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How to Recover From a Hard Disk Change Iain Laskey upgrades his hard disk I recently had to upgrade the hard drive on one of my PCs. The machine in question runs Windows XP and is attached to a small network. I thought it would be a fairly straightforward task but a few snags reared their head along the way. On with the tale. Backup, Backup, Backup I was lucky inasmuch as the hard drive in question was merely being upgraded. It may be you are upgrading because of a drive starting to cause problems such as an increase in bad sectors or a warning from a S.M.A.R.T. monitoring tool. Worse still, the drive might have just died completely. Whichever the case, the importance of a good backup regime is key to recovering. How and how often you backup is down to your own situation. What you are trying to achieve is a state such that if you lose everything, you can get back to where you were with minimal fuss. Some people choose to just backup their data and assume they can always reinstall the operating system and applications themselves. This is quite sensible as long as you have the time and can find all the original CDs. A bonus is that you can probably get everything on a single CD-R making backup cheap. On the downside, if you have a heavily customised PC or one that took a lot of configuring then having to do all that again can be a chore. Another option is to do a full backup once then to do incremental backups that only backup changes. Again, nice and easy but potentially time consuming when it comes to recovery. You are also totally reliant on the full backup and if that turns out to be bad, you are stuffed unless you have done two or more. I tend to do full backups and regularly as I am positively obsessive when it comes to data loss. Where possible I use a tape streamer and my PCs have a mix of 20Gb Travan, 40Gb DLT and 8Gb Travan. As luck would have it, the PC in question has no tape streamer yet. As the machines are networked, the obvious thing was to backup across the network to a second PC. One of my PCs is dedicated to video editing and generally has shed loads of free space in-between projects so everything looked ready to go. Windows XP has a built in program for performing backups which is accessed under Start>All Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Backup. If you don’t have this installed, you can install it from your CD like other XP features. The XP backup tool allows you to backup to a file as well as a hardware device so was ideal for the job. Get it healthy If your hard drive has started to have read problems, run scan disk or Norton Disk Doctor over it first to try to get it as healthy as possible before continuing. You may not be able to do a full backup so make sure you have the important stuff such as your data before trying to get as much of the operating system as applications as possible. The PC in question has four partitions set up as C to F. I always tend to build PCs with C: as the boot drive, D: for applications, E: for data and F: for temporary files or games. I decided to backup everything in one hit to a single file. Whenever doing a backup, you should also consider the important system files and particularly the registry which doesn’t always get backed up properly unless you specifically set this up. Another important file with XP is called wpa.dbl. This innocuous file stores the hardware configuration of your machine and is used by the product activation system to prevent piracy. If too much hardware changes, XP thinks it has been copied to a new machine and re-requests product activation. A full backup picks this up but it is worth remembering as it can save you having to reactivate XP if you need to reinstall it. I kicked off the backup and left it to it for a few hours. When I returned, XP had issued a write error but claimed it had written some 20Gb of data. On the destination PC though it showed a single 4Gb file. Confusion! Then it clicked. Older versions of Windows are limited to a maximum file size of 4Gb and the PC I was writing to was running Windows 98SE. The obvious thing to do was to backup each partition individually. That was set up and again left to it. Back again some hours later and the same problem. Two of the partitions were still bigger than 4Gb. Doh! Why didn’t I check? Once again the backup was done but this time the problem partitions were broken up into pieces so the ‘Program Files’ directory went in to one backup and everything else went in to another. That worked. Having backed up everything (with verify enabled, naturally) I was ready to swap drives. This stage was thankfully trivial. Simply switch off the PC and disconnect it from the mains before unplugging and sliding out the old drive. The mains bit is important as many PCs still have the motherboard powered up even when switched off at the front. The new drive was set to master via its jumper and then installed. Whilst it is possible to use backup tools such that you can reinstall from a series of boot floppies which then allow you to reload the main system, I decided to reinstall XP and go from there. To do this, I needed to boot the PC but then enter the BIOS to change the boot device from hard disk to CD before rebooting. The PC then tries to boot from the Windows XP CD instead of the usual hard drive. Don’t forget to change it back to hard drive afterwards though. Installing XP is pretty straightforward apart from it giving you an opportunity to create partitions which you can skip but I took advantage of to set up my C, D, E and F partitions. The XP install is amazingly intelligent and correctly deduced my network and broadband cable connection so once rebooted I could see the rest of the LAN and outside world without any further work. Next I had to open Backup and use it to restore the different partitions. I worked backwards from F: to C: as the last one would require a reboot. This stage was thankfully trouble free and on completion of restoring C:, the machine rebooted perfectly back to its (almost) original state albeit it with more free disk space free because of the new larger drive. The ‘almost’ was the graphics driver. For reasons unknown, the restored machine was working correctly in all respects apart from the monitor and graphics card were still set to default and standard VGA respectively. I reinstalled the monitor’s configuration file and downloaded and installed the latest drivers for the Radeon graphics card. On rebooting I was back to a 100% working system. WPA.DBL As mentioned before, Windows XP tracks any hardware changes and if enough of a difference is detected, it will reset your machine to a 30 days trial configuration requiring that you reregister it. I was expecting this with a hard drive change but luckily it didn’t seem to think this was needed. Be ready for this eventuality though as any other changes you make have a cumulative effect and may force a re-activation of XP. So there we have it, a successful drive swap. The secret is adequate backups and being able to recover them successfully. There is no point backing up with a program that only exists on the backups as you get a chicken and egg situation that stops you being able restore.
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