Back Up Plans

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Firstly, Do Not Dance with the Devil!

I made the mistake (again!) of trying dynamic disks with my new Windows 7 installation.  I must have been asleep – the use of this system is seriously frowned upon for most users.  It has several pitfalls not least that it’s high-end Windows specific (i.e not home, basic etc), and it’s impossible to clone partitions for backup or moves, say.

But mainly, it’s supposed to be un-do-able!

To convert from basic to dynamic is frighteningly easy (see screen shot).  The reversing option disappears once it’s done and in virtually all Disk Partition Software,  any ‘partitions’, now called volumes, just show as one big monolithic slab of pale yellow disk that has any possible action greyed out!  This was really bad as it was on the system drive…

You’ll see in the screen-shot that there are 3 disks.

Disk 0 & disk 1 were an effort at user-data mirroring originally until I realised what I pile of poo I’d just landed in.  All the initial  recommendations were negative and the prognosis didn’t look good.  See:

• http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/thread-1482847.php
• http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;217226&Product=win20 – Cannot Revert Boot Drive from Dynamic Disk to Basic Disk
• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc755238.aspx – Change a Dynamic Disk Back to a Basic Disk

Solution

However, this post gave me a pointer which eventually led to here and the HxD disc editing tool, here.   The Dynamic Disk Converter is a paid for solution and would have worked.  But I tried the Hex Editor approach after a bit more reading around the subject….

The trick, as in Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is 42!

Specifically, all 42’s must be converted to 07.

The highlighted area contains the bit to edit and the numbers to edit in this area are those in column 02 that are 42.  So change all the 42’s to 07’s in column 02 in the four highlighted lines.  (n.b. The screendump was taken after I’d fixed the disc, so all the 42s are now 07 and some partitions have been deleted.)

That’s all.

Do NOT twiddle anything else.

Caveat

This post in the thread says to just alter one line – this is wrong!  (There’s a confusing addition at the bottom.  This relates directly to my experience, so yes, all real primary partitions are numbered 07)

And this post says to do them all – this is right.  It shows 3.

In my original pre-editted state, I had 4!  Handily, this shows the reason (I think), why you can only have 4 primary partitions on a drive.

Finale and Actual Actions Summary

Now you’ll see I have only two 07’s in the column (in the screenshot above).  These map to the two partitions showing in my Disk Management full screen-shot here.  For some reason, it had ‘remembered’ other volumes I’d made on the disk – that’s why I had 4 to do.

I was quite prepared to buy the paid-for software.  It looked good and worth the cash.  Instead:

1. I very tediously moved ‘volumes’ into ‘partitions’ onto a third disk I entered into the system.
   1. This later disk needed it’s partitions resizing first to make room.
   2. It was hot-plugged using it’s SATA into the wire from the DVD as I didn’t have any spare SATA wires!  Doh!
2. The moved data was from disk 0 & disk 1, all relevant stuff going to disk 2.
3. Deleted all the volumes from Disk 1
4. I could then set Disk 1 to basic using Windows as per Microsoft instructions.
5. Moved all user data back to C-Drive volume (I had been in the process of separating data from programs).
6. Backed up C-Drive volume and system state using Windows 7 Backup tool to new partition ‘BACKUP’ using all of Disk 1
   1. This was in case the following hex stuff failed.  It would allow an easy restore by:
      1. Install windows from DVD onto Disk 0
      2. Use Windows backup to reset system state and all the files & programs on the C-Drive on Disk 0
7. Now used the Hex editor to edit the disk sector information as described above.
8. REBOOT (fingers crossed!)
9. WAHAY! It worked.
10. Removed pseudo partition remaining on Disk 0 to leave unallocated space  – I think this was due to the invisible 1Mb database that exists on dynamic disks.

Plans

I’ve now got two new hard drives in the post.  When these have arrived and are installed, I’ll use standard tools to move partitions and get user data onto a RAID mirror assembly.  This will increase data integrity and give me a better backup.  You’d think that outboard backups would be fine, wouldn’t you?  Well I bought a Western Digital 1TB Studio Edition which worked okay for a while….

But it ran so hot the eSATA/USB circuitry failed!  I dismantled it and found the drive to be okay – this is the third disk, Disk 2 in the screen-shots!

Now, I have a new system with a better,  heavy-duty power supply, adequate (and quiet cooling), with the whole thing protected behind an APC UPS which I’ve had for a year.  Sticking to basic disks should make backups simpler and the whole thing should be more reliable – certainly more so than the WD Studio thing which is a pile of hot plastic pants.

Stick to basic Disks – you know it makes sense!

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Introduction

I got a ping this morning from a website called cleanup-registry.net   It arrived because I’d been referenced as a website in the network setup using the plugin, “Related Websites” by the Blog Traffic Exchange (actually, it may be time to knock this experiment on the head as generally, the sites are only loosely related and have poor linkage otherwise).

Whatever; the link referenced an old post of mine about Microsoft software problems here.  Notionally, the website looks okay and professional – but I smelled a rat!

cleanup-registry.net

Cleanup-Registry.net

This is a screenshot of the whole post (at http://cleanup-registry.net/need-major-help-problem-installing-net-35-framework/).  So I did a search on the user’s  error message:

‘The DOTNETFX35SETUP.EXE file is linked to missing export NTDLL.DLL:NtShutdownSystem.’ (it turns out later that I should have just done a search on the text in the first paragraph of the post…)

Yahoo!Answers page

About six entries down in the Google search results, is this page from the respected ‘Yahoo! Answers’ forums website, shown at left.

The screen-shots of each WILL blow up to full-size, but to save you making direct textual comparisons, let me tell you now that the text in both, and one comment, the accepted answer in Yahoo! Answers, is EXACTLY the same!

For your interest, the accepted answer is that the OS’s are incompatible and there’s a fix described.

The real problem is the dates!  cleanup-registry.net’s is the 8th September 2009;  Yahoo! Answer’s is from 8 months ago!

Conclusion

What we are seeing is the same sort of tactic employed by the Google Treasure Chest scammers of a fake blog (now called a flog!) being used as part of a selling campaign.  They’ve content-scraped decent content and passed it off as their own as a means of justifying their flogging area.

Q. Their product?

A. They are trying to sell a registry cleaner type software and a computer maintenance service ($25 per month!) in Las Vegas.

All of this is done under the banner of some fairly useful video how-tos and some less worthy content scraping from other websites….

The killer bits are that all the ‘blog’ entries are dated 24/9/2009 (apart from the odd one) and all the pages and how-tos are dated 24/7/2009!!!

Furthermore, the domain owner is hidden by our old friends at Domains by Proxy..

Do you really trust this sort of stuff?  I don’t.  Whether it’s supporting malware or not, it’s selling by devious means using the same methods as used by zillions of scams worldwide.

Caveat Emptor – buyer beware!

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