SavageHobo's Computer Nightmare!!!

[Savage_Hobo]

So I have effectively killed my Windows XP partition. While uninstalling some software my computer decided to BSOD. When I rebooted I found that I couldn't uninstall ANYTHING and windows updates failed. I have tried everything to fix this and have come to the conclusion that I need to Nuke the box and start over. Luckily I made an image of my HDD about a month ago and have backed up all the files since then. But...... I made the mistake of compressing the image... So I've spend the last few hours decompressing the image file (still not done) and will attempt to restore the image after that. I am still able to use my Linux partition to do things but because of my "non-windows" boot sector (GRUB) the Windows CD won't boot... It just keeps getting better and better

[juneau]

That sucks. If you need help you know where to come.

[WalkinTarget]

Times like that where I pat my Windows Home Server on its flat plastic head and think to myself 'You were worth every penny I spent on you, my friend'.

Full system backups nightly. Remote access, web hosting, Itunes streaming .. it does it all.

[Savage_Hobo]

Yaa... the backup thing gets a little complicated as my system is a laptop.. a Dell Inspiron 6400 to be exact. I'm going to be building a desktop soon (I'll post my proposed specs when I've confirmed it). Right now my backup is still being written (uncompressed) back to my external hdd from my work computer.... Still running.... still running....

[Savage_Hobo]

YAHOOO!!!! I'm back up and running! My image from a month ago successfully decompressed!! It took about 2 hours to decompress and about 7 hours to write back to my external hdd (uncompressed). So my next backup image will definitely not be compressed. It only took 45 min to write the image to disk

[juneau]

Good to hear.

[Apache Warrior]

Yea.
Apache

[WalkinTarget]

You sweated out each and every one of those 9 hours too, I'll bet !!

[Savage_Hobo]

Oh man did I ever. I pretty much left it running all day at work.... Guess it's bad when you start to smell you data transferring (my HDD got REALLY hot). But it was all worth it.... I used Parted Magic (3.0) to make and restore my image... I would recommend it for sure, just make sure that when you create an image you DO NOT compress it, otherwise you'll spend hours and hours on needless decompression and transferr-age.

[Donziboy2]

Last time i screwed up XP I just reinstalled xp right back onto the hd. Just had it delete the old xp files and reinstall. Only a few programs got screwed and i just reinstalled them.

[Savage_Hobo]

Yaa, I tried to do a reinstall without formatting but it was still messed up. All my files were there it just replaced most of the windows files... but something somewhere that was apparently really important was still corrupted... Drive imaging seems to be a really great way to go. In less than 45 minutes you can restore EVERYTHING back to the way it was... plus you can do it as many times as you need to get it right.