Simple Ideas: Modify a SATA enclosure to make data backups easier.

If you're like me, you do a lot of system reloads for people who have OS issues due to malware or other factors. As a part of nearly all reload procedures a data backup of the owner's documents, pictures, music, etc. is performed. I always give a client the option and try to steer them toward it since the chances of recovering important information inexpensively after a system reload become very slim. While it's not something I would expect many wouldn't eventually come up with, I decided I would streamline the process of doing this step by modifying a SATA drive enclosure so that it can be used with the system's drive withoutremoving the drive from the PC.

First, I ditched the wimpy power adapter that came with the enclosure. This is the weak point on almost all drive enclosures. I've probably had ten of these fail for every other problem I've encountered with SATA drive enclosures so I opted to replace it with a unit that outputs the same voltage but has a higher current capacity.

Nice and heavy. 4.16A heavy.

I chose an enclosure that has everything required on one board rather than lots of leads going off to switches and lights that are sometimes difficult to remove from the chassis, etc. I also found that having a power switch on this particular enclosure's board was handy and there's even eSATA for added speed (though I'm just using USB right now).

USB, eSata, power switch and connector.

SATA and SATA power connectors.

"Modify the enclosure" might not be the exact phrase to describe what I did - rather, I removed the board from the enclosure. That is all. This really isn't a terribly complex operation, you just undo some screws, bend some tabs, etc. and free the board from the enclosure. Again, this is easier to do and the finished product is easier to handle if everything is integrated and you don't have to bring along extra stuff from the enclosure to get it to work.

Now, this is exceptionally simple to put into use: all you have to do is disconnect the SATA and power cables going to the hard drive in the computer being repaired and dock this little guy to the back of the drive. A word of warning, however, the SATA connections on the backs of hard drives can be fragile. I would advise against putting any undue strain on the connector with this board. Fortunately, the board itself is light enough it puts less strain than stiff SATA cables can on the board and thanks to the built-in power switch I can keep the power off (green light is dark) until it is completely seated on the drive and then apply power with the flip of a switch, rather than trying to plug in a coaxial DC connector to the back of the board while keeping it securely docked to the drive. Now plug the USB (or eSATA) into your host machine and you're in business.

Serious business.

Be mindful of the cords while they are hooked up and don't make any tripping hazards or you might still damage the hard drive being worked on. A data recovery process can sometimes take hours so it's important to keep everything clean and simple so you're not accidentally jerking cords around. My data recovery station is one table that I keep an iMac on for performing the actual recovery and I do not string any cords across gaps.

In the end this can save you several minutes on each job and help prevent the possibility of accidentally dropping the customer's hard drive or losing it either on your bench (it's perfectly clean, isn't it?) or worse, in another customer's computer. I normally label all drives with permanent marker with the customer's name before it leaves my hand after removing it from a PC, but this saves all those steps and is especially helpful on systems where you have to jump through hoops like front panel and faceplate component removal are required to remove the drive.

Who, me?

In addition to merely removing the board and using it one could also insulate it somewhat to protect it from damage and protect other things that it might come into contact with while left plugged into it's power brick. One could simply wrap the board with tape, I have done this before, but it will leave a sticky mess if you ever choose to change your design. You could also make or repurpose a small enclosure that holds just the board and perhaps integrates some form of mechanical attachment to support the device on the back of a drive. Keep in mind, however, if you make it much bigger or add tight brackets to the front side you can limit the device's usefulness, so I prefer to keep things simple.

Transfer Windows 7 Hard Disk To A New PC

Or, replace a motherboard in a Windows 7 system without reloading. Either way, when you do this, you're effectively going to a "new PC" - at least as far as the software is concerned. Even if you're using the same ram, cpu, drives and chassis, a different motherboard is just about as good as a whole different system.

Now, there are two complaints about this process that I can hear now:

1. You shouldn't do that - the OEM license forbids it!
2. You shouldn't do that - reloading is BETTER!

Well, to #1, I'd answer "I don't care, you do what you gotta do to get up and running". Microsoft actually acknowledges this and doesn't censor it's help forums for users seeking ways to do this. They understand that there are times when you just don't have the time or ability to procure a new license and do a fresh build on a system, or that this process may be a needed intermediate step for a full proper repair, they get it, you should too. To #2, well, I know. Again, time and other considerations can make this procedure more feasible, at least in the short term, than doing a full reinstallation.

This particular situation put me in territory deeming it worth my time and effort to preserve the original installation, rather than reloading it. My wife uses this PC for work and her employers provide some extremely finicky, delicate and difficult to install and configure software. Not only that, but this software, which uses Microsoft Word, has never worked well with versions of Office newer than 2003, and, unless they've done some major work on it recently, does not work at all on 64bit installations of Windows.

Rather than dig out a 32bit Windows 7 install media, then hunt around and dig out the Office 2003 media, and go through the multiple-hours long process of installing the proprietary applications, and manually installing their prerequisites because the developers couldn't be bothered to include the redistributable packages for a half-dozen required technologies, and then deal with migrating my wife's Outlook files, and over 250 gigs of other datas, I took the "easy" way out and decided I'd try my luck with swapping the motherboard into the system as-is.

Now, first, I was smart, as outlined in another post I effectively duplicated her hard drive and got that prepared for the actual procedure, leaving her original untouched just in case we had to go back to the system on the flakey but still marginally functional motherboard for some emergency work or whatnot.

After dealing with some other issues, I was able to get the system to the completely expected state of stop coding on boot. This is an extremely common happenstance when performing this kind of migration. Windows systems that are NT based, probably going back to 3.51, but certainly including Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Windows 7, are heavily dependent on the proper hardware abstraction layer (HAL) and mass storage controller drivers being installed and presently selected by an installed OS. Should some factor that these depend on change, say, you go from being a standard uniprocessor PC to an ACPI Multiprocessor PC, that's a different HAL, and you're looking at a stop code. If you go from one storage controller to another, that's another stop code (0x0000007b). That's the code I was receiving, and that's what we'll concern ourselves with for this brief how-to.

There are a few factors that we've got to be able to verify before we can proceed. I was replacing a motherboard in a system that had a somewhat bad motherboard, but was otherwise still bootable. You MUST be able to boot the system, at least into safe mode, in order to perform these steps with the ORIGINAL hardware in place. I had her old motherboard and a power supply splayed out on the kitchen table because I did not want to go back through the physical build process. I booted the copy of her hard drive and placed the following lines in a new text document and saved it as mergeide.reg:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\primary_ide_channel]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="atapi"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\secondary_ide_channel]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="atapi"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\*pnp0600]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="atapi"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\*azt0502]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="atapi"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\gendisk]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E967-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="disk"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#cc_0101]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="pciide"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#ven_0e11&dev_ae33]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="pciide"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#ven_1039&dev_0601]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="pciide"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase \pci#ven_1039&dev_5513]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="pciide"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#ven_1042&dev_1000]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="pciide"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#ven_105a&dev_4d33]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="pciide"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#ven_1095&dev_0640]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="pciide"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#ven_1095&dev_0646]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="pciide"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#ven_1095&dev_0646&REV_05]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="pciide"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#ven_1095&dev_0646&REV_07]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="pciide"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#ven_1095&dev_0648]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="pciide"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#ven_1095&dev_0649]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="pciide"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#ven_1097&dev_0038]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="pciide"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#ven_10ad&dev_0001]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="pciide"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#ven_10ad&dev_0150]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="pciide"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#ven_10b9&dev_5215]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="pciide"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#ven_10b9&dev_5219]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="pciide"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#ven_10b9&dev_5229]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="pciide"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#ven_1106&dev_0571]
"Service"="pciide"
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#ven_8086&dev_1222]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="intelide"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#ven_8086&dev_1230]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="intelide"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#ven_8086&dev_2411]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="intelide"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#ven_8086&dev_2421]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="intelide"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#ven_8086&dev_7010]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="intelide"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#ven_8086&dev_7111]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="intelide"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\pci#ven_8086&dev_7199]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="intelide"

;Add driver for Atapi (requires Atapi.sys in Drivers directory)

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi]
"ErrorControl"=dword:00000001
"Group"="SCSI miniport"
"Start"=dword:00000000
"Tag"=dword:00000019
"Type"=dword:00000001
"DisplayName"="Standard IDE/ESDI Hard Disk Controller"
"ImagePath"=hex(2):53,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,33,00,32,00,5c,00,44,00,\
52,00,49,00,56,00,45,00,52,00,53,00,5c,00,61,00,74,00,61,00,70,00,69,00,2e,\
00,73,00,79,00,73,00,00,00

;Add driver for intelide (requires intelide.sys in drivers directory)

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\IntelIde]
"ErrorControl"=dword:00000001
"Group"="System Bus Extender"
"Start"=dword:00000000
"Tag"=dword:00000004
"Type"=dword:00000001
"ImagePath"=hex(2):53,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,33,00,32,00,5c,00,44,00,\
52,00,49,00,56,00,45,00,52,00,53,00,5c,00,69,00,6e,00,74,00,65,00,6c,00,69,\
00,64,00,65,00,2e,00,73,00,79,00,73,00,00,00

;Add driver for Pciide (requires Pciide.sys and Pciidex.sys in Drivers directory)

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\PCIIde]
"ErrorControl"=dword:00000001
"Group"="System Bus Extender"
"Start"=dword:00000000
"Tag"=dword:00000003
"Type"=dword:00000001
"ImagePath"=hex(2):53,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,33,00,32,00,5c,00,44,00,\
52,00,49,00,56,00,45,00,52,00,53,00,5c,00,70,00,63,00,69,00,69,00,64,00,65,\
00,2e,00,73,00,79,00,73,00,00,00

You should just copy and paste that right into a notepad window (you may need to fix any weird wordwrapping issues from pasting from the internet), click file, save as and be sure to select *.* All Files in the type pulldown so you can specify the .reg extension.

Now, on that system, still functional and booting, double-click that reg file. You will be presented with some warnings about importing registry data from an unknown source and whatnot, you'll want to confirm this. Ok anything you see (UAC prompts, etc.) until you receive a message stating that the information has successfully been imported into the registry.

You may now shut down and perform your hardware swap, whichever way you may, be it a new motherboard into this system, or this hard disk into a new system, either way.

Upon first boot it is completely normal for a lot of things to be very slow. Your mouse and keyboard may not be responsive at first and you may find yourself staring at a login screen wondering how you'll do it without any input devices. Give it some time. I had to wait several minutes before my mouse lit up and the numlock on the keyboard toggled. Several more minutes beyond that and the mouse became responsive and I was able to select the user account and log in. That's not all there is to it, btw, you now have to install drivers for everything. I'd recommend loading the LAN driver from the installation CD that came with your new motherboard and then go online to the boar manufacturer's website to get all new drivers (including that for the LAN) and loading them. Restart the system, run any windows updates, re-activate Windows, Office if it's installed and complaining about it's status, and you should be golden!

Windows 7 Startup Repair - Not Quite Complete

Startup Repair is nice. Let me just get that out of the way first. I've used it many times to fix many problems, mostly related to the Boot Configuration Data, bootloader, etc. on both Windows Vista and Windows 7 systems. There seems to be, however, issues that Startup Repair can detect but cannot fix. The fixes for these problems aren't always inherently "impossible" from the standpoint of the environment in which Startup Repair runs. No doubt, there can and are many situations that prevent a Windows system from booting that startup repair cannot fix, nor can it be expected to fix. I encountered a situation today that I believe should be well within it's capability to repair.

System recovery options, including Startup Repair.

This morning I resumed a fix I had been working on yesterday for Jill's PC. I was working with a copy of her hard drive made by using Windows Home Server to restore the most recent backup copy of her hard disk from the day before. I had my reasons for doing it this way, in a nutshell they include: using a larger hard drive and not wanting to screw up her original. When restoring to a new hard drive you must prepare the drive and I happened to miss a step during this process. Essentially, when booting from the WHS client restore disc, you load a preinstallation environment of windows that starts the recovery wizard, installs lan drivers if needed, finds your home server and lets you pick which backed up PC and which backup of that pc to restore to which disk. You must, during this process, partition your new hard drive and set that partition as active. That last bit in bold is what I forgot to do. Failing to do that, the WHS restore application will not complain about there being something wrong with your restore destination and will happily spend the next four or five hours restoring 280GB of data over the network to this drive.

When attempting to boot the drive for the first time I encountered an error I didn't immediately expect. BOOTMGR IS MISSING. I fully expected, say, a Stop Error (I was replacing the motherboard at the time, the subject of another post). This message, again, was completely unexpected.

Unexpected.

I began to troubleshoot this issue out and part of that process was running the Startup Repair routine. Fortunately Startup Repair logs it's output and while it could be more thorough (I'd love to know not only the result, but the commands it runs - such is findable, I'm certain, but not right there). Among the root causes determined was a line that read "" Fantastic, I thought. Something's screwy with the partition. I decided to try to read the partition. For those of you who know me, you're aware that I love exploiting things like Notepad's open dialog when booting from purposefully restricted live installations of Windows in order to do all sorts of things (perhaps the subject of yet another post). Without going into the details (yet) I was able to browse around and found what appeared to be a relatively complete installation on a very visible and browseable volume on the hard drive. So what was wrong?

I decided I should have a look at the drive with the disk management utility and figured it wouldn't hurt to just use the same copy that I had used to create the partition, so I booted from the WHS Client Restore disc once again and went through the wizard until I was allowed to launch the disk management MMC snap-in. I discovered that I was able to right-click the volume and set it as active from there. This was what led to the eventual repair of the startup function. I restarted the machine, again got the "BOOTMGR is missing" error, which, by now was expected, but I was then able to use the Windows 7 Startup Repair (two passes) to successfully restore the bootsector and Boot Manager that was so desperately needed to get on with this repair.

Now, you're thinking "well, Startup Repair probably couldn't have repaired that problem, afterall, you had to use disk management, that's not available from where you were!"

Actually, it could have. And I could have, via the command prompt, available from the Windows 7 Recovery Options window using diskpart. What was accomplished with Disk Management would have also been doable with diskpart (I went through the motions, it's capable and available). Here's what it should do (and you can do, should you run into this yourself and don't want to do all the ridiculous booting back and forth between various other media):

Boot the system using the Windows Vista or Windows 7 install media, I don't believe this procedure even requires that you use media of a proper version or bittedness since you're just working on the hard disk here, but you'll need the right one to carry on with other startup repairs so make sure you have that.

Click "Repair My Computer" on the second page of the wizard that starts from this disc (after selecting language and keyboard layout).

Cancel any windows offering to restart the machine or telling you they cannot find a windows installation, you want to maneuver to the Advanced Recovery Options window (pictured at the top of this post).

Click Command Prompt at the bottom of the list.

Now you'll use diskpart to adjust your partition's attributes, type the following minus the parenthetical remarks and inserting appropriate values where I have indicated:

diskpart

list disk (you will see a list of fixed disk drives on your system)

select disk X (where X is the number of your hard disk, usually 0)

list partition (you will see all the partitions listed that the selected hard disk contains)

select partition Y (where Y is the number of the partition where Windows lives)

active

exit

Click the X at the top of the Recovery Options window and restart the PC, again, from the appropriate media and re-run Startup Repair. If you observe the logs different root causes and attempted repairs should be indicated. You may have to run through this last step multiple times (mine took two) but in the end you should be able to nudge Startup Repair through the required steps to make your system bootable again. And then, if you're like me, you can move on to the more pressing repair of the day...