Windows sucks and is a thorn in my side. DISK IMAGE ASSISTANCE PLZ

maximumzero

Okay, I've got a windows computer here that the boss' wife uses. Long to start up, long to load the desktop, long to respond to mouse clicks and slow in general.

I haven't had to run maintenance on a XP machine since the early 2000s so I'm a bit rusty. What's the current best as far as cheap as free cleanup/optimization software goes these days?

ronya

To be entirely honest? Nuke and pave. If this is at all an option, use it. If the problem is malware or adware, its claws are already dug in. If the problem is badly-designed legit software, then one has to trust the uninstaller or updater to have done a better job. Not really attractive options.

Otherwise, there is not much you can do, unless you know more about why it is sluggish and how sluggish it was when new. You could run HijackThis and post the log here and let us speculate on what might be the cause, I guess :P

xraydog

CCleaner I find is the best cleaning solutions for Windows.

edit: haha that sounds like it's a window washing cleaner. :P

Ramen Noodle

Backup all needed stuff, nuke and start over. My laptop with Windows 7 was acting funny and I did that and now boom, it's working like it should again.

maximumzero

Well, lemme see if I can burn the restore discs. It's an eMachines and I don't have a standalone Windows disc to use.

I forgot, can you partition a hard drive without destroying it's contents? I might just set up a second partition and start fresh there and slowly move stuff over.

ronya

You can alter a partition table by resizing it, but be sure to read the instructions carefully. It's easy to accidentally destroy data when poking at the partition table.

Setting up a second partition is indeed a good option (i've done it before to avoid having to figure out what to back up in a hurry)... but operating systems can be slightly slowerwhen it's in the middle of the hard drive rather than the beginning. Not significant slower, though, I guess.

Sadly, it is not possible to expand a partition "backwards" (i.e., delete a partition to the front, then expand the second partition toward its front); it is only possible to expand a partition into empty space that follows it. So one must plan for the eventual deletion of the original partition - probably by nuking it, moving data again, and then deleting the intermediary partition.

maximumzero

Well it's getting worse it seems. After logging in it just shows the wallpaper and stops there. No start menu and no icons. Thinking I might have to yank the HDD and drop it into another computer to get the files from it.

maximumzero

Okay I yanked the HDD and put it into another computer. I want to simply copy all the files from the parasite drive into the main computer so when I wipe the drive I can pull what I need to afterwards.

Is there a free disk imaging program I can download? OS X has Disk Utility which makes making disk images a breeze but I don't think XP has anything similar. Any recommendations?

General_Win

Why do you want to image the drive?

You're backing up the data.

Once that's done, install xp overtop of bad XP disk, then just network the data back over.

maximumzero

General_Win wrote: »

Why do you want to image the drive?

You're backing up the data.

Once that's done, install xp overtop of bad XP disk, then just network the data back over.

I want to drop an image of the bad computer's drive onto a good computer so that when I re-install Windows on the new computer I can pick and chose what I want to bring over from the mounted image in Windows.

Edit: That and attempting to copy files from the bad hard drive is leaving me with alot of "access denied" prompts.

maximumzero

Anybody?

ronya

I find Copy and Paste works well. If you're getting Access Denied prompts, you need to take ownership and give yourself administrator access - something like this works.

If I need exact duplicates, I tend to just use dd.

UncleSporky

maximumzero wrote: »

Well it's getting worse it seems. After logging in it just shows the wallpaper and stops there. No start menu and no icons. Thinking I might have to yank the HDD and drop it into another computer to get the files from it.

Just so you know, one possible way past this is to press ctrl-alt-del at this point, and if the task manager comes up, click file -> run and type explorer.exe. This should get you in, past whatever hangup it got stuck on, and you could then copy files.

Just one other thing you could try.

maximumzero

Fantastic. I can't pull the files out of her document folder because it's telling me access denied. Alright I'm gonna have to move everything back to the original drive, put it in the old computer and see if I can start it up in safe mode to get everything off this way.

Fuck you Windows.

bigwah

maximumzero wrote: »

Fantastic. I can't pull the files out of her document folder because it's telling me access denied. Alright I'm gonna have to move everything back to the original drive, put it in the old computer and see if I can start it up in safe mode to get everything off this way.

Fuck you Windows.

You need to give yourself permissions first. Helps if you know what you are doing before you degrade a product.

tachyon

Am I missing something? Why wouldn't you just either: a) boot of a live cd/usb, then transfer everything to an external drive or, b) remove the drive and connect it to a usb enclosure, plug into a good system, pull everything off.

Then nuke it from orbit and reload? This is almost as fundamental of a helpdesk function as 'Power it down, then power it back up'. Is there some circumstance that we don't know about that is not allowing you to follow this option?

maximumzero

bigwah wrote: »

maximumzero wrote: »

Fantastic. I can't pull the files out of her document folder because it's telling me access denied. Alright I'm gonna have to move everything back to the original drive, put it in the old computer and see if I can start it up in safe mode to get everything off this way.

Fuck you Windows.

You need to give yourself permissions first. Helps if you know what you are doing before you degrade a product.

I used to know. But in 2003 I bought a Mac and I haven't had to deal with any of this nonsense in so long that I've forgotten how to do so much of it.

maximumzero

tachyon wrote: »

Am I missing something? Why wouldn't you just either: a) boot of a live cd/usb, then transfer everything to an external drive or, b) remove the drive and connect it to a usb enclosure, plug into a good system, pull everything off.

Then nuke it from orbit and reload? This is almost as fundamental of a helpdesk function as 'Power it down, then power it back up'. Is there some circumstance that we don't know about that is not allowing you to follow this option?

I'm doing b, but instead of plugging it into an enclosure I'm plugging it into another computer, and then dropping the files onto that computer. Problem is a good chunk of 'em are protected, it seems, and I really don't need to be losing years worth of quickbooks files for this company.

ronya

In my experience, mounting it from a livecd using ntfs-3g allows you to avoid the permissions dance. So you could just boot Ubuntu or SysRescCd on the hosting computer and do that.

Spudge

If you have an administrator account for that machine, you can change permissions for the files you need to transfer

ronya

Don't try to change permissions manually, though, since you'll have to go through every single file and folder. One by one. Yeah.

There's a batch script that'll do it for you, I linked it earlier in the thread.

bigwah

ronya wrote: »

Don't try to change permissions manually, though, since you'll have to go through every single file and folder. One by one. Yeah.

There's a batch script that'll do it for you, I linked it earlier in the thread.

No you dont. Take ownership and give yourself admin and let it inherit its way down.

ronya

I concede that I may have been Doing It Wrong - this was more than a year ago - but when I last attached a dead Windows install to another Windows computer and tried to take ownership of the user folders, ownership did not inherit due (I think) to the working Windows installation not recognizing the current owner of the user folders. You could make yourself owner of the root folder but S-####-####... will remain the owner of the subfolders. Then attempting to make yourself admin will fail.

Maybe Vista/7 improved the issue, I dunno. I recall running into the issue with an XP computer hosting a dead XP install.

Fred Savage Power Glove

I don't know if this will be particularly useful for you but here is the process I enact when Joe User comes to me with a Windows machine that is running like a 80386.

1. Remove hard drive from victim machine.
2. Hook up to my little universal IDE/SATA to USB adapter I have. They run about $20 and you should be able to find them at almost any computer shop worth a damn in town. You can also borrow external HDD enclosures for this purpose.
3. Hook up victim HDD to my Mac.
4. Image the entire drive, bit-for-bit (as it were) using Carbon Copy Cloner.
5. Re-install victim HDD to victim machine.
6. I try to pry malware etc. off the machine using uninstallers, CCleaner and general "this is stupid why is this here" principles.

If the result at that point is satisfactory, I return the victim machine and give them The Talk About Technology, Stupid.

If I can't seem to get it to run like it was manufactured in the last five years, I nuke it. I then copy the original image I took back over via the network or directly via the IDE/SATA to USB adapter. Mount the image with ISODisk or your favorite tool and then, with the owner of the machine by my side, we hunt for their content on the image and I copy it over. I then remove my disk mounting tool and delete the image from my machine. If the victim HDD is large enough, I hide the image somewhere on the drive for the inevitable phone call I get asking OH MY GOD THAT THING I DIDN'T NEED! I NEED IT NOW! which makes for a happy user.

tl;dr store.apple.com

Joe K

ronya wrote: »

I find Copy and Paste works well. If you're getting Access Denied prompts, you need to take ownership and give yourself administrator access - something like this works.

If I need exact duplicates, I tend to just use dd.

there's a couple things here....

first, booting off of a Linux LiveCD/USBKey is probably the easiest way to get a system running. get another external USB Drive - big one, enough to hold the entire disk image, plus enough to copy the entire filesystem to. (so, at least 2x the original drive size)

On your USB destination drive - make /oh_shit_backup/ with two dirs fs and image.

FIRST copy the individual files. All of them 'cp -a /mnt/nt_drive/* /mnt/usb_drive/oh_shit_backup/fs'

NEXT pull off a dd image - 'dd if=/dev/sd? bs=4096 | gzip -c > /mnt/usb_drive/oh_shit_backup/image/backup.image.gz'

FINALLY pull off the boot sector - i have no good reason why this is necessary for NT systems, but it is:
'dd if=/dev/sd? of=/mnt/usb_drive/oh_shit_backup/image/boot.sector bs=512 count=1'

when you restore from that image, be sure to put the boot sector back on LAST, trust me, it matters.

And, BTW - are you getting any clicking noises? From the symptoms that you are describing, you may not have much time, because its starting to sound like a head crash on your HD. At that point recovery costs 10s of thousands.

Get the files off FIRST, using a linux boot media (usb or CD). THEN pull the image using DD. FINALLY, pull the bootsector off.

The most important is the files, and while its good fun to teach someone how to loopback mount a dd file, just having the files in a safe, easily accessible format will be best. Copy the drive file-wise, FIRST. Especially if you suspect HD failure at all, getting the files off is the most important.