orbanp Posted October 10, 2020 Share Posted October 10, 2020 Hello Everyone, New here... I need to restore my WXP partition that "went away" (I know, I should have known better...). It is a dual boot system, with Ubuntu the main OS. I kept WXP 32-bit in a partition as most of my files are still there, as well as a number of applications that does not really like to run under Linux. The WXP system was off the net. I also have a full backup of the WXP system on a USB external drive, using the built in backup tool of WXP. I would like to restore the partition and the WXP system, but in order to do that I need WXP running. The new NTFS partition is already created. I do have the XP installation disk with the key, but somehow when the new install loaded the files onto the ram disk and notifies that Windows is now starting, the whole thing just hangs there. Any reason for that? I did download another 32-bit installation disk image, but that does not take my original key. I also some time ago cloned the whole WXP disk when I had HDD trouble, I guess I could install that disk, boot from there, and restore the system to that now secondary drive with the new partition. Would that thing work? I also downloaded a 64-bit version of WXP, it installed into the new partition (someone posted the key to it), but that does not recognize the backup file from the 32-bit system (I am not really surprised). Any other options that I have? Thanks, Peter Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RainyShadow Posted October 10, 2020 Share Posted October 10, 2020 Explain "went away". Is it shown as unformatted? Not shown at all? All files there, but BSOD on boot? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
orbanp Posted October 10, 2020 Author Share Posted October 10, 2020 It was my fault. I tried to resize the partition from Linux, have not really thought it through... Did run chkdsk from a W7 installation, it barely recovered anything. After that I just reformatted the partition. Peter Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RainyShadow Posted October 10, 2020 Share Posted October 10, 2020 1 hour ago, orbanp said: I tried to resize the partition from Linux, have not really thought it through... You like skipping the important details, huh... Did the resize fail with some error? Or you changed your mind and tried to cancel it? If you were trying to expand that partition, you may be able to recover most files with some recovery programs. If you were shrinking it, probably most of the contents got mixed up well (depending on how far it got and how much free space there was initially). Anyways, since you have a backup, just connect that disk, boot Ubuntu or a LiveCD/USB and copy the XP partition (not the whole disk) over the trashed one. Then remove the cloned disk and try to boot XP. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
orbanp Posted October 10, 2020 Author Share Posted October 10, 2020 Hi, Thanks for the reply! I think the details of how I mocked up the WXP partition are irrelevant, I could not recover much from there, so I reformatted the partition, it is gone now. The XP disk clone is about two to three years old, the backup, that was done incrementally is about three weeks old. Clearly, I would like to get back the three weeks old state of the XP partition. The backup file I have is in the Windows .bkf file format. Some web-pages suggest that other OS than Windows XP could also restore using the .bkf file. The only thing is that I would like to restore the "whole XP system" and not just files. The ultimate would be a utility that would do that for me from Linux. I know, I am dreaming... Thanks, Peter Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RainyShadow Posted October 10, 2020 Share Posted October 10, 2020 First copy back the XP partition from the old disk clone, so you have a working XP. Then restore the newer backup over that. If the .bkf contains all files needed to make a bootable OS, you may skip the first step and use your Win7 to restore it. Copy these files from the i386 folder of your XP install CD: ntbackup.ex_ ntmsapi.dl_ vssapi.dl_ Use 7-Zip to extract these 3 files. Put them all in the same folder and run ntbackup.exe Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaclaz Posted October 11, 2020 Share Posted October 11, 2020 Is that a "clone" or an "image" (they are not the same thing, the clone is directly on disk, the image is inside a file). Whenever a NT OS is booted with connected two hard disks with the same Disk Signature one of the two is changed silently to avoid collisions. Since it is a dual boot system, you can use the ubuntu to check for the Disk Signature. The disk signature is 4 bytes at offset 440 in the MBR. It is normally not possible to boot a NT system on a disk where the disk signature was changed without either correcting the disk signature on disk or correcting it in the Registry (or clearing the key and let the OS recreate it) in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices jaclaz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
orbanp Posted October 13, 2020 Author Share Posted October 13, 2020 Hello Everyone, I restored the system as RainyShadow suggested, I restored it over WXPPro 64-bit, but my system was 32-bit. All the files are there but the system would not start, it complains about corrupted files. I am not surprised, I have overwritten all the files. The question remains why my original installation CD would hang during installation once the initial files are loaded into RAM, as I asked before. I could repair the installation if the original installation CD worked. I dragged out an old Pentium-4 machine of mine, and the CD did install there just fine! Only difference in my machine where the CD would not work is that I increased the RAM to 8 Gig from 2Gig when installed Linux. Would that brake the installation? Thanks for the help! Peter Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RainyShadow Posted October 13, 2020 Share Posted October 13, 2020 Abouth the install CD hang - no clue. You can try to reduce the RAM until you pass the hanging point, then put it back. There could also be some scratches on the CD and the drive reads incorrect data. But you can use a different approach - boot some kind of Windows (is that Win7 on the same PC?), it could be a WinPE - doesn't matter as long as you can access the CD and the disk drives. Then use WinNTSetup to prepare the installation on a formatted partition. When it's done, boot from that (or whichever you selected as boot partition) and continue the install from there. About restoring - how come you ended up with a mix of 32bit and 64bit Windows files?! You should use the 64bit XP only as a helper, and restore to a different partition. Did you restore the whole cloned partition or just copied the files over? Did you successfully boot it before proceeding to restore from the .bkf? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
orbanp Posted October 14, 2020 Author Share Posted October 14, 2020 About the install hang. I tried again to install the 32-bit XP Pro, this time I let the computer take its time. I left it at 20 minutes, still nothing, then went away for an hour and half long walk and by the time I got back the installation proceeded to the next stage. Unfortunately, next the installation could not find any hard disk partition. The mobo is about 12 years old and now the HD is a SATA hard drive. Does this installation CD recognize SATA drives? I do not recall it, but pretty sure I used this CD originally to install the OS. I vaguely recall that originally I had IDE hard drives and then I cloned the drive when I installed the large SATA HD. May be that is the explanation? Any chance I could "update" the installation CD with SP3, SP3 must have SATA drives in it. Any other solution? Any chance the installation hang time is related to the unrecognized hard drive? The 32-bit installation CD image that I downloaded has SP3 in it. I thought that if I have a valid authentication key it would work with any installation CD with the same product on it. As mentioned that downloaded CD would not take my valid key. Any way to extract a key from the installation CD itself? One can extract it from the installed OS. Thanks, Peter Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RainyShadow Posted October 14, 2020 Share Posted October 14, 2020 The unmodified XP CD don't have SATA drivers - you must load them from a floppy (can be virtual :P) when it says "Press F6 to load SCSI drivers". Probably this is the reason for the hang. Do you want to install fresh XP, or to restore your old one from the backups? I can't tell anymore, huh?! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
orbanp Posted October 14, 2020 Author Share Posted October 14, 2020 (edited) Hi RainyShadow, Thanks for your continued help! Ultimately I would like to restore my old system in a smaller partition. For that restore utility to run I need to have a running windows system. Last time I installed a 64-bit XP Pro, and restored all the files. The files are there, the XP system does not run. This is great step ahead, I see (and have) all my files from the XP system. I hoped that installing the 32-bit XP Pro system and restoring then I would have the files and the old system running. Hopefully installing that would not wrack the files already there, it took close to 9 hours to restore... You mentioned other ways to accomplish this, I need to go through of that again a couple of times to fully comprehend that. Where do I find a SATA drive to XP Pro and exactly how do I accomplish loading that. I think my 1.44 floppy is running here. The reason I went to all this trouble is that somehow from a few folders all the files on the XP partition disappeared. Not sure why, it is possible that the Linux system mocked it up (Ubuntu 18.04, KDE Plasma 5.12.9 frontend). I was starting to move over the XP user files to Linux, but was running out of space. The 1TB hard drive was split evenly between XP and Linux. The XP system uses up about 250GB. I need to rearrange the partitions, shrink the XP to 300GB, increase the Linux partition by the same. The first step was reducing the XP partition that I rushed into and ended up here... Thanks, Peter Edited October 14, 2020 by orbanp Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RainyShadow Posted October 15, 2020 Share Posted October 15, 2020 (edited) The way you planned to do this even if XP was shrinked properly, you would have probably screwed the Linux install when increasing it. You would need to update its boot loader right after ther resize, without rebooting. I'm not even sure if Ubuntu can resize its own partition while running, never tried such things, lol. Ok, prepare the 3 files for NTBackup and try to run it through Wine in Ubuntu. See if it can restore your .bkf backup to a clean formatted partition. Edited October 15, 2020 by RainyShadow typo Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
orbanp Posted October 16, 2020 Author Share Posted October 16, 2020 I did install successfully WXP with the original (well, modified) installation CD. I did find the SATA driver files on the mobo's CD, but it was in a format that the "F6 option" did not understand. I used the nLite program to modify the original installation CD, there I could add the driver files, and I also added the SP3 package as I saved that when it came out. Now I just have to see if the old system settings can be restored. Yes, the KDE Partition Manager in Linux gives you enough rope to hang yourself, as I amply have demonstrated that before! The KDE Partition Manager can resize/move a partition. I did expand one partition before successfully, though that partition was at the very end of the disk... Thanks again for the help! Regards, Peter Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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