[PROBLEMCHYLD]

Thanks guys. I like your little script jaclaz. MBRFIX.CMD is great. Thank you too dencorso. Off to fixed the bugs in SP 3.4.
Be back over here in a couple of days.

[jaclaz]

dencorso, on 13 August 2012 - 04:48 PM, said:

The items I highlighted in red on the above quotation indicate, to me at least, that the HDD is bricked. I'd guess the arm is not being able to move beyond 57%. Those things are difficult/expensive to repair so it's not worth it. However, and I know this is no great solace, the HDD failed because it was about to fail anyway, and nothing you've done caused it. As soon as you had put it to use, it would have failed shortly thereafter. Count yourself lucky you didn't loose any valuable/irreplaceable data with its failure.

NO.
"Bricked" is a highly specialized technical term ( meaning that the device CANNOT BE ACCESSED at all.
If it is accessible (and up to 57%) it is not "bricked" and not necessarily has an issue with the arm not being able to move beyond 57%, it could well be a (smaller or bigger) bunch of bad sectors.
This said, yes , *somehow* the actual device has failed, or is failing and it is not worth (being no valuable data on it) to lose any time to understand what is going on, if not for "fun".
It is much easier and safer to get another one.
In any case if the "fun" choice is made, first thing is to run the hard disk manufacturer tests on it.

PROBLEMCHYLD, on 13 August 2012 - 04:56 PM, said:

Thanks guys. I like your little script jaclaz. MBRFIX.CMD is great. Thank you too dencorso. Off to fixed the bugs in SP 3.4.
Be back over here in a couple of days.

Happy you like it , though it is specifically or no or little use, it is simply a poor man's kind of FDISK (and nothing more).

jaclaz

[Ponch]

PROBLEMCHYLD, on 08 August 2012 - 09:12 AM, said:

The laptop does not boot USB flash drives if it helps.

This is the line that got your laptop described as "craptop" in the other thread. Computers usually do boot from UFD since many many years. Your main problem being that you could not have external boot ("from cd only") and target drive at the same time as they were using a same enclosure, booting USB was the obvious solution.
Where do you get your info that it doesn't boot from USB ?

[Ponch]

jaclaz, on 15 August 2012 - 02:55 PM, said:

Ponch, on 15 August 2012 - 10:40 AM, said:

Without installing third party tools. And I had a valid suggestion for that.

Which was actually the SAME one I had proposed LONG BEFORE you did, i.e. booting to "something else"

Don't be so competitive, at the end it will just keep people from replying to any question.
Not same solution. You were solving "no external boot while target drive present" when I was solving "no target present while external boot".
You would have created a 2nd partition for an alternative OS to boot from, I would have created one for temporary local image storage (more time involved, more space needed, less elegant, less practical for a possible "next time" only advantage was; less knowledge required IMHO).

[jaclaz]

Ponch, on 16 August 2012 - 06:49 AM, said:

Don't be so competitive, at the end it will just keep people from replying to any question.

Not at all competitive .
Momentarily irritated by your pickyness on the unrelated thread, yes
And the idea was not at all to somehow "intimidate" you and/or prevent you from replying to a question, your post to which I replied was NOT an answer to any question, or at least not an answer to any question asked on that thread, the idea was to highlight the off-topicness of your remark.

Ponch, on 16 August 2012 - 06:49 AM, said:

Not same solution. You were solving "no external boot while target drive present" when I was solving "no target present while external boot".
You would have created a 2nd partition for an alternative OS to boot from, I would have created one for temporary local image storage (more time involved, more space needed, less elegant, less practical for a possible "next time" only advantage was; less knowledge required IMHO).

We both provided a possible solution - of course as different variations - but on a SAME theme, that is/was "booting something else".

But - just for the record - no, I would not have needed to create a 2nd partition on the "source" (actually currently booting drive) as I suggested to use grub4dos to boot from a floppy image saved on the same (already existing) partition.
On the contrary, one would have needed a partition (even temporary) on the "target" drive, to store the image.
The idea was to make the less "intrusion" in the source drive, while having the "target" drive (which is/was larger in size) "free" to be formatted/partitioned as one would like.

Still in the idea of an "as accurate as possible" image, since the "source" drive is/was 40 Gb and the target drive is/was 120 GB, I would have (in my perverted mind) used the first 40 Gb of the "target" as "space available" to restore the image and the "rest" as space to hold the image to be later restored to the first 40 Gb.

The only changes on the source disk would have been:

• a single line added to BOOT.INI <- which can be added (and later removed) by using NOTEPAD or any text editor
  
• a single file a few hundreds of Kb added to the root of the drive (grldr) <- which can later be deleted allright
  
• optionally a second very small plain text file added to root of the drive (menu.lst) <- which can be later be deleted allright
  
• a single file 1.474.560 bytes (or less if .gz compressed) anywhere on the drive (the floppy image) <- which can be later be deleted allright

Your idea is good as well (and I don't see in it all the defects that you are now listing ) but IMHO it represents NOT an answer to the question, since you modify the source disk (by reducing the size of the current partition and add a new partition to store temporarily the image) the image contents that will be deployed to the new disk will be not the image of the disk"as is", but of the disk as "it will be" after your mods...

Since PROBLEMCHYLD didn't use EITHER of the proposed solution (which I repeat are both "valid" and "working") but used his own way (which is as said yet another non answer to his original question but the answer to another question) I would call the result of the game between us a draw or even better a null .

BTW, and just to be as picky as I traditionally am, had JorgeA asked originally the actual question he had in mind, that is/was:

Quote

Is it possible, by using Black-Armour (a re-branded Acronis Trueimage) create a procedure capable of perforiming a bare-metal recovery in case of a system hard disk crash?

He would have got a simple "Yes" answer:
http://homepage.ntlw...no-answers.html
and there would have been a lot less key presses, and bytes sent over the internet, and misunderstandings (for these latter ones, please accept my apologies should I have somehow hurt your feelings).

jaclaz

This post has been edited by jaclaz: 16 August 2012 - 05:08 PM

[Ponch]

jaclaz, on 16 August 2012 - 04:06 PM, said:

Momentarily irritated by your pickyness on the unrelated thread, yes

Who's the bully now ? I wasn't picky, it was clearly related. I think the word "installing" was the relevant difference between my suggestion and what had been offered before.

Quote

Your idea is good as well (and I don't see in it all the defects that you are now listing ) but IMHO it represents NOT an answer to the question, since you modify the source disk (by reducing the size of the current partition and add a new partition to store temporarily the image) the image contents that will be deployed to the new disk will be not the image of the disk"as is", but of the disk as "it will be" after your mods...

Well, obviously (you just pretend not to see this, I know ), in my case, the image would have been one of a partition, not of a disk (remember the OP only intends to "move XP" from one disk to an other). As such my image is 100% untouched (as you just write, only the size is reduced but we know it's a detail) while you list all 4 "temporary" changes your method would have (permanently) brought to the image.
I really stop here. I mean it.

[jaclaz]

Ponch, on 17 August 2012 - 01:07 AM, said:

Well, obviously (you just pretend not to see this, I know ), in my case, the image would have been one of a partition, not of a disk (remember the OP only intends to "move XP" from one disk to an other). As such my image is 100% untouched (as you just write, only the size is reduced but we know it's a detail) while you list all 4 "temporary" changes your method would have (permanently) brought to the image.

Well, no.
If it was a "mere" partition copy, it would never have booted from the new disk, you would need anyway to copy (or fix) the MBR and the disk signature - or the connected Registry entries).
So, even if it would not be a "whole disk" copy, it would be anyway a "whole disk copy minus the second temporary partition" .


jaclaz