Messages - Vurbal [ switch to compact view ]

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31
Living Room / Re: Recommend some music videos to me!
« on: January 19, 2016, 06:46 AM »
Lemmy makes breakfast:


32
General Software Discussion / Re: Mind mapping software
« on: September 06, 2015, 09:17 AM »
Thread necro powers, activate, form of...Graduate Thesis Student!

Vurbal,

I am interested to see how your quest to organize your thoughts has turned out as it seems you and I share a similar mind. I was wondering what you found and what you see as the strengths in such a product. I am not officially underway on my thesis in my Master of Science in Information Assurance course, with the ultimate goal being a Doctorate of Science in Information Systems to follow. As such, I am looking for a way to keep all of these random ideas and thoughts that populate in the tangled mess I call my brain somewhat organized. Have you had any luck?
-Josh (September 03, 2015, 09:54 PM)

I don't have time right this moment,  but I'll try to answer this with enough detail to be useful. The short version is yes, I have had some luck, but with quite a few caveats.

If I haven't posted again before tomorrow afternoon, shoot me another PM because it probably means I've forgotten entirely.

33
Living Room / Re: [SOLVED] Boot problem/s
« on: July 26, 2015, 01:49 PM »
Congratulations.   I have pretty good experience messing with MBR.  But with W8 they changed to this UEFI and GPT jazz.  I understand it had to be changed to accommodate huge storage.  But I don't dare to do anything without a lot of reading in preparation and expendable machines to experiment with.  :)

Plus a lot of bootable utilities that worked for sure on MBR are now suspect.  Can't take anything as a given. 


-MilesAhead (July 26, 2015, 07:28 AM)

As I learned last year, Dell's recovery process was already suspect on MBR systems - and that's being generous. Throw in those additional variables and it's clearly a train wreck waiting to happen - at least for the average user.

34
Living Room / Re: [Help!] Boot problem/s
« on: July 25, 2015, 08:47 PM »
So I am not sure what to make of the 1st partition on your hard disk. Likely when you make the 3rd partition the boot partition your system will start working again.
-Shades (July 25, 2015, 07:43 PM)

I'm pretty sure it's part of the Dell restore crap. Not all of it, obviously, since it's not big enough. IIRC it contains the restore program, accessible through the Windows startup repair process. At least on the one I dealt with, the WIM image was actually stored on the system drive, but hidden so you wouldn't know it was there.

It's still a little fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure all I had to do at that point is set the correct partition to boot (using diskpart obviously), and it was fixed. I do remember for sure that the recovery partition was at the beginning of the drive, just because I had always seen them at the end in the past.

35
Living Room / Re: [Help!] Boot problem/s
« on: July 24, 2015, 01:20 PM »

I ran into this exact problem last year after replacing the hard drive in a Dell laptop. The restore process is supposed to hide that partition at the end of the restore process, but doesn't necessarily do so. IIRC I found a way to do it from the command line. If I get some time, I'll see if I can find the command I used.
-Vurbal (July 24, 2015, 12:34 PM)

Probably diskpart.  Run it from an administrative command prompt(or elevated as they say these days.)

edit: This tutorial on a Vista system changes a recovery partition to show it by changing the type to 07. Supposedly 07 is visible ntfs 17 is hidden and 27 is a recovery partition.  If 17 doesn't work try 27.  :)

http://defaultreasoning.com/2009/05/29/unhide-the-recovery-partition-on-a-basic-disk-with-diskpart/

-MilesAhead (July 24, 2015, 01:05 PM)

This was actually one of Dell's command line utilities, but yeah, DiskPart should do the job.

Apparently I did just use diskpart, at least according to what I posted here at the time.

For anyone unfortunate enough to get stuck repairing a Dell with DataSafe (a truly ironic name) backup software, I do now have a few words of advice. The first word that comes to mind is run and that's only halfway joking.

It seems someone at Dell came up with the brilliant idea of integrating half assed backup software with the Windows deployment process. Actually that's not exactly right which is really the problem. Instead of launching their proprietary tools inside the deployment process, a successful restore required me to use their tool directly so it could select the correct (original) install image rather than the DataSafe backup which just looked like it was the original.

Also, since Dell decided to leave the recovery partition accessible from Windows, when the Win7 upgrade ran it used it as the boot partition and changed it from E: to C:. That, of course, isn't nearly as problematic as the fact the upgrade obviously had to also make it the active partition. On the good side I can now definitively say I haven't forgotten how to use diskpart.

The tl;dr version goes something like this. After booting with a Windows disc I started by making the correct (OS) partition active. Next I used imagex to manually apply what various Internet sources indicated was the factory image. In reality it ended up a backup from some point which at least got me to the point DataSafe was available from the Windows repair menu. When I booted the next time I let DataSafe do another restore which applied the actual factory image.
-Vurbal (April 02, 2014, 08:43 PM)

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