Posts Tagged ‘Restore’

Windows 7 – moving to an SSD

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

My HP MiniNote 2140 which I got from TechEd Australia is actually a pretty impressive little machine.  My only concern is that given I am using it so much, I wanted to replace the 160G SATA Hard Drive with an SSD drive. I figured this would be better for me as it reduces the chances of a head crash given I carry it everywhere whilst it’s still running.

I used the Windows 7 Backup  program to do a complete backup of the hard drive to an external USB drive.  I replaced the 160GB SATA drive with a 120GB SSD drive and booted from a USB DVD drive with the Windows 7 DVD in it.  I selected the Repair Computer option and then started to restore from the USB hard drive until I got this error below

"No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found. Try the following: [...] (0×80042412)"

Basically it says that it can not find a disk to recover to.  Investigation showed that the issue was not quite what it seemed.  Windows Image backup from Vista, or Windows 7 will not allow you to restore to a smaller hard drive. In my case I was going from a 160GB SATA drive to a 120GB SSD drive.  Other people had used third party imaging tools to do the job. I decided to try something different.

I reasoned that if the issue was that the image was too large (being a 160GB image) that if I used Windows 7 to Shrink the partition, it might work.  I used the disk management console to Shrink the partition of Windows 7 from 160GB down to 85GB.  I then performed another image backup with the Windows 7 backup tool to USB hard drive.

This time when I attempted to restore it, it went through just fine. After the restore, I used the Windows 7 Disk Management tool to expand the size of the partition back up to the maximum on this disk of 120GB.  Hopefully this will help others that might face the same issues in future.

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SBS 2008 Restore to ML 110 G5

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

Following on from an earlier blog post where I had tested the restore of my SBS 2008 to alternate hardware, on Saturday I restored my SBS 2008 server to an ML 110 G5. Here’s the process I’ve used to transfer SBS 2008 from an ML110 G4 to an ML110 G5.

  1. Ensure that backups have been running fine for the past few days.  I did this by going into the SBS 2008 console and selecting the Backup & Shared Folders tab and then select “Restore a backup”.  Here you will see the list of all the backups for this server.  I reviewed the last few backups and decided all was good.
  2. I disconnected the SBS 2008/ML110 G4 server from the network and then used the SBS 2008 console to perform a “Backup Now” operation. This ensures that I have everything I need before I start.
  3. Once the backup was complete, I left the old server running so I could easily see anything I needed to in event of emergency.
  4. I setup the ML 110 G5 on the bench with no network connection.
  5. I inserted the SBS 2008 DVD into the DVD drive and booted up without the USB backup drive connected.
  6. Select the correct Language and Country options and Next
  7. Select “Repair Your Computer”
  8. Connected my USB backup drive to the server
  9. Select “Complete PC Restore” and it scanned the USB Hard Drive for the backup images.  It found the most recent backup and displayed it as 2:29pm on 20th November when in fact I had backed it up at 9:29AM on 21st November.  Thats ok – it also displayed the timezone information which allowed me to see that this was the right backup.  I selected that backup and Next.
  10. SBS 2008 doesn’t have the RAID controller drivers for the ML 110 G5 inbuilt so I had to use the Add Drivers button to add the drivers.  I had to however plug in the USB stick with the RAID drivers on them first which I did.  I selected the right drivers and hit Next.
  11. I ticked the box to confirm that I wanted to erase the drives and proceed with the restore. It’s 9:50am now and the restore is proceeding… time to wait.
  12. 12:20pm – just on 2.5 hours since the restore started, it’s finished and rebooting.  Remove the USB devices while it’s rebooting and take out the SBS 2008 DVD or it might try to boot from that again.
  13. I connected a loopback adapter to the servers NIC so that it had a network interface to bind too.
  14. Logged in to the server and it starts to ask for drivers… I’ve elected to say “Ask me later” as I want to install all the drivers myself first up and then go from there.
  15. I copied the folder I prepared earlier with all the drivers downloaded from the HP website to the desktop of the ML110 G5.  I then set about installing them all beginning with the ML110 G5 Chipset drivers first, RAID Drivers second, and then the Network Card and Video drivers.
  16. I connected the network cable to the server and then opened the SBS 2008 Console and ran the “Connect to the Internet” wizard and used it to confirm and fix my servers IP address as it was before.
  17. Reboot and check the servers event logs – all looks great. Test everything and connect a new backup drive and we’re done.
  18. Total time around 3 hours or so.  Not bad using the inbuilt tools that come with SBS 2008.

 

Hardware Specs of my new server

HP Proliant ML 110 G5

Pentium E2160 Dual Core CPU @ 1.8Ghz

8GB RAM – yes 8GB is enough for my requirements. I’ve in fact run it on 4GB on the old server without an issue as well.

2 x 500G Drives in Hardware RAID 1 Array – this is where SBS 2008, Exchange and all key user data is stored – this is what I restored using the process above.

2 x 1.5TB Drives in Software RAID 0 Array (the HP ML110 G5 can’t handle more than 2TB as a logical volume).  This is my data dump of ISO files, drivers etc that are not so critical. I use DFS-R to have this data also stored on another server in the network in case we have a drive failure on this server.  After the restore, I used DFS-R to replicate the information back over to this server.

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Free Backup and Recovery Software?

Friday, November 20th, 2009

I got an interesting email today from Paragon Software.

I thought that our latest release can be interesting for you and your community: we’ve created a brand new Paragon Backup & Recovery Free Edition at no cost to users: http://www.paragon-software.com/home/db-express/index.html.
Paragon Backup & Recovery is the most powerful disc-imaging and recovery solution on the market today: it is the only one that can do differential backups; create a bootable USB/flash drive and execute automatic data exclusion option. It also supports all existing backup techniques, performs disc imaging to any backup destination and supports Windows 7.
Currently, we are getting the feedback from the market about this tool and your professional feedback is more than appreciated. Please, help us to remove the inertia plaguing of consumers when it comes to backing up and encourage them to act with diligence and confidence!
P.S. The Paragon free software portal is available at: http://www.paragon-software.com/free/

I’ve used their tools in the past for some of our customers and have been impressed.  I’ve not had a chance to try this one out just yet, but it certainly looks interesting.  The only limitation I can see is that it’s for “non-commercial use” which implies home users.  Perfect for our clients home PCs that they refuse to backup :-)

I’d be interested in any feedback you’ve got to offer if you try it out.  I plan to do so over the next few weeks and will post a review of it here when I’m done.

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SBS 2008 Restore to alternate hardware

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

My SBS 2008 server is running on a 2 year old ML110 G4 and the disk subsystem is not up to the task.  I’m unsure if it’s a hardware issue or just old as I frequently get the system pausing whilst the hard drive light is flat out on.

Anyway – I decided to look at restoring it to an ML110G5 – newer disk controller, 3GB SATA drives etc.  Here’s the process I used.

1. I went into the BIOS and ensured that the boot order placed the DVD at the top, the inbuilt hard drive as 2nd and the removable USB hard drive as 3rd. 

2. I took the last full backup from SBS, and booted from the SBS 2008 DVD. 

3. I selected the right country and then selected “Repair You Computer”. 

4. I selected “Complete PC restore” and it began to scan my USB drive for backup images. 

5. Clicked Next and then selected “Add Drivers” as I know that SBS2008 does not have the RAID driver for the ML110 G5 inbuilt. 

6. Next again and then tick the box to confirm that I wanted to erase all data on the inbuilt hard drive and I was away… well almost. 

After a minute or two the restore process gave me an error on screen “element not found 0×80070490” and stopped. Hmm – a little strange, but a quick Google found that this was due to the detection process of the restore program.  It had detected the USB drive incorrectly in the process.  Easy fix. Remove all the USB drives, reboot and then connect the USB drives AFTER step 3 above and it then commenced restoring.  The backup drive was a 400GB 2.5” WD drive and it was restoring around 250GB of data all up.  It took approximately 2.5 hours to restore the data, and after a reboot it was good to go – I could logon to the console.

Ok the next bit was pretty basic – installed all the drivers for the ML 110 G5 from HP’s website and another reboot.  To be safe, I ran the “Connect to the Internet” wizard on it to ensure that it bound and set the IP on the servers NIC correctly. Amazing huh – it all worked with out of the box product.

Ok today was just a test restore.  I plan for the real thing on Saturday when I do all my major server maintenance.  I’ll let you know how it goes after it’s all done.

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