Windows Rant

[rexxar]

The main drive on my desktop PC died recently. Naturally, I popped in a live linux CD and dd'd the drive onto a new one. "Simple," I thought "Surely nothing could go wrong".

Being Windows, of course, something was bound to break.

I don't know why, but all of my drive letters are now wrong. There's three disks and five partitions in this system, and Windows went and screwed it all up. I like to keep my programs on a separate drive in case I have to reinstall Windows, or the C: drive fails. All the program shortcuts point to D:, which Windows reassigned to E:, so now everything's broken.

Furthermore, only the main Windows 7 install will boot. I've got two other OSes that don't work any more because Windows is stupid.

I thought okay, I'll just change all the drive letters back, annoying as it is, it's not a huge deal. But no, of course that won't work. I change the drive letters in Windows' partition manager, but it won't stick. Every time I reboot, they all go back to the wrong letters.  So I went into the registry and changed them. That just made Windows angry. Some programs work, others don't, and all of the program shortcuts have lost their icons, even in the start bar.

I guess I get to have the joy of re-installing Windows yet again. I'm so looking forward to the 12 solid hours of updates that comes with Win7.

Related: Never, ever use Windows' build in 'RAID' support. If one drive goes, you're screwed, the whole volume is lost.

I could rant about the various ways in which Windows Vista/7 are doing everything wrong for hours on end, but this is just the most recent problem to make me set my computer on fire and toss it out the window.

And yes, I could switch to Linux. As many times as I've said "This is it, I'm not going back to Windows ever again" I keep crawling back.

[Stonent]

As long as nothing is D: change E: to D:.  If something is D: change it to F:, move E: to D: and F: to E:

I like to keep my programs on a separate drive in case I have to reinstall Windows, or the C: drive fails. All the program shortcuts point to D:, which Windows reassigned to E:, so now everything's broken.

I once worked on a guy's computer who had about a dozen partitions and made it very clear he'd be mad if I put something on the wrong drive. Modem software went on the M: drive. Sound card went on the S: drive...etc

In Windows 7 you can create a volume and link it to a directory so stuff like this doesn't happen, or you could just put everything on C.

Or just pay someone like me a few hundred bucks to fix your problems

Wait... Why is this a windows rant? You're the one who set the drives up.  O0

[rexxar]

As long as nothing is D: change E: to D:.  If something is D: change it to F:, move E: to D: and F: to E:

That doesn't work, unfortunately. I can't get the settings to stick, and when I force it, Windows gets angry and things stop working.

I once worked on a guy's computer who had about a dozen partitions and made it very clear he'd be mad if I put something on the wrong drive. Modem software went on the M: drive. Sound card went on the S: drive...etc

Dear god, that's terrible!

Or just pay someone like me a few hundred bucks to fix your problems

Wait... Why is this a windows rant? You're the one who set the drives up.  O0

Thing is, I'm usually the guy people come to with these problems..

It's a Windows rant because my Windows install completely screwed everything up for no reason. Also I hate Windows.

[Stonent]

I think when you DD a drive in windows vista/7 it gives it a new letter because the drive itself was physically different than the old one.

It has to do with the whole switch from Boot.ini to BCD crap. As far as I'm concerned there was nothing wrong with Boot.ini

[IanB]

The main drive on my desktop PC died recently. Naturally, I popped in a live linux CD and dd'd the drive onto a new one.

Why naturally? You have a Windows OS, you used a foreign OS to mess with it, and now you blame Windows for your troubles?

Sure, in the old days of "simple" disks you might get away with a raw block by block copy, but things are more complicated these days.

When you buy a new disk, use the image copying tools provided by the disk manufacturer that know about partitions and boot records. I've cloned loads of disks in the last few months and it has always worked fine.

Seems to me like you got in over your head, didn't fully understand how your system works, and now you are trying to find something else to blame other than yourself after you broke it.

Sure, I have some sympathy for your troubles, but ranting isn't going to fix them. When things go wrong, it's time to pause, take a deep breath, and have a think about what the cause was. Doing lots of Googling and asking lots of questions if necessary.

[rexxar]

I think when you DD a drive in windows vista/7 it gives it a new letter because the drive itself was physically different than the old one.

It has to do with the whole switch from Boot.ini to BCD crap. As far as I'm concerned there was nothing wrong with Boot.ini

Hm, BCD does use UUID, doesn't it?

I don't see what's so wrong with say, /dev/sda1 or (hd0,0). Much more sane than a string of hex garbage, I think.

[c4757p]

It's the /dev/sda1 crap that makes things get moved about in the first place. The reason Linux is immune to this is that most distributions now use the filesystem UUID, so it will always go to that file system no matter where it now sits in the partition table. Look in /etc/fstab - it's all UUID now.

[Stonent]

I think when you DD a drive in windows vista/7 it gives it a new letter because the drive itself was physically different than the old one.

It has to do with the whole switch from Boot.ini to BCD crap. As far as I'm concerned there was nothing wrong with Boot.ini

Hm, BCD does use UUID, doesn't it?

I don't see what's so wrong with say, /dev/sda1 or (hd0,0). Much more sane than a string of hex garbage, I think.

I don't know the exact cause, but I do know it behaves differently than XP did when you used DD or rawcopy to clone a drive.

Older versions of Ghost (I think 8.5 and older) would cause Windows 7 to BSOD on startup.  To fix it you had to boot from a repair disc and run the repair. Newer versions can handle the Vista/7 style drives without the need for a startup repair.

[Mechatrommer]

I like to keep my programs on a separate drive in case I have to reinstall Windows, or the C: drive fails. All the program shortcuts point to D:

wrong paradigm, wrong paradigm. you dont expect Windows to live 20 years without reinstall (virus and building up unused App) when your Windows die, all your D:\App will become useless except some simple Apps that dont rely on registry and {WinSysPath}.

which Windows reassigned to E:, so now everything's broken.

i used Partition Magic if something bad like this happened, but its old App i'm not sure if anyone can have access to it anymore. newer and newr Windows has become more and more broken in the sense that it will not allow you to access your HDD down closer to the physical level. but then, its what people called as "modern".

[dr.diesel]

And yes, I could switch to Linux. As many times as I've said "This is it, I'm not going back to Windows ever again" I keep crawling back.

I've been Linux only since the early 2000s, couldn't be happier.

[free_electron]

The main drive on my desktop PC died recently. Naturally, I popped in a live linux CD and dd'd the drive onto a new one.

Why naturally? You have a Windows OS, you used a foreign OS to mess with it, and now you blame Windows for your troubles?

Bingo.

You can clone the bootdrive perfectly fine, provided it has a standard boot mechanism. Many a cloning program does not understand non standard boot loading and partitioning scemes.

Now, your funky drive letter problem is possibly because the disk id was not cloned. Windows stores the disk id (8 char id number unique to a drive) somewhere. That is how it distinguishes between drives. You can attach to different sata port it will come up right. If you have a new id number then windows assigns a new letter..

There are tools out there to change this id code.
But the best way to clone a driveis to use a hardware cloner.

A coul,e of other things :
Like said, storing programs on a diferent driveis useless as the keys, registry etc is still stored on the c drive. Lose the c drive and your d drive is useless.
Userdata . Same scenario. Do not try to outsmart the system, you are only screwing it up.

Here is a bulletproof strategy on win7.
Install os, register, load all software and register that. Copy all your files. Once you have the machine back where you want it install a second, empty harddisk.

Run windows 7 backup and ask it to make a system image and store it on the new blank drive. Windows will also ask you to create a boot cd . Do that as well. There is a tool that lets you copy the boot cd to a usb stick and make the usb stick bootable.

Run windows backup again and this time create an automatic event that backs up your machine to the additional disk. Let windows manage diskspace.

If your computer fucks up,disk crash, virus, whatever . Plug in usb stick or cd , boot off of that and select full system restore. Ploink. Done. Everything is back

The system image i had you create in the first step is a single massive file. You can copy that onto a usb harddisk and ise that as your master install. If you build a second computer with nearly identical specs as the first one you dont install winodows and all apps. Simply restore from that image.

I have three identical computers in my homelab. Same mobo , same graphics , same cpu. I installed 1 to my liking , then replicated the rest. The tiltbits will ask you to reregister but that is a few mouseclicks. It saves lots of install time.

Another nicety is to install a program like deepfreeze. Especially on a machine you use to download demo versions of software or a machine that, due to its usage, tends to collect a lot of cruft.
Simply powercycle to restore to 'frozen state'.
The machine can be infected by all you can throw at it. Powercycle and its all gone.

[MacAttak]

Related: Never, ever use Windows' build in 'RAID' support. If one drive goes, you're screwed, the whole volume is lost.

Well, nobody forced you to use one of the RAID configurations that don't include error recovery. Sounds like you used RAID 0 or JBOD or a simple stripe set. Don't be surprised when you do the same thing under Linux and it comes down just as hard. If you are using multi-spindle partitions you need to have fault tolerance if you care about the content. Each extra drive in the partition simply multiplies the chances of a catastrophic failure at any given moment in time.

Thats not a "Windows problem". Thats a "disk configuration problem".

Also, yeah. Don't use software RAID. Even Microsoft will tell you that. This is a legacy feature from Windows 2000, which nobody in their right mind used back then either. It was created in a time where hardware RAID controllers were SCSI-only and costed $5,000 and up for the simplest of devices, plus a few thousand dollars for external drive cabinet and then the drives themselves (back then, a single typical 10k RPM SCSI drive was over a thousand dollars). Honestly, I don't know why they don't just remove it from the operating system since nothing but tears ever comes from using it these days. Probably because "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".

[nctnico]

Actually the cheap RAID controllers use software raid. They emulate a drive to the BIOS so the system can boot from it.

I still don't understand why people think dividing a disk in multiple drives will solve anything. In the end you'll always run out of space on one partition and then you're screwed. Been there done that. Re-installing Windows is not a real solution because you'll end up re-installing everything. I'm working on moving to Linux and decided to run Windows XP from a virtual machine. I tried Windows 7 but it sucks way too much.

[Paul Moir]

Some pile of apologists on here eh?

I mean:  drive letters, in this day and age?  And immutable static ones at that?

[WarSim]

Yes I find it amusing

[Stonent]

Windows Vista and up support mounting drives and partitions as directories just like Linux does.

[Telequipment]

Damn I thought it was going to a rant about windows 8 otherwise known as Mather's Curse, over here, I could rant about that for years.