This is mostly a blog entry for my adventures, but any advice would be gratefully received.
System: Dell Studio 540, Intel quad 2.33gHz, 8gb, 2 @ 600gb SATA hd in Intel hardware RAID 0.
OS: Vista64 Home Premium SP1 (all updates applied)
I’m setting up the system for the purchaser. One of the things I had in mind, was to change it to RAID 1 to protect the purchaser’s data. I’m no longer certain I want to do that, but I am certain I want to get rid of the RAID 0. I would prefer to restore from a fresh backup rather than reinstall everything.
So I decided to install NSW2008 with NSR 2.0.
The installation went fine until I ran LU after the NSR install. It found a ~58mb update that hung during installation. When I cancelled it and ran LU again, it said I was up-to-date.
NSR showed all three volumes on the array; but when I tried to run or define a backup, the wizards didn’t show any of them.
I tried running the online AutoFix tool. After an hour or so, I canceled it.
I used the removal tool and tried again, same result.
I went looking for newer installation files and found, here on the forums, that I could install NSW 12.0. So I ran the removal tool again, and installed it.
I have a couple of nits. Vista is complaining about the firewall being off. I’m pretty sure that NAV has that covered, but I can’t find any place that says so (there is no equivalent to the Norton Protection Center).
And even nittier; the NSD Free Physical Memory sensor apparently tops out at 4gb, so it just shows that continuously.
But it was primarily NSR I was after, and the wizards now showed all three volumes. In addition to the boot volume, there’s a 15gb recovery volume (WIM format) with 6.3gb used, and a 71mb hidden utility volume with 3.3mb used.
I decided to try backing up the recovery volume onto a DVD.
The first try failed when, I think, Vista fooled me. When I inserted a blank DVD-R, I got a pop-up inviting me to format it. I thought it was from NSR, and said ‘yes.’ NSR then reported that the disk was full, before starting the backup.
I tried again with a fresh disk, and got (IIRC) a read error on the media early in the process.
I decided that I really didn’t care about backing up onto DVDs, since they wouldn’t have been useful for the boot volume anyway.
I backed-up the recovery volume onto the boot volume, primarily to make sure the basic function worked. I got a 5.7gb backup, which was actually more compression than I expected.
I decided to backup the boot volume onto itself, just to see what size the file was. I got 9.8gb, which seems too small.
The next day I pulled a drive out of an older system, and stuck it in a USB enclosure. I hooked it up and ran the backup directly on to it. I got 9.7gb. The difference in size is credible, but it still seems too small.
A superficial browse of the recovery point, seems to show everything being present.
The boot volume properties reports 113gb used. I have hidden and system files uncovered, and when I select everything on the volume, I get ~37gb. That’s credible for an as-delivered system without Office yet installed; if anything, I cannot rule out that Vista is denying me access to some files.
Let’s do some math, using billions for gigabytes. 38.7gb on the volume, less 17.5gb for page and hiber files, = 21.2gb. The 10.5gb backup file yields 50.5% compression.
On my own system (XP-Pro NSR 2.0), I’m getting almost no compression. 44.8gb on the boot volume, less 2.1gb for the page file, = 42.7gb. The backup file is 42.8gb. Looking at these numbers, I’m thinking that I used to get more compression.
Both backups are set to Normal Compression, with Verify on. All of the drives involved are NTFS.
Now that I’ve done the math, the backup on the new system (NSR 2.0.7.29210) no longer seems incredibly small. But it still seems small. And I’m starting to wonder about the negative compression on my system (NSR 2.0.6.26322).
Hmmmm.
And one more thing; I had created a recovery disk from the first installation, without apparent problem. I tried it again from the NSW 12.0 installation, and got a message saying that it couldn’t install 64bit drivers on the 32bit recovery disk. I figured I could find the 32bit drivers, but decided to try the stock recovery disk first. It appears to work fine and is able to access both the internal drives and the USB-attached drive.