Tag Archives: restore

Restoring Windows 7 after an oopsie

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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

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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

MySQL backup and restore databases with views

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We recently installed OS X Leopard Server at work. I had to take MySQL databases from our old Tiger Server and restore them onto the new XServes. Both servers are running MySQL Server version 5.0.45 but our Tiger server is running MySQL Client version 5.0.22 while our Leopard servers are running MySQL Client version 5.1.18. According to MySQL’s documentation (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysqldump.html):

Prior to release 5.0.48, this option did not create valid SQL if the database dump contained views. The recreation of views requires the creation and removal of temporary tables and this option suppressed the removal of those temporary tables. As a workaround, use --compress with the --add-drop-table option and then manually adjust the dump file.

I tried the –compress option but it didn’t work. I still had to manually adjust the SQL file. The I tried the GUI tool from MySQL, http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/gui-tools/5.0.html (MySQL Administrator).

mysql_admin.jpg

Once you create the backup, you can restore it using the same application on the newer server. It will even include the views. Once you start using the newer client, you shouldn’t have a problem restoring databases with views from backups made with the mysqldump command.