System Rebuild - Lost MBR on C drive

Something happened to my C drive and it stopped booting. Other stuff was going wrong before I discovered this because I was getting emails from Crashplan that backups were not working. I was on vacation in Tucson when this started happening, so I had to wait until I got home to check it out. The network was acting up, so I decided to re-boot. No workee. I tried the repair functions from the recovery disks I created right after getting the machine, but they did not work. I got one successful boot and then it stopped working again. I can only assume the MBR sector on the disk is bad, plus some other stuff. I also tried some third party tools, but no luck. But while I was gone, the replacement disk for the bad V drive came and was sitting on the front stoop. I installed this and tried to restore the system to it from the image I had made recently. This also would not boot. So I ran a factory restore from the recovery disks, and now things are working. Of course, now I have to re-do tool installations, etc, to get everything running.

Bring up external drives

X drive comes up as J, but works. Resetting it to X

M drive is finicky about starting. It is still in warranty, but I managed to make it start. Resetting to M

O drive started fine

Bring up internal drives

When I did the factory restore, I unplugged the SATA connectors from the internal drives, V/Y and W. When I restarted with these plugged in, the machine did not boot. I found that the drive order was wrong in the BIOS and it was trying to boot on W, which is not bootable or active. I did have Y set to active, though, but no boot stuff there. I changed the BIOS to put the boot drive first, and it booted with no problem. It does make me wonder if this was what caused the boot problem with the old drive, though. But the symptoms were different and why would this suddenly happen? ...unless this was the first reboot since setting Y to active? Maybe I will check this out sometime, but now I am committed, and an occasional system rebuild is probably good to do.

Set up drive letters for V and W, then deleted and recreated the volume on Y, not active this time, and named it "spare."

Restore user files on drive C

Installed CrashPlan and logged into my account. Set up the X: drive local backup for this machine as a destination, and started a restore on all of the C drive stuff I had backed up. This includes all of the application specific user directories, email database, firefox favorites, etc. The restore took about three hours, during most of which I was out at a meeting.

Set up network

• Set IP address to 192.168.1.8
• Set up print shares

Re-install applications

Skipped the big stuff like LabView and Inventor for now

• Norton Internet Security came up automatically because it is part of the factory build. Still have not figured out why it already knew about my paid subscription. Computer serial number, some installed code, or whatever, but it knows who I am and the state of my subscription.
• Windows live came up automatically and prompted for download of applications. I chose Movie Maker, which I use regularly.
• 7-zip
• acritum rename 3 - applied license from kits folders
• AVS Video Tools - applied license
• Better file Rename - applied license
• Bit Torrent
• calibre - came up with all of the restored content and subscriptions. Downloaded the latest when prompted and re-installed.
• exiftool, exiftoolgui - not installable tools. They were restored to the applications folder.
  • Added C:\Applications to system PATH to access these tools.
• Thunderbird - downloaded latest version (8.0) and added to kits. As soon as I started it, it started downloading unfetched mail from the server using the restored files in my user area.
• Firefox - downloaded latest version. Home page, bookmarks, etc, are already set up because of user specific file restore.
• VLC Media Viewer
• Fast Stone Image Viewer - downloaded the latest version
• FastPicureViewerCodecPack-v3.1 - This is a new download.
• Filezilla - downloaded latest version
• Irfanview and plugins - downloaded latest version
• Google talk - downloaded latest version