Partitioning Nitemare

[tjcinnamon]

I am backing up all (3) of our finance departments computers. All of the important data is on the server (Thank GOD). I am backing them up because their set up is a more complex than most of the office machines.

I was used Acronis Disk Manager to shrink the partitions down to smaller 20GB sizes (the PC's have 140GB but only 12GB used). I figured I could shrink them down to 20GB and then back all three of the PC's on to one 74GB drive and do it twice.

The first machine went fine. I shrunk the partition and backed it up. The second machine at some point during the partition shrinking the program errored out. I'm not sure where.

The 2nd machine booted at first, I got a lot of weird errors on windows starting up about certain files being damaged. I immediatly tried to run a ScanDisk and when I restarted, to run the scandisk, it said that windows cannot start due to PCI.sys is damaged or missing. It says I should try to try to do a repair windows install. I tried to put in the XP install disk it freezes on the disk and says that it's missing a file. I am going to try another XP install disk but I'm not sure if that will fix the problem.

Would a scan disk help this computer start up, after all it did but once?

What is going on with it? What software would fix this?

How can I salvage this computer or at least repair it enough to be able to re-setup the machine by Monday so no one can blindly blame me for something.

Thanks, JOe K.

 

[Navid]

I am sorry about the problem and I do not have a solution.

I just wanted to point out that you didn't need to shrink a partition to make the image smaller. The size of the image will be determined by how much data is on the partition. The empty part will not be imaged.

 

[corkyg]

Navid is right - you can clone a drive proportionally - up or down, as long as the data fits and there is space for NTFS overhead.

 

[bruceb]

I agree. There was no need to attempt to shrink the partitions on the existing drive.
Only thing you should do is first clear out the Temp Files and then Defrag the drive
before making an Image of it.

 

[tjcinnamon]

Lesson learned. I'm hoping I can restore the integrity of the partition or at least salvage it enough to re-install a copy of it before monday morning.

Thanks,
JOe K.

 

[QuixoticOne]

If possible I'd just do a complete restore the problematic PC from Friday night's backup or whatever is available that may be sufficiently good for continuation purposes.

Having a crash and corruption during partition resizing is a potentially pretty catastrophic event and it does not bode well for the rest of the files' integrities that you're having problems booting it now. It MAY be possible to recover incrementally from the current state, but I'd say that you risk wasting a lot of time / effort trying to do so and STILL having to consult a backup to determine whether the majority of the files were really properly recovered with integrity. How else can you know what may be missing / damaged (unless there are special software / sysadmin provisions in effect to audit file integrity otherwise)?

Although shrinking the partitions might not have been strictly necessary to accomplish your goals given a sufficiently smart imaging program that can image only the "in use" areas of a disc, your attempt was logical / reasonable and "should have worked" / "would usually be expected to work". Arguably it DOES simplify backup / restore operations when the partition size is appropriate to the amount of data contained on it, e.g. if you wanted to do a more straightforward partition clone or allocate other partitions of the source disc to hold images / backups of the primary partition, or whatever. So don't beat yourself up too much over it.

Assuming that it wasn't improper for you to be messing with the systems / doing backups at all, I'd say that if explanation is needed you could just give a generic "the disk died / was found to be corrupted" and leave it at that; it happens sometimes entirely on its own without anyone's direct involvement, and any responsible corporate IT system should have adequate contingency backups in place to prevent unreasonable loss / down-time even if the whole PC went up in flames or the drive mechanically crashed into a totally irrecoverable state at any given moment.

 

[QuixoticOne]

If you have a spare drive or can image the current one to a snapshot on one of the servers in case it becomes needed for any data recovery efforts, perhaps you could continue as follows.
(assuming you don't just go straight for the backup full restore option).
Resize the current C partition if possible down to 15GB or whatever.
Clone the resized partition C onto a duplicate D on the same drive.
Create an appropriate new partition E in the empty space after C,D.
Restore the last full + last incremental backups of that PC's good state onto E.
Use differential file analysis, i.e. check time-stamps, md5 hashes, file synchronization software,
et. al. to analyze the differences between (D,E) and use that information to guide either manual or automated resynchronization / repair between the backup and current state. i.e. identify files that can be salvaged that are present with integrity, are useful, and are newer than anything on the last incremental backup.

Microsoft's new free syncToy V2.0 may help.
http://www.microsoft.com/proph...loads/synctoybeta.aspx

Also some kind of hash based file integrity checker may help:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/841290

There's a freeware version of SyncBack too, I'm not sure if it is better than SyncToy V2, or if it is OK for commercial use:
http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html

 

[tjcinnamon]

Thanks so much for your reply. I ended up getting it back to a normal state, better than normal in terms of DOS printing. It took me 12 hours but I learned alot in my failures.

 

[0roo0roo]

bingo, the imaging program is generally smart enough to make an image file no larger than the actual data, not the drive. and with compression its even smaller. as said clear out temp file, perhaps turn off hibernation and such. ghost seems smart enough to ignore such files, xml drive imge was not. and yea restoring an image partition works as long as it fits.
resizing partitions is dangerous as you've found out. itssomething you do only after you backup.