Grrrrrhh Windows Shista!

[Deleted User]

danthemoneysavingman wrote: »

you haven't suggested anything above!

See Post #3

gonzo127

my personal thoughts on this are that unless you have any specific programs or games you just have to use then i would seriously suggest dumping vista totally and moving over to Ubuntu (i did this just over a year ago and just dont look back and only boot into windows when i want to game)

99% of windows programs have a alternative on Ubuntu which are generally free, if you need to run a windows program you also have the option of running something in WINE or running vista in a virtualbox

yes there would be a learning curve but with your system, the lower requirments that Ubuntu needs would make your system so much faster, and you will also benifit from not having to run a anti virus program etc therefore freeing more of your system resorces up to actually run your programs

danthemoneysavingman

anewhope wrote: »

See Post #3

must improve my eyesight!

candtalan

khublaikhan wrote: »

Not quite the right....

1) Backed up (called "Complete PC Backup" in Vista) the system volume in HDD1 to a seperate HDD2.

2) Removed HDD1. Set HDD2 as Master.

3) HDD2 has two Partitions: First Partition is 100GB - formatted NTFS. Second Partition is 60GB, formatted NTFS and contains the Backed Up image from HDD1.

4) I restored the Backed up image from SECOND Partition of HDD2 (60GB) to the FIRST Partition of HDD2 (100GB free space).

Restoring an image from a partition to another Partition on the same drive is apparently too much for Vista Ultimate to handle. It was the drive letter assignments of the drives that Vista could not cope with. The image was from a C:\ drive but was backed up to the E:\ drive and was being restored to the \ drive. When I reassigned \ back to C:\ the restore completed (apparently) successfully.

I am going to do a fresh install - but first I will check the memory with an Ubuntu CD...

Thanks

When backing up data and restoring data the obvious choice is user data or complete system including the operating system. However, the master boot record (mbr) is located on the relevant hard drive but is *outside* the normal partitions. It resides in a boot sector in a small but standard number of bytes. It can only be written to using tools specifically for that purpose. In xp days I think the microsoft tool FIXMBR is commonly used.

So, unless your backup tool featured an abilty to restore the mbr - to your new blank drive for example - it is rather unlikely that you did what you expected, completely.

Even with some disk image tools, they do not always include the mbr unless you specifically set them to.

With your newly restored hd (but not working), try then using fixmbr or similar?

Good luck

candtalan

Afterthought: (Vista vs Ubuntu etc)
FWIW, my awareness of such things as mbr only became clear after I moved away from windows....... It was an indirect advantage of using a foss system (Ubuntu) when nobody has any thing to hide, to get money from you for example. This meant that knowledge is passed around fully and freely without restriction.

I hope you get your machine working, however, keep Ubuntu in mind? It can refresh parts which other OS's fail to reach.... :-)

(ubuntu user)