How to you keep Windows working on a TP?

[Muse]

I'm used to Windows versions up to Windows 2000. Recently (2+ months ago) bought my first laptop, T60 preloaded with XP Pro.

I've always had to reinstall Windows 2000 at least once a year because the installation becomes slow and flaky. This entails either a wipe of the OS partition and fresh install or perhaps a restore of a basic install that was Ghosted. For instance, the Windows 2000 installation on my desktop that I've been using regularly is clamboring for a reinstall (some crazy crashes in an application that shouldn't crash and a sudden unprovoked BSOD yesterday).

What strategy is effective for a Thinkpad? I have done next to nothing in terms of reconfiguring so far, but my CSS will expire in a couple of weeks and I am going to uninstall it. I plan to probably install AVG and Zonealarm free.

I encountered a post in these forums a couple of days ago refering to making RnR disks. I didn't do that. Can I still do that and can that be used to do a refresh of your Windows? I thought there was a hidden RnR partition on this laptop. I haven't investigated what that's about. Thanks for guidance.

[GomJabbar]

I encountered a post in these forums a couple of days ago refering to making RnR disks. I didn't do that. Can I still do that and can that be used to do a refresh of your Windows?

You should be able to. This is one of the first things that a new ThinkPad owner should do. Go to Start > All Programs > ThinkVantage > Create Recovery Media > Product Recovery and burn a set of these discs. Use quality media. This is normally done with (1) CD/R, and (1) DVD/R (I don't recall which flavor of DVD the ThinkPad burner is compatible with +R or -R, but you can also use an external DVD burner or you can use all CD/R's - about 7).

If you use this Product Recovery Disc set to Restore Factory Contents, all data on your hard drive will be deleted and the original OS and Factory Software will be installed. You can also Restore Factory Contents by booting into Rescue and Recovery when you press the ThinkVantage button at the beginning of the boot process.

[jdhurst]

Somewhere here I posted a document on tools I use to keep my machine running smoothly (search for jdhurst or search for "not all free"). There are a number of tools you can use (defrag, cache management, registry cleaner (ocassionally)) that promote smooth running.

I can (and have) run Windows 2000 and Windows XP Pro for years on end without reinstalling.

In addition, other people here have very good ideas how to keep their machines running smoothly and I encourage you to browse around to see what we are doing.

Beyond all the tools, a good dollop of common sense is invaluable. Make sure you are not doing silly things or going silly places.
... JD Hurst

[Muse]

I encountered a post in these forums a couple of days ago refering to making RnR disks. I didn't do that. Can I still do that and can that be used to do a refresh of your Windows?

You should be able to. This is one of the first things that a new ThinkPad owner should do. Go to Start > All Programs > ThinkVantage > Create Recovery Media > Product Recovery and burn a set of these discs. Use quality media. This is normally done with (1) CD/R, and (1) DVD/R (I don't recall which flavor of DVD the ThinkPad burner is compatible with +R or -R, but you can also use an external DVD burner or you can use all CD/R's - about 7).

If you use this Product Recovery Disc set to Restore Factory Contents, all data on your hard drive will be deleted and the original OS and Factory Software will be installed. You can also Restore Factory Contents by booting into Rescue and Recovery when you press the ThinkVantage button at the beginning of the boot process.

Yes (Thank you!), I don't recall any posts suggesting an immediate creation of media. I have a CDRW/DVD-R drive, so I'll be making a CDR set. What I have seen is a lot of posts talking about restore from the RnR partition and I thought that this was sufficient. I suppose the concept here is that there are potential conditions in which a restoration of some sort from CDR or DVD+-R media is advantageous over (or the only option) restoration from the RnR partition. When would that happen?

[Muse]

Somewhere here I posted a document on tools I use to keep my machine running smoothly (search for jdhurst or search for "not all free"). There are a number of tools you can use (defrag, cache management, registry cleaner (ocassionally)) that promote smooth running.

I can (and have) run Windows 2000 and Windows XP Pro for years on end without reinstalling.

In addition, other people here have very good ideas how to keep their machines running smoothly and I encourage you to browse around to see what we are doing.

Beyond all the tools, a good dollop of common sense is invaluable. Make sure you are not doing silly things or going silly places.
... JD Hurst

I am defragging as I type (on my desktop, but the defrag is going on on the T60). I discovered the defrag utility a 1/2 hour ago while investigating the many icons at the right side of the Tray. I figured I'd set it up to inform me when things start getting dicey. Do others just have it automatically defrag?

Cache management isn't something I'm familiar with. Is it a configuration in Windows?

Registry cleaner - 3rd party, or Windows?

I read a thread at Anandtech Forums a year or two ago asking people how often they reinstall Windows. Most said more often than I do, which as I said is something loosely called "yearly." A lot of people said every 6 months or more frequently than that. Running Windows successfully for years is definitely an achievement.

Common sense, yes. Having a solid intuition about what you should do when computing is key here, and that's what you mean. You're obviously really good at that. I'm not so good, but as I say, I think I'm doing as well as or better than most. Anyway, I'm nowhere near as good as I need to be to get by for 3 years without a fresh Windows install.

I don't do a lot of silly things or go to silly places much. Hardly at all, but I probably do occasionally and without realizing it. Links have links and suddenly you're somewhere you don't want to be. That's the Internet.

[jdhurst]

Like I said, consider searching for stuff here.

Defrag: Perfect Disk 8 is as good as it gets and blistringly fast.
Cache: Cache Sentry Pro is excellent.
Registry: Registry First Aid is excellent.

JD Hurst

[GomJabbar]

What I have seen is a lot of posts talking about restore from the RnR partition and I thought that this was sufficient. I suppose the concept here is that there are potential conditions in which a restoration of some sort from CDR or DVD+-R media is advantageous over (or the only option) restoration from the RnR partition. When would that happen?

The main advantage of having the Product Recovery Discs is that you can use them on a new hard drive. If your hard drive fails, these discs can come in very handy.

[jjesusfreak01]

Heh, I reinstall every couple months, usually following a complete system failure...this is expected, because I abuse my Windows installation.

[syedj]

I have noticed that Windows has a way of deteriorating by time. So every few months (to a max of a whole year) I also need to re-install Windows and all the software from scratch.

It take hours if not days to get all the applications installed again, updates applied, preferences changed and such but now I have created ghost images of full installs (WinXP Pro and most recently Vista Ultimate in the last few weeks, along with their respective recovery partitions, basically the whole disk) for T60 and T41. Now every time I have to reinstall I just re-create the whole HDD in under 30 minutes after a few clicks with an end product which is everything to my liking. The images sit on an external USB HDD and are accessible through BartPE Live CD.

I just have to remember to save the data before zapping the whole disk

[agarza]

syedj, which software you use to clone your HDD. I've been wanting to create a image of my T42p. I have an external USB disks and certainly recovering from a image would speed the process of reinstalling everything

[ZDiablo]

I wish you guys lived next door to me. My computers could use a fresh OS install. I can install just about anything except OS. I tried once and never tried it again, it was a nightmare.

Zarra

[Muse]

syedj, which software you use to clone your HDD. I've been wanting to create a image of my T42p. I have an external USB disks and certainly recovering from a image would speed the process of reinstalling everything

You've certainly got the idea. As I noted above, I'm on the cusp of reinstalling Windows 2000 on my desktop system. Actually, I may be able to delay that some as today I may have fixed the immediate concern, BSOD's! Yesterday, I was simply reading an email (not touching anything) and BSOD! I haven't had one of those in a very long time. Today, another! I uninstalled my video driver, rebooted, reinistalled the driver, rebooted and so far so good. This strategy has solved a lot of Windows problems for me, and I don't know why.

Ghosting (probably with Norton Ghost, a program that is branded Symantec, but they only get credit in my book for buying the program from the developers, who are from "down under") is a wonderful way of restoring Windows, or anything else for that matter. As benottomex noted, it's a fantastic time saver. I've used it successfully many times, but haven't yet used it to restore an OS. I think I have a Ghost image of my Windows 2000 at the proper moment, and can use that for my OS renew. The crucial thing is to make the Ghost image (from which you will/may later restore) at the right moment - after necessary adjustments that you know you are going to have to do next time you install, but before anything else. If you make the image too soon, it's not a concern... you just have to do some extra steps after restoring the image. However, if you make the image too late, you may not be able to undo the damage. Such was the case with my Norton Antivirus, a program that's notoriously difficult (if not impossible) to effectively uninstall. I don't believe I'm going to be using NAV any more, in any case.

I wish you guys lived next door to me. My computers could use a fresh OS install. I can install just about anything except OS. I tried once and never tried it again, it was a nightmare.

Zarra

It's really not that hard. I know, it's really intimidating when you first start doing it. I've installed OS's many many times and it doesn't scare me anymore.

[syedj]

benottomex,

I use ghost32.exe for making the images. This standalone .exe version came with Symantec Ghost 8.0 Corporate Edition and works perfectively from within BartPE's Windows bootable disk. My understanding is it was retired in later versions of Ghost. I have created a bootable Windows XP SP2 disk and added ghost32.exe to it. BartPE supports USB HDDs out of the box and mounts them just like normal Windows XP does under "My Computer," which is exactly what we need. The first image of a ThinkPad's default HDD layout (with the recovery partition) I made failed to restore the HDD from the image when I tested it; symptom was the restored HDD was failing to boot. Even fdisk /mbr wasn't fixing the boot issue. After much research I found out that ghost32.exe doesn't copy the whole boot sector by default which the recovery partition and IBM's scheme of things depend on. The trick is using -IB switch while invoking the ghost32.exe (from a command prompt) for making the image. This -IB switch makes the ghost32.exe to save the whole boot sector in the image file. I usually use the highest compression for the image files, just to save space. With the OS and all the applications that I use the image files come out to be roughly 12GB-15GB or so.

I have successfully test the above method with Windows XP SP2 and Vista Ultimate edition. One little caveat I ran into with the Vista Ultimate after restoring from the image was it also failed to boot. The fix was to reboot from the Vista install DVD and chose to fix the installation instead of a brand new install. The machine works flawlessly with restored Windows XP or Vista Ultimate -- and yes, the R&R partition also works as expected with the blue Access IBM and Function buttons.

After all interested images have been made and stored, the HDD re-image process takes roughly 30 minutes - including the setup time - from a clean hard drive to a fully operational system from the saved image. Talk about time savings

In theory the same procedure should also work with Linux OS installation but I haven't tried it myself yet.

In the long gone era when floppy drives were more easily available for laptops, I used to use similar procedure for cloning mismatched size hard drives using DOS ghost.exe ver 6.05 after booting through a Windows 98 bootable floppy disk. For Windows 2000 and XP with NTFS file system it used to warn that the HDD might have corrupted boot sector because of some virus but still made the clone

Funnily enough with OS images at hand one feels a lot more confident and daring trying different OS experiments with the machine.

jjesusfreak01, I know exactly what you mean by abusing Windows installations

ZDiablo, like benottomex mentioned, its only scary the first few times If you ever run into problems installing OSes feel free to send me a PM. It will be my pleasure to help you.

[Ken Fox]

I can (and have) run Windows 2000 and Windows XP Pro for years on end without reinstalling.


... JD Hurst

ditto.

Although I've done a very large number of new installs on WinXP (plus Win2K and NT4 beforehand), I do not regularly reinstall the OS and have found no reason to do so.

I do not find that my systems deteriorate over time. I do use a registry cleaner (ccleaner.exe) and perfectdisk 8, with some frequency.

Don't install programs and updates and other stuff you don't need. That will eliminate a lot of potential problems.

[Muse]

I can (and have) run Windows 2000 and Windows XP Pro for years on end without reinstalling.


... JD Hurst

ditto.

Although I've done a very large number of new installs on WinXP (plus Win2K and NT4 beforehand), I do not regularly reinstall the OS and have found no reason to do so.

I do not find that my systems deteriorate over time. I do use a registry cleaner (ccleaner.exe) and perfectdisk 8, with some frequency.

Don't install programs and updates and other stuff you don't need. That will eliminate a lot of potential problems.

I have been thinking I have to reinstall (or restore a fresh install) Windows 2000 on my desktop's every-day use OS partition in the VERY near future, however an experiment I tried yesterday may have fixed the most obvious problem that cropped up a couple of days ago -- sudden unprovoked BSOD's (two of them in two days). I uninstalled my nVidia video driver and reinstalled it. This little tactic has eliminated crashing scenarios in the past for me. So far so good...

[agarza]

I wish you guys lived next door to me. My computers could use a fresh OS install. I can install just about anything except OS. I tried once and never tried it again, it was a nightmare.

Zarra

I certainly would like to help you, in the next coming of years I think on moving to the US with my engineering degree. So maybe I will come sometime to help you out reinstalling your Thinkpad (as a matter of fact I repair computers as a hobby, but people here don't like to pay lots of $$$ for this kind of service, so irritating )

syedj, thanks for your reply. I will try to use your advice. Just some questions:
1. I have a Live CD of Windows XP which does the same thing as BartPE, it boots to Windows and have support of USB devices, then in that ISO should I include ghost32.exe? and is ghost32 GUI or command mode.
2. I downloaded a file called Symantec Ghost v8.2 Corporate Usb Edition For Dos Boot.rar, maybe I could give it a try (But a extraction of the RAR file results on 2 floppy images, there's no way I could use floppies on my T42p.
3. A simple image made from ghost32 contains all the partitions the imaged HDD has (on a single file)?

And finally maybe you could want to post the instructions on how to use ghost32.exe (I suppose you run in within windows environment, right)

[syedj]

1. You can either include the ghost32.exe executable in the ISO image, use a flash PCMCIA card or even the target USB drive as well. Basically just put it anywhere you can access it from within the machine while running from the bootable Windows XP CD. The most convenient place it the ISO though since you have all the tools you need in one CD then. Remember to invoke it from the command line using the -IB switch. ghost32.exe has an GUI interface, kinda like from the late 90's but very functional nevertheless. It does, however, support full command line interface as well for scripting and such. I personally use the GUI interface and find it does what I need to do adequately. ghost32.exe runs from within Windows environment however since the running OS locks most of the system files its using an image of the running OS cannot be made. If you can use another external USB HDD enclosure or an Ultra Slimbay adapter for the source HDD then I imagine it should work.

2. I am not personally familiar with the 8.2 version so cannot comment on the floppy images. Are the images in ISO or some other format? Can you open the images using any tool and peak whats inside of them? Maybe one of them contain the ghost32.exe. The version 8.0 that I have is more than 2.38MB so I am not sure if that will fit on a 1.44MB floppy image. Give it a shot otherwise look for the 8.0 version.

3. ghost32 has the following options that I are relevant to this discussion:

Local Disk -> to another HDD (a verbatim copy)
to an image (save the image of the source HDD)
from an image (restore the target HDD from image file)

Local Partition -> to a partition on a separate HDD
to an image
from an image

By default the image file is broken into chunks of about 2.25GB each (I guess to support FAT32 target HDDs for storing these images). When you open the image file ghost32 considers all these chunks of the image as a coherent image and treats them that way.

The GUI interface is pretty intuitive to use following the menus. I use Local->Disk->To Disk to make a verbatim copy of the HDD, Local->Disk->To Image to make the image file and Local->Disk->From Image to restore the HDD from an image file. I never had a need to play around with individual partitions but I suppose it should follow the same pattern. There are other options available too but again I have never looked into them.

The version 8.0 came with another executable called ghostexp.exe which a very nifty utility to mount an image just like how Windows Explorer shows contents under My Computer. If you need one or more files from an image without actually overwriting the contents of an HDD to have access to them then this is what you need. I haven't tried modifying files in an image but have had to retrieve files, which works very well.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

[ibm meister]

Two ways that work well. Rescue and Restore will allow you to save any files you want and reinstall every thing else. Can be tricky for a novice. What I usually do is save all files, svae all installs, passwords, favorites, etc elsewhere. Then simply restore the machine to factory contents.

This is a sure way to truly have a FRESH install. Just did this a few weeks ago, made all the difference. Increase speed X2