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. I set up CrashPlan for resuming backups later.

Set up network

• Set IP address to 192.168.1.8
• Set up print shares.
  • Had to use the wrong driver for PostScript (Laser Jet 2300 instead of Laser Jet 2200.) Seems to work anyway.
  • iMAC now works with this printer
  • ejblap2 set up very easily because it is a windows 7 machine. Once the share was set up, I just browsed to it on the laptop and created a new network printer.
  • aiblap is a netbook running windows 7 starter. It was not set up correctly for the network for some reason, even though I had set up a print share in the past. To find the new share, I had to log into ejbdesk1 with username and password, so this may not be totally right.

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
• Java SDK and JRE - downloaded and installed latest v6 release
• Jalbum - downloaded latest version
• K-Lite_codec_pack_760_Full and K-Lite_Codec_Pack_64bit_510 - There are later versions of these, but I did not bother to upgrade.
• Crashplan - more than just installing. I needed to re-start with the backup environment. More on this below.
• Adobe reader - not in kits, but needed it to read some crashplan stuff
• Vegas Movie Studio 9.0b - this installs visual c++ 2005 runtime. The tools below came with Vegas. Each of the three applications has a serial number that gets entered when the tool starts.
  • DVD Architect Studio - This is a separate tool and starts in the normal way and asks for the serial number when it starts.
  • Cinescore Studio Plug-In - This is a Vegas plugin that starts with the menu item for generating music for a clip. The license is entered when the plugin comes up.
• tsdiscon - session disconnect application. Copied to c:\Windows\ and shortcut for the start menu.
• turbotax 2010 - probably don't need this, but it might be useful for starting next year's taxes. Installed updates on prompt. Opened and was able to open my 2010 tax return.
• Nero Burning Rom - Ran installation but it aborted because I was also installing turbotax. Something completed and asked for a reboot, but I ran installation again. This time it asked for the serial number, then completed installation. Started and entered registration information.
• Nikon Capture NX2 - Don't use this much anymore since I got photoshop CS5, but it is use useful on occasion. Canceled download of Nikon Transfer, which is not useful to me. On tool startup, I was prompted for both the NX2 and NX1 key codes. Good reason to keep old stuff.
• Photoshop CS5.1 - prompted for serial number during install. Installed only the 64 bit version. Tested with open recent and it found the right stuff.
• PDFCreator - Virtual printer that creates PDF files. Downloaded the latest version and installed. Did not work, so I uninstalled, removed the old PDFCreator printer, and installed again. Now it wants a reboot before installation - done. Re-installed.
• UltraEdit - Re-installed V1.13. For some reason there it came up registered. The license file is an html file, which would not open with firefox, so I opened it with the newly installed UltraEdit. The license key is there, but it looks like I will not need it. Creating a text file.
• windirstat
• WinRar - The registration key is already in place in the program files area. Maybe the installer copied it from the installation directory.
• powershell - already installed, but needed to change script policy. Details for this: Power Shell Owner's Manual
• SeaTools for Windows - for diagnosing SeaGate drives, which is nearly all that is in the system at this point.
• SmartMonTools - to add capabilities for diagnosing drives with SMART Monitor.
• GSmartControl - GUI for smartctl, part os SmartMonTools. The system crashed with a blue screen after bringing this up, so there might be a problem here. I'll check it later. For now, leave it alone in case the blue screen was a coincidence caused by something else.
• Default Programs Editor - Not an installable program. Already restored to the C:\Applications directory. Moved a shortcut to the Task Bar
• DNG Converter - for converting camera RAW to Adobe Digital NeGatives
• flowplayer - not really an application. It is a flash player for the web, and was already restored.
• foobar2000 - for playing APE lossless audio files. I use it with the foo_input_monkey plug-in to convert APE to MP3

Bringing CrashPlan back up

This was not as easy as I had hoped, mostly because I did not understand how everything worked. The two computers that back up to this one were fine once I set the machine up to be on the right IP address; it may have even worked without this IP update. aibdesk just started working, but ejblap2 needed to be set up to back up to ejbdesk1. Getting ejbdesk1 to start backing up was not so easy, because ejbdesk1 showed up twice in the list. I deleted the old one, which I probably should not have done. CrashPlan gives each computer a serial number that is associated with the backup files, so I am afraid I deleted the backup files from the server when I deleted the old computer instead of using a CrashPlan procedure designed for this situation. I emailed CrashPlan support about this, so maybe they can fix this.