Thinkpads Forum

In about a month I'm headed to France for a month, something I do twice a year. I'll be taking an X61s Ultralight. I'm a Technet subscriber and have loaded Windows 7 and other apps on the machine, so my basic needs will be met. I'll probably also take along a spare clone of this HD, just in case.

Since I no longer have a service partition on this machine, and given my paranoid nature, I'd like to bring along a USB key (I have an 8gb Lenovo key) that I could use in case of emergency, in order to get some basic functionality in order to tide me over if all else fails. I can think of a couple of ways I might use this however I haven't decided on what failsafe approach to take.

One approach would be to use the "imaging" function within Windows 7 and to put an image of the hard drive on my spare drive, plus load the recovery CD contents on the USB key, if it is possible to get that to work (haven't tried it). Or, I could try to do essentially the same thing with an imaging program like Acronis True Image.

Another approach would be to dispense with Windows altogether in this sort of disaster situation, and to opt for some sort of simple Linux distribution, or even a pared down version of XP, that I could boot into each time with the USB drive. At the least I would need to have the ability to use wired and wireless internet and browser functionality.

The X61s is under warranty and has an international warranty so unless the machine was physically damaged I could get it repaired in France during the trip, if need be. My major concern is what to do should my hard disk fail or become corrupted, especially since I'll not have a recovery partition to fall back on.

Any suggestions?

Ken Fox wrote:... I'll...take along a spare clone of this HD ... what to do should my hard disk fail ...

The obvious and best solution is to replace the bad drive with the clone you will have with you --- but you know that already, so what am I missing here?

You could use an Acronis true image boot disc for your backup since you can make a flash bootable using the recovery disk maker, OR....
If you wanted to go the linux route, you could technically load a full version of UBUNTU onto your flash drive and use it that way.
Other options would include making a flash drive bootable and using WindowsPE or better yet, VISTAPE or Windows7 Recovery.
Below are some links for more info, welcome to booting from flash....

www.pendrivelinux.com

www.winbuilder.net

EOMtp wrote:

Ken Fox wrote:... I'll...take along a spare clone of this HD ... what to do should my hard disk fail ...

The obvious and best solution is to replace the bad drive with the clone you will have with you --- but you know that already, so what am I missing here?

That is what I would do, however the recovery partition provides a sort of fail-safe basic functionality in case all else fails. I'm looking for "double protection."

ken

If the hard drive fails mechanically or electronically, then the recovery partition would be of no use even if it existed, hence the cloned drive. If the problem is not drive failure, but rather "corruption" of one sort or another -- including inability to boot -- then, amongst the 50 options of what one can do, there is the following esoteric candidate:

- Make a USB flash drive bootable and place PowerQuest's Drive Image 2002 on it -- it's an old program, yet far superior to anything else that exists in the convenience of use in case of a catastrophic failure.
- Boot using the USB flash drive, start Drive Image, and restore a previously-created image of the C:-drive (which you would have created earlier using Drive Image, and which you would have stored on a different partition of the drive).

One cannot do quite the same thing with Acronis TrueImage, or Ghost, or many other imaging products. The "beauty" of Drive Image is that one can run it off a flash drive after booting off the flash drive; nothing else is required to restore a backup image.

Have fun in France!

EOMtp wrote:...One cannot do quite the same thing with Acronis TrueImage, or Ghost, or many other imaging products. The "beauty" of Drive Image is that one can run it off a flash drive after booting off the flash drive; nothing else is required to restore a backup image...

Not to disparage Drive Image, but Acronis True Image (ATI) can do the same. You can boot the machine from a USB flash drive containing the recovery version of ATI. The image that you want to restore can be stored on the same flash drive or elsewhere.

First of all, thanks for the many good suggestions given in this thread!

I stumbled onto a good blog posting that details, in very simple terms, how to make a thumb drive bootable, and then to transfer the contents of optical media over to it, giving you in essence a bootable copy of a CD or DVD drive. The subject of the blog posting is how to install Win 7 from a thumb drive, but the principles detailed on how to make the thumb drive bootable should be more or less universal. Here is the blog page of interest:

http://blogs.technet.com/aviraj/archive ... drive.aspx

I think you could use these instructions to end up with a bootable flash drive having whatever it is that you want to have on it, be it Acronis True Image, the Windows 7 recovery program, or a Linux distro. I have already tried it with the Windows 7 recovery program (that requires an image made through Win 7) and it appears to work well. I have no doubt it would work with most or all other CDs or DVDs containing operating systems or imaging programs.

On my trip I'm going to take the spare hard drive with a copy of my main drive, which will also have an image file of some sort from the main drive on it, plus a couple of thumb drives, one of which can install the image file and the other of which will be a usable simple bootable linux distro. This ought to give me every option possible except one for the possibility of having my laptop stolen!

Thanks again to everyone who replied in this thread!

"I have no doubt it would work with most or all other CDs or DVDs containing operating systems or imaging programs."

That would be a negative.
That process only works with VISTA and WINDOWS 7 and recovery or image programs based off the VISTAPE or WIN7PE code.

There are numerous apps out there that attempt to assist in making Flash Drives bootable for XP install CDs or various Distros of Linux, some are decent, while others are hit and miss.

That's correct.

My favorite method is to set up the flash drive to boot from Grub4Dos, which is based on Linux GRUB but modernized to understand NTFS partitions. One of its neatest features is the ability to directly boot an ISO image. So if you have bootable software that runs from CD, all you need to do is to copy an ISO image of the CD to your flash drive and directly boot the ISO from Grub4Dos.

Here is a tutorial from a friend of mine showing how to do this with the Acronis True Image boot environment. Skip section 2 of the tutorial and do the rest of the steps, substituting your favorite ISO for the one mentioned at the end of section 3.

Note that you can have as many ISOs on the flash drive as will fit, and can boot any of them. I have, for example, ISOs for TrueImage, PartedMagic, Kubuntu Live, WinRE for Windows 7, VistaPE, and Windows Home Server Recovery ISOs on my flash drive.

Now for the fine print -- Grub4Dos requires the ISO file to be contiguous on the drive (no fragments), but you can work around that by adding the --mem option in the configuration file. Doing this will load the ISO into RAM before booting it. Obviously, you must have enough RAM to hold the entire ISO so use of the --mem option is inappropriate for large ISOs like the Windows 7 installer DVD, for example.

gmgfarrand wrote:"I have no doubt it would work with most or all other CDs or DVDs containing operating systems or imaging programs."

That would be a negative.
That process only works with VISTA and WINDOWS 7 and recovery or image programs based off the VISTAPE or WIN7PE code.

There are numerous apps out there that attempt to assist in making Flash Drives bootable for XP install CDs or various Distros of Linux, some are decent, while others are hit and miss.

Obviously, I need to increase my level of "doubt" given the circumstances

ken

K0LO wrote:That's correct.

My favorite method is to set up the flash drive to boot from Grub4Dos, which is based on Linux GRUB but modernized to understand NTFS partitions. One of its neatest features is the ability to directly boot an ISO image. So if you have bootable software that runs from CD, all you need to do is to copy an ISO image of the CD to your flash drive and directly boot the ISO from Grub4Dos.

Here is a tutorial from a friend of mine showing how to do this with the Acronis True Image boot environment. Skip section 2 of the tutorial and do the rest of the steps, substituting your favorite ISO for the one mentioned at the end of section 3.

Note that you can have as many ISOs on the flash drive as will fit, and can boot any of them. I have, for example, ISOs for TrueImage, PartedMagic, Kubuntu Live, WinRE for Windows 7, VistaPE, and Windows Home Server Recovery ISOs on my flash drive.

Now for the fine print -- Grub4Dos requires the ISO file to be contiguous on the drive (no fragments), but you can work around that by adding the --mem option in the configuration file. Doing this will load the ISO into RAM before booting it. Obviously, you must have enough RAM to hold the entire ISO so use of the --mem option is inappropriate for large ISOs like the Windows 7 installer DVD, for example.

Thanks for this information . . . .

I have a couple of 8gb flash drives, and maybe I'll load one of them up with various ISOs to allow me to deal with any number of dire circumstances I'll probably never face . . . .

ken

Ken Fox wrote: I stumbled onto a good blog posting that details, in very simple terms, how to make a thumb drive bootable

For XP, I've used the same type of procedure detailed here, and it works very well - when I travel, I carry a 2 GB bootable flash drive with XP, drivers, and ISOs for Office and some other programs on, and a 16GB flash drive to which I backup critical files. It's tiny, and works well, even in the event of a total hard drive meltdown.

K0LO wrote: My favorite method is to set up the flash drive to boot from Grub4Dos, which is based on Linux GRUB but modernized to understand NTFS partitions. One of its neatest features is the ability to directly boot an ISO image. So if you have bootable software that runs from CD, all you need to do is to copy an ISO image of the CD to your flash drive and directly boot the ISO from Grub4Dos.

Here is a tutorial from a friend of mine showing how to do this with the Acronis True Image boot environment. Skip section 2 of the tutorial and do the rest of the steps, substituting your favorite ISO for the one mentioned at the end of section 3.

Note that you can have as many ISOs on the flash drive as will fit, and can boot any of them. I have, for example, ISOs for TrueImage, PartedMagic, Kubuntu Live, WinRE for Windows 7, VistaPE, and Windows Home Server Recovery ISOs on my flash drive.

I had a 16gb fast SDHC card on order from one of those NY stores run by crooks, who took my order but did not fulfill it until a month later. I got the card in the mail today and was finally able to test this, using a USB SDHC card reader. I was able to get it to work with Acronis TI 11, and in fact made a clone of my hard drive on another disk using this technique, which worked well. I do still have several gb of free space on this SDHC card.

I'm interested in putting ISOs for a few other programs on there, perhaps a basic linux distribution and maybe something else. I'll try adding them on when their downloads are completed. Hopefully I can get the menu.lst file's syntax right with those added iso choices.

I did discover one interesting thing today, which was that it was possible to copy, onto a flash drive, the entire service partition of the disk that originally came with the X61s in question (which was sold with Vista on it). Windows won't let you do that easily, however using qparted, which is a bootable linux partition editor, it was easy to copy the entire partition, with its boot flag, onto a flash drive, although I did get some sort of error message at the end of the process. The flash drive worked anyway, and I'm able to boot into it using F12 at the beginning of the boot sequence. This basically gives all the functionality of the original service partition, even though I no longer have it on the hard disk after installing Windows 7. From a practical standpoint you probably need an 8gb flash drive to get the service partition on there, since most of the service partitions I've seen have been more than 4gb, and thumb drives and SDHC cards are not sold in sizes between 4 and 8gb.

Finally, for anyone interested, the SD card slot on an X6x machine does not appear to be usable as a boot device, and does not come up on the boot menu with the use of F12 in the early boot sequence. You would need to put that SDHC card into a USB reader in order to boot from it. Once you boot up a program like Acronis TI, however, you can then access the SD card, so you could, for example, put the Acronis TI program on a small thumb drive but the actual tib (true image) restore files on an SD card put into the SD card slot. I don't know how fast reads and writes are done from this SD card slot, and I think they are probably a lot slower than if you just put the SD card into a USB reader.

Another "solution" I have found is to make a bootable USB key (or flash drive attached to a USB reader) and to install a live version of Linux, which would actually have a lot more functionality than the service partition, once you learned how to use it. Knoppix seems to be a good choice for this and if you burn a CD with the live version you actually have the option to make a bootable USB drive version from within the live version of the program booted from CD. All you need is a 1gb flash drive and you are set. A "live" linux distro will allow you to do things like connecting to a WiFi network, while the service partition (at least the ones I'm familiar with) can only access the internet or email via wired Ethernet cable. On the other hand, the service partition can reinstall the original Windows OS, which the Linux distro obviously cannot do (although it can install Linux).

Otherwise, there are other easy ways of making most any live Linux distribution functional on a USB key drive, such as with this free download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/liveusb ... e/download. You can even use it to make a key drive bootable cloning program (Clonezilla) or similarly, with a partition manager such as Gparted.

ken

Ken:

Since you are obviously enjoying this, try adding the ISO for PartedMagic to your Grub4Dos bootable USB flash drive. PartedMagic is an impressive recovery environment that contains support for wireless, a web browser, file manager, Clonezilla, and GParted; all in an impressively small ISO.

With Windows 7 you can make a bootable recovery CD. Add this ISO to your collection for repairing Windows PCs.

K0LO wrote:Ken:

Since you are obviously enjoying this, try adding the ISO for PartedMagic to your Grub4Dos bootable USB flash drive. PartedMagic is an impressive recovery environment that contains support for wireless, a web browser, file manager, Clonezilla, and GParted; all in an impressively small ISO.

With Windows 7 you can make a bootable recovery CD. Add this ISO to your collection for repairing Windows PCs.

Hi Mark,

I had no luck at all getting Grub4Dos to work with multiple boot options. I did succeed, in following the tutorial, to get Acronis to work. I have a 16gb SDHC card that I have loaded the image(s) from my Acronis TI backup onto, along with Grub4Dos and the Acronis 11 Home program on. I tried to put other ISOs on this but they would not boot then after reading some support material I discovered that most Linux distros will not boot from ISO form with Grub4Dos. I even tried using the extracted files from the zip files for these programs, like Clonezilla and Gparted, but in the end just gave up as it was a huge PITA to try to read the support information on Grub4Dos which runs as many pages as my phone directory and is somewhat less interesting

Linux can be arcane to those who are not used to it.

If you can suggest an easy way to configure the menu.lst file to allow booting of more than one thing (and to have it actually work) then I'd love to hear about it. I have enough old small SDHC cards lying around that it would probably just be easier to make a separate bootable SDHC card (in a reader).

As to the Windows 7 repair utility, I am familiar with it and in fact have tested it out several times. It is quite limited in its capabilities. For example, if you make an image file of a 320gb HD then try to restore to a 500gb hard disk, you have no options at all to get the restored image put onto a partition of a size other than the original 320gb (which means the rest of the space on the HD will end up being unpartitioned and unused; granted, you can deal with that afterwards, but it is a PITA as opposed to simply using Acronis TI to begin with).

Anyway, thanks for your suggestion and I would like to try out the Partedmagic installation as it sounds like it would be fun to play around with!

Ken:

To make a Grub4Dos bootable USB flash drive you copy the Grub4Dos loader file, grldr, and the menu file, menu.lst, to your flash drive. Then you run the GUI installer, grubinst_gui.exe, to install GRUB to the MBR of the flash drive. Paul's tutorial covers how to do this. Once these initial steps have been completed, to add a bootable ISO to the flash drive consists of only copying the ISO to the flash drive and adding a menu item for it.

In the following example, I have created a folder grub to hold splash screens and a folder images to hold ISO image files. Here is my flash drive's menu.lst:You are correct that some of the Linux distros that use Isolinux for a boot manager cannot be booted directly from their ISO files. You can usually find information on the distro's forum or in their help documentation to show how to boot with GRUB. See the above menu.lst file for example boot stanzas for Kubuntu and for Knoppix.

Have fun!

Hi Mark,

Thanks for posting your menu.lst file's contents and other information.

I have played around with this stuff now over several hours and on different days. I have had no difficulty getting stuff to run if Grub 4 Dos will work with it as an ISO file, but have not succeeded in getting a single program or linux distro to work that will not load in this fashion. This is in spite of altering the syntax to fit my own file's names and other characteristics. Still, I have a flash drive with multiple isos on it which works fine and is very useful. I thank you for that.

This is not to say that with additional time and effort that I could not have figured out how to make this all work, but it is to say that I have already invested more time and effort than the results would be worth to me, and it was simply easier to use my collection of now-semi-obsolete small SDHC cards and thumb drives rather than try to get everything to work all on one piece of media. This is the inherent problem with Linux; in a world that is full of other options, it isn't that you can't get it to work, but that it oftentimes is not worth the time or effort compared to the other options.

Unless an individual is willing to invest some time in learning how to work with Linux, I cannot recommend this approach (grub 4 dos multibooting) unless the person has a high frustration tolerance. If people want a live linux distro that will boot off of flash media, it is a LOT simpler to use one of the prepackaged programs that will do this for you, such as KU904p.exe for Kubuntu, which will make a "persistent" version of Kubuntu on a 2gb flash drive. Other alternatives would include another program called "Live USB Helper," or simpler still, just run the live CD for Knoppix and once booted up choose the option to have it automatically install a bootable live version of Knoppix on your flash media/USB key.

All of the above having been said, I very much appreciate your introducing me to grub 4 dos, and especially to PartedMagic, which is a gem of a program for anyone who likes to play around with hard drives and OS installations.

Thanks again.

Ken:

You're quite welcome. Yes, getting things to work in Linux can sometimes consume an inordinate amount of time and effort. I was originally motivated to pack everything onto one 8 GB flash drive in my zeal for miniaturization. Here is a picture *pdf (See Pico C model on the bottom of page 2) of the final product, which goes everywhere with me on a key chain.

Linux has been wonderful as a method of learning more about PCs, but having said that, I find myself using it less and less as the Windows tools get better and better. I can't believe I'm going to say this, but my recent experiences with Windows 7 and with Windows Home Server have convinced me that sometimes the big guys are capable of doing an outstanding job.

Enjoy your trip and your new recovery tools.

K0LO wrote:Ken:

You're quite welcome. Yes, getting things to work in Linux can sometimes consume an inordinate amount of time and effort. I was originally motivated to pack everything onto one 8 GB flash drive in my zeal for miniaturization. Here is a picture *pdf (See Pico C model on the bottom of page 2) of the final product, which goes everywhere with me on a key chain.

Linux has been wonderful as a method of learning more about PCs, but having said that, I find myself using it less and less as the Windows tools get better and better. I can't believe I'm going to say this, but my recent experiences with Windows 7 and with Windows Home Server have convinced me that sometimes the big guys are capable of doing an outstanding job.

Enjoy your trip and your new recovery tools.

Mark,

Thanks for the help. I'm leaving on my trip in 3 days, but fortunately I'm not staying in a single place that does not (at least claim to) have internet access. That probably means I'll have to do without for a night or two, but otherwise I'll be connected. That's a far cry from what I used to experience in trips to France.

Windows 7 is hugely better than Vista (not saying much) and much more modern and capable than XP. The last transition that MS made that was as valuable (to me) was from NT 4 to Windows 2000. Still, if you like to work with your drives and installations, Windows goes out of its way to prevent you from doing various things, whereas with Linux there are tools that make those chores a snap. Plus, I think those live bootable Linux distros are really cool, and I plan to play around with them some more. At the very least they would easily compensate for not having a service partition any longer on your hard drive, as you would experience with updating your OS on a Thinkpad.

Once again, thanks, have a nice fall!