During a spectacular thunderstorm, I suddenly got a pop-up from Win7-64 stating that one of my disks was failing. When I clicked "details," it identified my SSD (second generation Intel) boot disk. Soon it totally stopped working. In BIOS, it was listed as "Intel Boot Loader" instead of "xxxxSSDxxxG2xx."
Not to worry - I had a 2-day-old backup image of the OS drive. So, I put in the Win7 installation disk and clicked "repair." But - unlike the two or three previous recovery operations, which went well - it could not find any backup images. I had not renamed my computer, I had not renamed the backup image, nor had I put the image on a different drive than where it was created - any one of which is a known cause of failure for the auto-find feature of Win7's restore utility. And that, eh, "beloved" ("bedeviled"?) utility does not have a browse function that lets you look at your attached disks and files.
After reading a lot on the web, I re-installed Win7 on another disk, then used Win7's disk manager utility to open the .vhd (image) file. According to one forum thread, you should be able to simply copy all the files in the .vhd over to the boot's root directory and thus restore all the programs. That didn't work, of course, because you can't copy a new version over a file that is in use, and many of the OS files were of course in use.
So I saved all the .vhd files to a new partition, then booted to a disk that had WinXP installed. Again I tried to copy the files, and this time most could be copied; but in some cases I got "access denied" error prompts that I could not overcome.
So I pulled the disk and connected it to a Linux (Ubuntu 9.04) box, and then I successfully copied all files from the image over to the boot partition.
Unfortunately, it still wouldn't boot. Would my 3+ months of installing and tweaking my dozens of programs go down the drain?
The good news: I found that, after copying all the .vhd files with Ubuntu, now the Repair utility on the Win7 disk was able to find the images for that installation. After installing the most recent image, all booted like normal (except drastically slower, for my spinning disk isn't nearly as fast as the SSD). It probably took about 6 hours of intense work, but what a relief!
After getting all working again, I went into the Backup utility from within Win7 to see if now it could find the images. Nope.
So I made a new image using my trusty old DriveImageXML program (free, open source), running from a BartPE boot CD (also free). Then I used it to create a new Win7 installation on another disk. After opening that disk in WinXP and marking the disk as "active," I was able to boot from it after selecting it as the boot disk in BIOS.
Lesson: Don't use the Win7 backup utility to create images. While it does have the advantage of allowing one to open all the files in the .vhd and copying any one of them without having to totally recreate the entire OS, it's not reliable - as others on the Win7 forum have found. Instead, from now on I'll be again using BartPE/DriveImageXML, for it has never let me down (it has saved my bacon probably a dozen times or more). Just remember to first open the restored disk on another Windows computer and mark the drive as "active."
Another lesson? My computer was running from an 1100-watt-hour name-brand UPS which always powers the computer from its internal battery. I never worried about thunderstorms, for the UPS battery/inverter system would be immune to surges. If a really big one came, it could destroy the UPS, but my computer should have escaped unscathed.
However, I've read that the traces on the second-generation Intel SSDs are only 34 nm wide - something on the order of a mere 10 silicon atoms! Perhaps even cosmic rays could damage a trace. I'm guessing that the intense electric and magnetic fields from really close thunderbolts somehow got into the SSD directly and destroyed one or more of the traces. Are these things reliable? (My first-gen Intel SSD with 50 nm traces was not affected.)
Not to worry - I had a 2-day-old backup image of the OS drive. So, I put in the Win7 installation disk and clicked "repair." But - unlike the two or three previous recovery operations, which went well - it could not find any backup images. I had not renamed my computer, I had not renamed the backup image, nor had I put the image on a different drive than where it was created - any one of which is a known cause of failure for the auto-find feature of Win7's restore utility. And that, eh, "beloved" ("bedeviled"?) utility does not have a browse function that lets you look at your attached disks and files.
After reading a lot on the web, I re-installed Win7 on another disk, then used Win7's disk manager utility to open the .vhd (image) file. According to one forum thread, you should be able to simply copy all the files in the .vhd over to the boot's root directory and thus restore all the programs. That didn't work, of course, because you can't copy a new version over a file that is in use, and many of the OS files were of course in use.
So I saved all the .vhd files to a new partition, then booted to a disk that had WinXP installed. Again I tried to copy the files, and this time most could be copied; but in some cases I got "access denied" error prompts that I could not overcome.
So I pulled the disk and connected it to a Linux (Ubuntu 9.04) box, and then I successfully copied all files from the image over to the boot partition.
Unfortunately, it still wouldn't boot. Would my 3+ months of installing and tweaking my dozens of programs go down the drain?
The good news: I found that, after copying all the .vhd files with Ubuntu, now the Repair utility on the Win7 disk was able to find the images for that installation. After installing the most recent image, all booted like normal (except drastically slower, for my spinning disk isn't nearly as fast as the SSD). It probably took about 6 hours of intense work, but what a relief!
After getting all working again, I went into the Backup utility from within Win7 to see if now it could find the images. Nope.
So I made a new image using my trusty old DriveImageXML program (free, open source), running from a BartPE boot CD (also free). Then I used it to create a new Win7 installation on another disk. After opening that disk in WinXP and marking the disk as "active," I was able to boot from it after selecting it as the boot disk in BIOS.
Lesson: Don't use the Win7 backup utility to create images. While it does have the advantage of allowing one to open all the files in the .vhd and copying any one of them without having to totally recreate the entire OS, it's not reliable - as others on the Win7 forum have found. Instead, from now on I'll be again using BartPE/DriveImageXML, for it has never let me down (it has saved my bacon probably a dozen times or more). Just remember to first open the restored disk on another Windows computer and mark the drive as "active."
Another lesson? My computer was running from an 1100-watt-hour name-brand UPS which always powers the computer from its internal battery. I never worried about thunderstorms, for the UPS battery/inverter system would be immune to surges. If a really big one came, it could destroy the UPS, but my computer should have escaped unscathed.
However, I've read that the traces on the second-generation Intel SSDs are only 34 nm wide - something on the order of a mere 10 silicon atoms! Perhaps even cosmic rays could damage a trace. I'm guessing that the intense electric and magnetic fields from really close thunderbolts somehow got into the SSD directly and destroyed one or more of the traces. Are these things reliable? (My first-gen Intel SSD with 50 nm traces was not affected.)