someday I’ll be able to get all my photos, including thousands that I haven’t been able to access for years, there! But we haven’t gotten that far yet.

Tim and I both started using CrashPlan as a free backup service, so I had my local PC data backed up when we decided to work on my PC again—in a way that might require reformatting.

Last night I copied about 50 GB from my PC to the FreeNAS server, and there was one delayed write failure. Uh oh—don’t know what caused that.

Hooray for Tim, SpinRite, and Image for DOS!

I am once again regretting that I have not been taking notes, thus requiring that I re-learn how to do things I’ve done before, now that I’m trying to re-image my PC again. It’s a Toshiba Portege M200 tablet PC.

Recently, I had a hard disk failure that made my PC unbootable. Horror of horrors! I started having withdrawal symptoms just thinking about my PC-less prospects. My magnificent hero, Tim, used SpinRite to recover my disk, the 80 GB drive that I’d had in the computer since I bought it in 2005. However, SpinRite reported some unrecoverable errors, and we weren’t quite sure of the full integrity of the hard drive.

Then we went to Fry’s Electronics and bought a WD Scorpio Blue 320 GB EIDE notebook hard drive, and Tim used Image for DOS to put the 80 GB hard drive image onto the 320 GB drive—in a partition that was a bit bigger than 80 GB (90 or 100?). I didn’t even know that putting an image onto something a different size was even possible. (Weeks later, we found out that using an NTFS partition for that would be a problem.)

Somewhere in this process, which took most of a weekend, the file system lost track of the rest of the 320 GB, so I have not been able to use the extra space on the notebook hard drive. Tim and I decided to address that problem on a different weekend. I used the PC for a couple weeks like that, but I planned to take Tim’s advice and install BootIt™ Next Generation to set up a clean partition that I could fall back on in the future.

Bonjour Error when Connecting to a Mac Printer via XP

I reimaged my PC recently, and I have gradually been reinstalling everything I need. Before the reimaging, I had used Apple’s Bonjour for Windows to quickly and easily connect wirelessly to the Brother printer connected to my brother’s Mac.

However, today I spent hours trying to get the printer connected and then surfing for troubleshooting information. The error message Bonjour displayed was, “You do not have sufficient access to your computer to connect to the selected printer.” This error message is apparently normally caused by the PC local security policy for “Devices: Prevent users from installing printer drivers.” My policy was set correctly set to “Disabled,” though.

My brother couldn’t find anything to try changing on his Mac, and it didn’t make sense that the problem was there since we had this working before I reimaged my PC.

However, we decided to try something I found on the web anyway, and it worked. My brother said that step 6 was the key: ‘6) Mac: Set firewall to "Set access for specific services and applications."’

Automatically end processes when shutting down

My PC was running really slow this morning, so I decided to restart it. Shutting down took forever because I was prompted to end each task one by one. Before I reimaged the hard disk on my PC, I had edited the registry to automatically end tasks at shutdown. Today it took me so long to find what to edit again that I decided this needed to be in my PC notes.

You should know what you’re doing before you edit the registry, since you can really mess things up if you make a mistake. I backed up my registry and then changed HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\AutoEndTasks to 1.

Below are some related Microsoft links.

• Safekeeping the Windows XP Registry
• How To Automatically close non-responsive programs

Updated AutoRun to Open USB Drive Folder

My solution from yesterday (AutoRun to Deal with USB External Drive "Delayed Write Failed" Problem) was too irritating. I'd double-click on the drive in the Windows Explorer and the power saver utility would run instead of opening a folder of the drive contents.

So I changed the AUTORUN.INF file to run a batch file that opens the folder and runs the power saver. Here are the new contents of the AUTORUN.INF file.

[autorun]
;open=Kathys_Autorun.bat
ShellExecute=Kathys_Autorun.bat
Label=Tim's 500 GB USB External Drive

Here are the contents of the called batch file, Kathys_Autorun.bat. (In the first "paragraph," each line begins with "echo." I'm not going to bother dealing with the word wrap that is happening on the blog page.)

echo off
echo Turn off standby (e.g., switch to the PRESENTATION mode of POWER SAVER)
echo while using an external USB drive to prevent going into standby and
echo thus causing DELAYED WRITE FAILURES.
echo .
echo Better yet, remember to EJECT the USB drive when you are done with it.

REM Bring up an Explorer window for the USB drive.
echo .
echo (1 of 2) Ready to open an Explorer window.
pause
start explorer.exe /select,Kathys_Autorun.bat

REM First try running the Toshiba Power Saver.
REM If that fails, try the Windows Power Saver.
echo .
echo (2 of 2) Ready to run Power Saver.
pause
control.exe TPwrSave.cpl
if %errorlevel% 1 start powercfg.exe /setactive presentation

The batch file displays a message, opens the USB drive folder in explorer, and starts the power saver utility.

I added something to run the Windows power saver if the Toshiba one fails to start. Hopefully someone will let me know if that works.