Learning experience -- Restoring Win7 Disk Image to larger partition

adbsgicom

So my HDD crashed yesterday -- thankfully after my nightly backups. The boot sector was toast so I decided this might be a good time to increase my storage as well. My system is Win7 x64 and my main partition is RAID0.

1. Not all HDD's are RAID enabled. They aren't explicit about this, but make sure you get a RAID-Enabled Disk. Western Digital RE3 disks is what I ended up with.
2. Win7 hates finding an external HDD bay. Once I got my base system up, I needed to find the installation for the drivers for my external SATA (actually a pair of drivers). During the image recovery process, it won't find anything, and you can go into the advanced options, and add drivers to find extra devices. Once found, the recovery was flawless.
3. Well, almost. MS protects you from yourself by forcing the restored partition size back to the size of the partition you saved. So even though I was configured for a 1.4TB partition, it clobbered it back to 0.9TB. There doesn't seem to be a way to expand the RAID within the O/S.
4. Found this wonderful tool called Partition Wizard referenced in the Windows7 Forum. For home use, it is FREE. Allowed me to slide my recovery partition to the top of the disk and extend the main partition into the void. Managed the reboot to expand the partition without a hitch.

Hopefully your disks will continue to spin flawlessly, but if they fail, this might make your process take a little less than the 48 hours of me pecking around and being told by HP (my computer OEM) that it wasn't possible to restore from an external disk, and wasn't possible to extend a RAID partition.

hgernhardtjr

Andrew, I have a slightly different problem but perhaps you or another member can help. My MB fried but the XP HD is fine. So I purchased a new Windows 7 Core i7 machine to do AVCHD video editing along with photo editing (it rocks at those HD videos, btw!).

I can get into and transfer any USER files (Administrator, etc) on the salvaged-XP-and-put-in-an-external-FireWire-enclosure-drive, EXCEPT I cannot get into my own User/Henry (it even denies me from seeing the file structure within my User/Henry) to transfer various files I need access to ... and am unable to "take ownership" — Windows 7 will not let me. (There were no passwords or logons involved with that XP HD, btw).

Any help would be appreciated. If worse comes to worse, I suppose I can put the old HD into one of my lab's older XP machines, save the stuff out from there (to DVD, whathaveyou), then put it onto the Windows 7 box, but that is very time consuming and I really should not have to do that. It should be as easy as I have done in the past with older Win versions: put the drive in an external enclosure and transfer the files. Period.

adbsgicom

If you can get to the all-users space on the HDD, can you just move it user/Henry to user/allUsers on work machine and then pull it over on the Win7 machine? Not ideal, but better than making a bunch of DVDs.

hgernhardtjr

I will definitely try that. It's beyond me why Micro$oft is so danged paranoid about "security" anymore ... it just makes it difficult for joe-user while not causing problems for joe-hacker. I'll also piddle with the user permissions some more ... I may have missed something.

All my important data (e.g., photos, stuff in work) is triple-backed-up so that is not a problem. It's just the time consuming hassal of putting everything back the way it was, and the non-important stuff that might need to be recreated or reinstalled (favorites, email addresses, X10 controller software, printer profiles, etc.) — and, hey, let's face it: its just easier to copy Adobe's Presets/Actions/Brushes/etc. to the new install than redo it all!

Scott_Quier

hgernhardtjr wrote:

Andrew, I have a slightly different problem but perhaps you or another member can help. My MB fried but the XP HD is fine. So I purchased a new Windows 7 Core i7 machine to do AVCHD video editing along with photo editing (it rocks at those HD videos, btw!).

I can get into and transfer any USER files (Administrator, etc) on the salvaged-XP-and-put-in-an-external-FireWire-enclosure-drive, EXCEPT I cannot get into my own User/Henry (it even denies me from seeing the file structure within my User/Henry) to transfer various files I need access to ... and am unable to "take ownership" — Windows 7 will not let me. (There were no passwords or logons involved with that XP HD, btw).

Any help would be appreciated. If worse comes to worse, I suppose I can put the old HD into one of my lab's older XP machines, save the stuff out from there (to DVD, whathaveyou), then put it onto the Windows 7 box, but that is very time consuming and I really should not have to do that. It should be as easy as I have done in the past with older Win versions: put the drive in an external enclosure and transfer the files. Period.

In Win7, most (all?) commands do not run with Admin rights, regardless of the fact that your account is a member of the computer admins group. What I would recommend you try is to run your application (windows explorer, cmd.exe, whatever) with "elevated privileges". Right click on the application icon in the menu to bring up a pop-up menu. Near the top will be an option to "Run with administrator rights". Select that and proceed on your way. I think this will solve your problem of taking ownership of the files. Once you have ownership, you should have no issues with copying the files to another destination.

hgernhardtjr

Thanks, Scott ... I will definitely try that. I already ran into that once on one install program, but did not put 2+2 together. While my on-going experience predates DOS, to the punch-card and wired board programming era, this is my first bout with Win7 — so I am still having to learn new ways and methods!

hgernhardtjr

Well, no luck ... so I simply plugged it into another older XP machine and was able to read ALL the files and begin my rather selective transfers using a couple of 8gb flash drives and some DVDs. Slow, but there's less than 50gb of stuff to transfer (plus or minus). I'll go to the external backup drives/DVDs for all the rest.

Perhaps one day I'll laugh at all the ridiculous paranoid security Micro$oft is wont to do nowadays!

adbsgicom

Now that you are on win7, I can recommend (with the caveats above) to use the system image backups and just have it do the incrementals every night. Aside from the little annoyances in the flow, I had 100% data and application recovery. When the computer came back up, it was like I had never left.

hgernhardtjr

Thanks, Andrew ... I set it up (hopefully properly!) on my 2nd internal 1tb drive!

But I still will use my externals to backup my work, like I did on the XP machine. I use Seagate Free Agents; both were set to automatically backup, while the second internal on the XP machine was also a work backup. Then, every so often, everything went to DVDs for long term storage in a safe place.

But since I've changed machines and OS, it is a bit of a hassle to get everything back to working with my own work flow! Hopefully the Win7 backup will be taken into consideration by future Win OSs ... I hate hassles!

adbsgicom

hgernhardtjr wrote:

]
But since I've changed machines and OS, it is a bit of a hassle to get everything back to working with my own work flow! Hopefully the Win7 backup will be taken into consideration by future Win OSs ... I hate hassles!

I hear you. Too many fun and useful things to do, to spend time fighting with the OS.

Scott_Quier

I know this is way to late to solve the problem but it was bugging me and it might help someone else. I continued to search for a solution and I think I may have found it here. It would seem that, in addition to taking ownership, one must also change the permissions on the files and folders.

hgernhardtjr

Actually, Scott, that link was one of the places I tried to follow step-by-step with no luck, although it is very clear and easily followable. It just did not work in my situation.

Granted, different installations have different settings, but you would think there would be something SIMPLE we could do ... especially since when I plugged it into an XP machine and everything was totally and freely readable. I've worked with computers for years, in fact teach "computers" at a local college, and was (and remain) totally stumped.

As a member of the sexagenerian club, perhaps I'm just getting too old to do things the newer, more complicated, paranoid-Micro$oft way! Gettin' 'bout time to retire ....