{"id":467,"date":"2010-09-13T02:09:03","date_gmt":"2010-09-13T07:09:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/swildow.darktech.org\/wp\/?p=467"},"modified":"2010-09-13T02:09:03","modified_gmt":"2010-09-13T07:09:03","slug":"from-minasi-about-2008-backup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wildow.com\/blog\/?p=467","title":{"rendered":"from Minasi about 2008 backup"},"content":{"rendered":"

CompletePC Backup:\u00a0 Transplanting a Vista installation from one drive to another<\/h3>\n

I know I’ve covered CompletePC Backup in two previous newsletters, but I have since used it for a real-world backup and restore and in the process discovered a couple of undocumented things that might be useful.\u00a0 (“Undocumented” because I’ve spent a lot of time with the Server 2008 version of CompletePC Backup and noticed a few useful options to the wbadmin command that Microsoft’s documentation clearly stated only worked with 2008 and not Vista.\u00a0 You won’t be surprised to hear that they did work in Vista, after all.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Quick review:\u00a0 CompletePC Backup is a new technology built into Vista and Server 2008 that backs up entire drive letters (or groups of drive letters), storing them in the VHD format that Microsoft normally uses to store its virtual machines for Virtual Server, Virtual PC or the upcoming Hyper-V server.\u00a0 The VHD format understands the notion of snapshots and so a given VHD can store many versions of a given drive’s backup, and does it fairly efficiently as the snapshots store just the differences from one backup to another.\u00a0 These backups can then be restored to do a complete system restore, allowing you to do a CompletePC Backup of a system and then restore that to a system with somewhat different hardware.\u00a0 (Different drive architectures seem not to always work \u2014 transplanting a backup taken from an IDE hard disk doesn’t seem to be possible on a SATA hard disk, for example, although I HAVE transplanted a SCSI backup onto an IDE drive.)\u00a0 Thus, CompletePC Backup allows for so-called “bare metal” restores.\u00a0 Again, it cannot<\/em> just back up a single file or folder \u2014 just an entire drive.<\/p>\n

Anyway, here’s the story.\u00a0 7200 RPM laptop hard disks now come in a 200 GB size.\u00a0 (I’m staying with 7200 RPM because Vista is a lot<\/em> happier with 7200s.\u00a0 Previously 160 GB was the largest 7200 RPM laptop-sized drive.)\u00a0 In addition to being larger, the drive (the Hitachi Travelstar 7K200) has a 16 MB cache, rather than the 8 MB cache found in the other laptop hard disks that I’ve used… so I had<\/em> to have it.<\/p>\n

I know, you’re saying, “Minasi’s going to transplant his Vista system from one drive to another for a measly 40 more gigs?”\u00a0 Yup; that measly 40 gigs, my friends, is equivalent to space for four more virtual machines, or a couple more virtual machines and<\/em> space for a bunch more photos.\u00a0 (If you’ve not been to www.minasi.com\/photos<\/a>, then you’re missing out on the gray fox and dolphin pictures.) But how to move from the 160 to the 200 easily and cheaply?\u00a0 With CompletePC Backup.\u00a0 I’ve covered CompletePC Backup before, but now that I’ve used it to do a “no muss, no fuss, no greasy aftertaste” drive upgrade, I wanted to cover the steps in detail to (1) document some extra CompletePC syntax that I found in the process of doing the drive transplant and (2) save someone having to do this the trouble of looking all of this vaguely-documented stuff up.\u00a0 I have already covered much of this in Newsletters #63 and #64, but, again, when I actually bet my laptop’s<\/em> drive on it, I found having step-by-steps useful, as I’d sat down beforehand and laid out a procedure \u2014 and I’m hoping you’ll find it useful also.<\/p>\n

Backing Up the Drive<\/h4>\n

As I’ve discussed in previous newsletters, we’re going to back up the existing drives on the laptop to either an external drive (like a USB-connected drive) or a network share, using the wbadmin.exe command-line tool shipped with Vista but which is, sadly, a mite underdocumented.<\/p>\n

First, open an elevated command prompt (one where you right-clicked the “Command Prompt” icon, chose “Run as administrator” and clicked “Continue” at the User Account Control prompt).<\/p>\n

Then type “wbadmin start backup -backuptarget:wheretobackupto<\/em> -allcritical -quiet” where wheretobackupto<\/em> is either an UNC path or a drive letter.\u00a0 Remember from previous newsletters that you cannot specify a drive letter that is actually a mapped drive (and you may recall that the GUI is completely network-deaf for some reason) and if you specify a drive letter that is<\/em> a hard drive letter, then ensure that you specify only the drive letter — you cannot include a path within that drive letter.<\/p>\n

The “-allcritical” is an option that I discovered shortly after writing the last newsletter wherein I covered wbadmin.\u00a0 It appears nowhere in Vista documentation, but it appears in Server 2008 documentation with the specific warning that the “-allcritical” option only works on Server, and not Vista.\u00a0 (So much for documentation.)<\/p>\n

Here are a couple of working examples:<\/p>\n

wbadmin start backup -backuptarget:h: -allcritical -quiet<\/pre>\n
This is the simplest example, which instructs wbadmin to back up everything  on the PC except drive h:, and to put the backup on h:.\u00a0 (CompletePC cannot back  itself up to a drive that it is backing up for some reason.\u00a0 You’d think it’d be  smart enough to be able to handle it, y’know?)\u00a0 The trick is the “-allcritical”  switch; otherwise, we’d have to name every drive to get those drives backed up.\u00a0  The documentation says that “-allcritical” only backs up the drives that are  essential to making the OS work, but my older laptop image had a superfluous  drive D: that was 1.5 GB in size and did nothing of any value, but -allcritical  backed it up, all the same.\u00a0 To reiterate an important point, this would not  work:<\/p>\n
wbadmin start backup -backuptarget:h:\\pcbackups -allcritical -quiet<\/pre>\n
I have no idea why, but wbadmin doesn’t let you specify a full drive and  path, just a drive; it then puts it in a folder on that drive called  WindowsImageBackup.<\/p>\n
(Interesting note:\u00a0 I’m not sure why, but when I restored the backup to the  new drive, it rearranged my volumes — I had three, only two of which were  important \u2014 so that the essential ones were restored first, and the superfluous  one later.\u00a0 I don’t know if this is a behavior that’ll happen every time, as  I’ve only tried it once, but it was wonderful, as it let me delete the useless  volume and then use its 1.5 GB in combination with the newly-acquired 40 GB as  one new volume.\u00a0 Very nice!)<\/p>\n
wbadmin start backup -backuptarget:\\\\myserver\\myshare\\pcbackupsdir -allcritical -quiet<\/pre>\n
Here, we’re doing the same thing, but to a share.\u00a0 Notice the next wbadmin  oddity \u2014 specifying an UNC path lets you specify a folder within it<\/em>.\u00a0  What backing up to H: could do, backing up to \\\\myserver could.\u00a0 Go figure.<\/p>\n
Expect the backup to take a fair amount of time.\u00a0 On my system, backing up  the roughly 152 GB of data on my hard disk took about eight hours.<\/p>\n
Restoring to the new drive<\/h4>\n
Now that my original 160 GB drive was backed up, it was time to perform some  open-PC surgery and swap the drive.\u00a0 I opened up the PC, removed the 160 GB  drive, and replaced it with the empty 200 GB drive.\u00a0 (Of course, the nice part  about this is that if the restore fails, I could have always fallen back to the  160 GB drive.)\u00a0 After securing the new drive, I popped the Vista installation  DVD and booted from it.\u00a0 When I got to the “Install Now” screen, I opted instead  to click “Repair your computer.”\u00a0 That in turn led to a screen that offered me  several options, two of which were “CompletePC Restore” and “Command Prompt.”\u00a0  You’ll use one or another of those two options, depending on where you put the  backup.<\/p>\n
If you backed up your old drive onto an external USB drive, then plug it in  (if it’s not plugged in yet) and choose “System Restore.”\u00a0 Then just run the GUI  \u2014 it’ll look around, find a CompletePC backup on the USB drive, and offer to  restore it to your 200 GB drive.\u00a0 It will warn you that it’s going to blow away  anything currently on the hard disk (it has to repartition the drive to match  the backed-up partitions), and in a short time, much less time than the backup  took, you’ll have a working system.<\/p>\n
If, on the other hand, you backed up to a network share, then you need to do  three things:<\/p>\n