Tag Archives: hard drive

Restoring Windows 7 after an oopsie

Posted on by
Reply

I have a RAID10 and 2 other hard drives installed on my PC. I was trying to format one of non-RAID HDD but it wouldn’t let me in Windows. So I booted off of the Windows 7 DVD and formatted it that way. I didn’t continue the installation after I formatted the HDD. I made sure I selected the right HDD. I restarted and kept getting the missing bootmgr message like the one below.

bootmgr

The joys of Windows. I guess it’s what I get for messing around with it too much. But I accepted the challenge. Here’s what I did. I recently purchased a Kingston SSD drive which came with an Arconis software to clone HDDs and partitions. I know the data is still in my RAID array, the bootmgr is just messed up and won’t boot that drive. I tried to restore by booting off the Windows 7 disc. Unfortunately, because it’s a RAID, it doesn’t recognize it. I can load the drivers but I only have 1 optical drive on this PC and it already has the Windows 7 in there.

So I ended up cloning the contents in the RAID onto one of the HDD. I booted of the Windows 7 disc again and I was able to restore the bootmgr. This was possible because the HDD wasn’t in a RAID array and is just a regular drive. So with a working Windows 7 installed on the non-RAID, I cloned it again but back to the RAID10 array. I unplugged the other drive and rebooted. Everything is back to normal. I didn’t have any back ups yet because I was trying to prepare those drives when this happened.

Conclusion: Make sure you have a software that can clone or back up. It’s very helpful. The Arconis True Image software is great. Saved me today from re-doing my Windows machine.

RAID boo boo

Posted on by
Reply

I got my RAID1+0 set up Sunday night and I bought some molex to SATA power cable adapters (I ran out because of the positioning of the devices). After Windows 7’s backup/restore failed to restore my OS onto my new drives from a backup and image file on my NAS, I decided to plug in my old/space 1TB hard drive internally – hoping to fix that issue. The 4 drives on my RAID were plugged in with 3 red and 1 blue. Nitpicking around, I wanted to have them all red so I swapped the drive3 of the array (blue) cable with red. Then I plugged in the new drive. After booting up, I noticed my RAID manager saying that my array needed to be rebuilt. I’m guessing even swapping out cables is not allowed or it will break the chain – noob IT guy :\

So for the last few hours, my 3rd drive is being rebuilt. I’m just glad I didn’t have to reinstall Windows and all those drivers. Nevertheless, if you can set up any RAID configuration on your computer, I highly recommend it. Not only will it increase performance, but it can increase hardware reliability – based on the RAID configurations of course. If you got any questions, email Jeff from JB Tech Enterprises – support@jbtechent.com. He’ll be able to help you out. He’s a genius when it comes to these things and he helped me build my new PC, or leave a comment below.

rebuild_raid

Upgrading my iMac MB324LL/A

Posted on by
4

My 320GB hard drive is starting to fill up on my iMac so I decided to get a 1TB hard drive. I knew opening the iMac is going to be a pain. I’ve seen videos from YouTube on how to open the previous plastic models and it looked hard. Nevertheless, I needed to upgrade my hard drive and I want someone else to do it. Besides, I wanted to know how to do it and do it myself. So the first thing I needed to do is look for videos on YouTube. I kept getting the plastic iMac model but kept searching. I found 2 pretty good videos: by lexusnut and by Zenn3k. Those were my starting point.

It took my cousin and I two hours to finally access the motherboard area. I cannot stress enough on how careful you must be. Apple has placed wires in many areas where if you lift something quickly, you may pull it out of place or unplug it – leading to damaging your device. We documented the process and uploaded it on YouTube to help others.

So now I got the new 1TB hard drive installed. How do I get my old system on the new drive? There are 2 ways to do this. The first way is to use Time Machine (if you actually did use it). You can install a fresh copy of Leopard on the new hard drive. After installation, you get an option to use a Time Machine back up to restore. I’ve tried this but since I have over 200GB of data, my iMac ends up sleeping while trying to load the data to restore.

The second option is the image the old hard drive and restore it on the new one. This option took me about a day to complete. What you will need is an external hard drive, your old hard, and the new hard drive. If you image your old drive before installing the new one, you don’t need a second external enclosure. The first thing you’ll do is to boot your computer using the Leopard DVD. Open Disc Utility on the Leopard DVD. Do not do this while booted on the hard drive. It’s possible that it will not work because the drive you are imaging is in use. The external hard drive is where you will save the image file. Once finished, restore the image onto the new hard drive. That’s pretty much a brief summary of what I did.

I did run into some errors while formatting the new hard drive. This post helped me out http://macosx.com/forums/hardware-peripherals/290989-disk-utility-problem-erasing-large-external-hard-drive.html.

The image/restore process took most of the day. It may be quicker or longer for you, depending on the size of the data. Make sure you take any necessary precautions before working on your expensive Apple hardware ;)