Batwing~SPARTA~ Posted September 24, 2011 Share Posted September 24, 2011 Just sharing a bit of knowledge. I had a bad virus recently and I started suffering random crashes. Although virus was removed, crashes were still there and takinga look at the Event viewer, there were a moltitude of underground errors running on the machine, all over the place. System Restore failed, maybe due to virus intervention. Final solution: 1 - Restore a well known working Ghost copy of the OS partition (I forgot to create one tho...) 2 - Full nuke and reinstall OS partition - I cannot even tell you how painful that would be with tons of programs and games to reinstall OR 3 - Execute a Repair Install, which is basically fully replacing Win 7 on itself Keeping all of the previous settings, Links and Preferences. It will require an OS update later on, which can be set on Automatic to be performed seemlessy Result: (after a full no-user procedure taking 3 hours) PC is safe, my ass is safe and is a lovely Saturday... Check this for more info http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/3413-repair-install.html Now I just have to make the freaking Ghost copy... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NoScream~SPARTA~ Posted September 24, 2011 Share Posted September 24, 2011 Windows 7 has an auto backup system, I use all the time, it makes an image to any other drive. I also use Acronis True image Home, the best ever backup & recovery system. Images a 120Gb drive in around 6-7mins. http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/ ESET for protection, better than Durex. http://www.eset.co.uk/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hunter~SPARTA~ Posted September 24, 2011 Share Posted September 24, 2011 ESET for protection, better than Durex. Lmao. - JHunter Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Halli~SPARTA~ Posted September 24, 2011 Share Posted September 24, 2011 Batwing I had to do the very same thing on Sept-10-11th It is a real pain in the hard drive haha. It made me step up my new build so by end of year I will have a new system and I do want to get Acronis so this will not happen again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NoScream~SPARTA~ Posted September 24, 2011 Share Posted September 24, 2011 Batwing I had to do the very same thing on Sept-10-11th It is a real pain in the hard drive haha. It made me step up my new build so by end of year I will have a new system and I do want to get Acronis so this will not happen again. Acronis is $49 but if your budget is tight, I can share mine with you, digitally. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Batwing~SPARTA~ Posted September 25, 2011 Author Share Posted September 25, 2011 However, also if you create a clone of your partition today with Acronis, due to the fact you will have a new system, involving new MB, CPU and RAM (most probably) is very possible the system win NOT recignize your back up anymore due to a massive difference in hardware. Be preparred to a Repair Install to have all set up on a new system Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EBE Posted September 25, 2011 Share Posted September 25, 2011 Just sharing a bit of knowledge. I had a bad virus recently and I started suffering random crashes. Although virus was removed, crashes were still there and takinga look at the Event viewer, there were a moltitude of underground errors running on the machine, all over the place. Watching to mutch again .. i hear that alot these days , some off them are caused by off lack of updating drivers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NoScream~SPARTA~ Posted September 25, 2011 Share Posted September 25, 2011 However, also if you create a clone of your partition today with Acronis, due to the fact you will have a new system, involving new MB, CPU and RAM (most probably) is very possible the system win NOT recignize your back up anymore due to a massive difference in hardware. Be preparred to a Repair Install to have all set up on a new system Why do you make a thread about recovering your system then change the whole context. Your talking about system recovery, not building a new PC and restoring a previous PC OS to it. In this case Acronis is an excellent product, fast, simple and well made. Halli is building a new PC, I would never recommend a new build to have a previous build OS placed on it. The amount of rubbish left over will be eating up HD space & God knows what else. Fresh install and then add in what ever. Two totally different situations. So to recap, if your building a new system (like Halli) I personally would recommend a fresh install of OS. If your recovering from crash/virus or death of a boot HD, I would recommend Acronis. If your changing HD to a different/bigger/ to SSD I would also recommend Acronis. All these options rely on the fact that you made a backup prior, no backup? your screwed in all situations, inc. Batwings. The only advantage of Windows recovery is it Writes back the windows OS to the hard drive, so if that drive is working, you will have a bootable Windows with a virus or whatever. Then you need safe mode so the system only loads the OS and no virus etc, then you need to kill the virus or what ever. (edit for bad grammar) . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PANiC Posted September 25, 2011 Share Posted September 25, 2011 However, also if you create a clone of your partition today with Acronis, due to the fact you will have a new system, involving new MB, CPU and RAM (most probably) is very possible the system win NOT recignize your back up anymore due to a massive difference in hardware. Be preparred to a Repair Install to have all set up on a new system Have you not heard of the Acronis Universal Restore function (used to be part of the server verson but now also in the home edition)? i use this on a weekly basis to transfer a working hard drive image into completely different hardware, for example you can go from an intel system with on board raid --> amd non raid system. or take an image from an HP laptop and transfer it to your desktop machine. i used it on my own machine to go from an amd athlon system to an intel c2d you dont even have to do anything special, infact when restoring the image I have to untick a box to stop universal restore from being the default option. also an acronis secure partition is an excellent idea, it gives an F11 prompt on boot for options to restore from. the partition is invisible so less chance of being deleted accidentally. sry i cant recommend the acronis products enough. i used to struggle by with ghost many years ago but acronis blew it out of the water then, and i dont know anything else like it today. regarding repair installs, this is the only option for me a lot of the time and is one of the good things that micrsoft did used this method since 98 (although there is no repair option, over the top install has the same effect), 2000, xp mostly. ive never looked into it much for windows 7 but got some good answers from your link n1. i have to fix a lot of business machines and more often than not they have no idea of their config, dont have their install cds, have a ton of data and are usually important to the business (although you wouldnt think so by the lack of info but ppl just dont care until things go tits up), so repair install can often get them back up and running in less than an hour. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Batwing~SPARTA~ Posted September 25, 2011 Author Share Posted September 25, 2011 (edited) @ Vii: Why do you make a thread about recovering your system then change the whole context. Your talking about system recovery, not building a new PC and restoring a previous PC OS to it. In this case Acronis is an excellent product, fast, simple and well made. I didn t mean to change the subject on my "recovery" thread. I was answering to Halli with an advice, because it sounded like he was thinking to clone his partition to restore it on a new machine. However, as Panic suggest: Have you not heard of the Acronis Universal Restore function not being an Acronis user, I didn t know about this. It sounds like an amazing feature, I just wonder how they do that I may be wrong, but all of the point (and the pain) having an old OS "created' on hardware and then switching it to different hardware is that MB drivers (NB and SB, Net, Sound, etc.) and other handlers related to the specific CPU, are customized to "that" building. How Acronis can adjust those info while transfering a partition to a new "unkown" machine stays a mistery to me When I mentioned on my first post the terminology "Ghost copy" is more like a generic name of a procedure. I do not use Ghost since at least 7 years. Acronis is an amazing software, a bit expensive but amazing. I found an Amazing software FOR FREE doing 90% of what Acronis does and I am pretty happy with it. Check this out, you may want to give it a try or suggest it to a friend on a budget: http://www.todo-backup.com/ Main site with many retail products. FREE for PC: http://www.todo-backup.com/products/home/free-backup-software.htm EDIT: IMPORTANT I just discovered they released the vers. 3 (I ve been using vers 2) and on the major features says: Restore system to dissimilar hardware Therefore it is very possible now this FREE product perfectly emulate Acronis. I will stick with it. Edited September 25, 2011 by Batwing~SPARTA~ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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