New Windows Installation

Just as the title says!
darkmast2

#1 New Windows Installation

Post by darkmast2 »

Well it's not been a good day for me. I recently installed AVG8.0 Free as 7.5 will expire soon and that's when my problems started.

IE would refuse to open, search option in Windows wouldn't work, Event Viewer would list lots of errors but wouldn't let me view the properties of them and I couldnt' drag and drop files in any folder.

I managed to get drag and drop working with a registry hack but my computer crashed and it wouldn't reboot again, something about hal.dll being missing or corrupt. I tried doing a repair but I couldnt' get it working after a few hours trying so I installed a 2nd instance of Windows on the drive by selecting to install to a different folder and moved all the files I wanted to keep onto my 2nd Sata drive. I then did a complete fresh install of Windows and applying SP3 and drivers etc.

I moved BOINC directory over to the 2nd sata drive as a backup so when I got Windows working again I just installed the BOINC client then overwrote the directory with the backup. Everything seems to be working fine but I was just wondering if the installation will be ok in the long run ? I wasn't quite sure how to get back up and running again.

Everything else is just a case of reinstalling but I wasn't sure if BOINC would be ok.
Nightlord

#2

Post by Nightlord »

Boinc should be ok the way you did it. As long as you installed Boinc in the first place, then over-wrote the new installation with your old data it should pick up from where it was.

On the incident itself, it sounds to me like an explorer.exe problem. Hal.dll may be a red herring - it's the dll that allows your windows installation to run on various different platforms. Specifically it's the Hardware Abstraction Layer dll. However, all the other symptoms suggest explorer.exe is non-functional. Explorer.exe is the application that allows you access to files and data. All file access is made through this - hence the problem with drag and drop, viewing events and maybe even the message about hal.dll. Why this should happen after an avg upgrade, I'm not sure. Maybe a co-incident disk corruption?

If you still have the old disk in the system on the same bus, it maybe worthwhile running some low level diagnostics on it.

Just remember though, backups are your friend. A 30 day trial licence of norton ghost costs nothing and at this point maybe a very good thing to do :wink:
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MacDitch
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#3

Post by MacDitch »

I'd agree with Nightlord. The best way is to replace the BOINC folder and then install over the top (as it picks up all the settings and such) but the way you did it works just as well, better if you aren't upgrading the BOINC version.

Good luck figuring out what went wrong!
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darkmast2

#4

Post by darkmast2 »

I'm going to be finishing installing the rest of the software I had on before tonight when I get home. Some of it is a real pain especially games through steam as I have to download them all again, lost my cache files of them a while ago.

I was wondering what's the best way to backup. I was thinking installing everything I want in my base install. I.e. necessary software and my favourite games then creating an image (Acronis TrueImage or something similar).

Would this image only 1 partition or would it image the whole drive ? I installed Windows into it's own partition this time and all my programs are going into there too. There's a separate partition for game installs/patches on this drive too. All my really important files and other stuff I keep i.e. music/films are on a 2nd Sata HDD and a 500gb external drive so they are safe.

Would I also need to backup the registry or is this covered in the image ? How easy is it to reinstate an image, I've never done it before. I want to save myself so much hassle if things ever go wrong again *crosses fingers*
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Andrew
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#5

Post by Andrew »

When taking backups you should be able to select whether to capture a specific hard drive, or a specific partition. If you select hard drive, and this has 3 partitions on it then it'll capture all 3 and place them inside a single file.

Depending on whether or not you want to back up the 2nd partition you can select the backup method you want.

The registry is just a number of files, mostly held in c:\windows\system32\config so if you do a drive backup then they'll go along with the image. If you were to capture a drive image now, put the captured file onto a save external drive or something and were then to come along in 6 months time with a new hard drive cos the last one burst and you applied that image file, things would appear exactly as they were when you created the backup. Registry, last accessed files, Internet Explorer history etc etc etc
But only for the partition/drives you backed up.

I've never used Acronis myself, just Ghost and Microsoft WIM's (now my preferred backup solution), by in large though I'm pretty sure that for what you want every one of the big name drive backup apps would do the same job.
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darkmast2

#6

Post by darkmast2 »

I just gave Acronis as an example, I've never used any drive image software before. I will certainly look into using it now though.

What is Microsoft WIMs ?
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Andrew
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#7

Post by Andrew »

WIM's are the format used for deploying Vista and 2008.
There are free tools to create them from Microsoft, it's command line based, you just tell it where to take data from (drive or a folder on a drive) and where to put it, and it goes and creates a file based on that.

I suppose you could think of a WIM as being like an advanced zip file although aimed at deployment rather than just compressing the odd file like you'd do with WinZip.

Gritty details of it here, but it's not as complicated in reality as this page makes out :P
WIMs

If you do decide to go down the free route then I should be about and can help with any questions.

There's no doubt that Trueimage/Ghost would be easier products to use....but you do pay for them.
As Nightlord says, you'll get trials. Not sure what restrictions that the trials would have though, possibly a size limit, or hopefully just a fully functioning time limited trial.

Plenty to investigate on a rainy day :)
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darkmast2

#8

Post by darkmast2 »

I had a quick look but I think WIMs is for Vista and 2008 only. I currently run XP Pro SP3.
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MacDitch
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#9

Post by MacDitch »

I had a quick look but I think WIMs is for Vista and 2008 only. I currently run XP Pro SP3.
I can find plenty of references to WIMS for XP, but I don't know if it's public or windows distro only. :( Hopefully someone with some actual nkowledge can be more enlightening. :)
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Andrew
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#10

Post by Andrew »

I use it for XP, not touched Vista since the early betas, but we use WIM's to deploy XP SP2 for a number of clients.

You could use a WIM to deploy Windows 3.1 if you wanted to ;)

The format was really pushed when Vista came along which is why that's what most of the documentation will reference, but there is no reason it couldn't be used for earlier OSs including XPSP3.
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ianmbaker2
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#11

Post by ianmbaker2 »

Hi,
I was recently looking for a (cheap) poduct which I could use to create a backup image of my notebook. I found this one ( http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/index.htm?1 ) which is Free, about as cheap as it comes.

It creates a bootable CD which allows you to back up your hard drive to another drive, I used a USB drive, and also to restore it back when anything goes wrong with your original install.

It appears to be bases on a mini-linux install and worls (as far as I can tell) for all HD file systems. It's also quite quick.

Keep on crunchin'

Ian
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