Macrium Reflect Free - restoring partition / disk backups

Now with the disk backup and the rescue USB flash created earlier, we’re going through the restore process. I won’t do that on a real PC though but on a local VM, where I can take some screenshots.

Macrium Reflect running on Windows PE looks pretty much the same as in the full Windows app (and it probably is the same :-). You can browse the network (in my case) or an attached USB drive for the disk backup image.



Choose the “Restore Image” option and that’ll take you to the restore wizard.

Note: I’ve set up the VM display to 800x480 at first (ASUS R2H screen size) and I can see a problem as it cuts off the bottom of the wizard window. Maybe you can work around that if you learn the key sequences to push the buttons, but maybe the Windows PE might just support an external monitor you can connect through VGA? I’ve changed the VM screen to a 800x600 to move on.



Select the physical destination disk and you can pick the partitions you want to restore and then click the “Copy selected partitions”. Here I will restore all 3 partitions, although you can use to only say restore the "personal” partition, and re-install the OS on the first partition later, or the other way around.



Click Next to get to a summary page, and then click Finish to start the restore process.



Leave it running, this will take a while. Although might look like like a long time, but it’s definitely shorter than having to re-install OS and applications, and certainly a lot less effort (and I should know, I’ve done this a lot).



Restart the system, and should now be fully restored to its previous state.



Now having used it end to end, I think Macrium Reflect Free is a great tool for a home user, and amazingly you get all that for free! Might sound odd, but I wasn’t paid for these last posts, I’m just genuinely surprised how easy it was and how well it worked to do exactly what I needed

Macrium Reflect Free - bootable rescue media

A day may come when your old hard disk might crash - or if like me, you might break things :-) - and you’d need to restore your system. The nice thing about disk / partition backups is that you can restore your system very quickly to the previous state with contents and all, rather than reinstall Windows and the rest of your applications.

For that, we’ll be preparing a boot disk with the Macrium Reflect software – the software creates an .iso image you can write to a CD/DVD, or my preference is for a USB flash drive. If you only got a computer around the house, might want to do that early while your system is still usable, otherwise you can do that later when you need it.



You have a choice between a Windows PE and Linux based disk – I tried the Linux image earlier and unfortunately didn’t seem to be able to connect to my Seagate GoFlex Home NAS. I can imagine the Windows PE supports a lot more network devices, so I’ll go for that.



This option requires Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK) – if you already have it downloaded somewhere you can just point to it (have used it before for Windows 8 PXE boot), otherwise the application will download it for you (1.7 GB).



WAIK and image preparation finished, you can choose to burn it onto a CD/DVD or a USB flash drive.



If you get the error message below when writing the image to the USB flash drive, follow the directions in this Macrium KB entry to prepare the drive and then try again.



I will go through the restore process using this newly created rescue disk in a new post soon.

Macrium Reflect Free - disk / partition backups

Have been looking for ages for a good free partition backup (imaging) software, and Macrium Reflect Free 5.0 does exactly what I wanted and even more – I’m quite surprised the free version has so many features really. While Windows Backup has improved quite a bit in the last Windows versions and handy for file backups, what I needed is an application to image entire partitions or disks and be able to easily restore the disk contents after a system crash. Another feature I was looking for is to have a bootable CD or flash drive so I can restore the system without the need for a full OS. I’ve been reading on the likes of Clonezilla, PING and DriveImage XML, but they just don’t seem very easy to use, especially on the last part - they are using Linux based boot images, mostly console based and they just don’t seem very friendly to use (here is a good start if you are looking into this).

In today’s exercise I’m going to backup the entire disk of my ASUS R2H (all partitions), in preparation for installing Ubuntu 12.04 next week (mm, that’ll be interesting :-), but just as well you can choose one partition if you want to image them separately or some more often than others. The windows are a bit tall for the 800x480 screen (R2H), so I’m running it through Remote Desktop in 800x600 and it seems to fit just fine – it appears they did think of smaller screen computers, but not that small.

The main interface is colorful and easy on the eye.

 

I’m going to save the disk image on my Seagate GoFlex Home NAS on the network, but a USB hard drive should be just as good.

The summary page has an advanced button (bottom left) where you can choose the compression level, split the image into separate files, enter a comment or choose to shutdown when finished, if you have to leave it running for longer on its own.

 

Initial estimation is about 2 hours for the 60 GB disk (about 80% full) – the system is quite busy on the CPU, maybe the medium compression is a bit too much for the tiny Celeron. Grab a cup of coffee or find something else to do in the meantime :-)

That was quite accurate, 2 hours later disk backup is finished – with an image file of about 40 GB.

Now if you switch to Restore tab, you can see the image and you can choose to verify it…

 

or, just above that (or from left tasks) you can choose to browse the image – that will mount a partition as read-only in Explorer. I see that very useful if want to pick a few files from an image, without the need for a full restore.

 

That’s it from the backup perspective. There will be two other posts on how to create a recovery USB flash drive and how to use that to restore the backup we just did.

ExamDiff Pro: customizing display colours

I’ve been using ExamDiff Pro for 9 years next week (funny how found that looking for the emails with the license to re-install on a new Windows :-) and it was probably the  best 30$ I ever spent, considering I’ve used the hell out ExamDiff Pro 3.x until recently upgraded to 5.5.

It is an impressive piece of software you get for the money - file compare with differences at character level, ability to save the compare results as a portable webpage you can attach to emails with fully synchronized scrolling, looking at changes with and without customized ignores at a click of a button, command line support for scripting bulk compares, directory compare and merging, and recently found a feature I like, comparing files with ability to exclude parts (columns) using regular expressions, great for comparing logs with different date/time stamps, and the list could go on. Don’t get me wrong, I continue trying free alternatives out there and even use them in customer sites (like WinMerge for example), where I don’t have my ExamDiff Pro; but as a software developer, as soon as I got my first few checks I just had to look for better tools, and it did pay off in time savings and less effort.

But this is not as much about the software itself, as it is about the presentation – I always thought the standard colours in the screenshots they have on the website weren’t doing the software any favours. I thought they were too bland and not very helpful. Maybe it’s just me, but if you do a lot of file comparing you probably want to spot the differences quickly enough to figure out what the changes are about.

And not that you can only fully customize them, but you can also export the entire configuration as an Options.txt file to store away and simply import again on a new Windows installation or I don’t know, share them with yoru friends (obviously programmers as well :-).

This is how the standard colours look like – I mean, look at the colour set: dark red is additions, blue is deletions, on a dark grey background, and then the entire block on a muddy yellow (?!)

And here are my colours – I have additions as green, deletions as red on a bright yellow background for the modified text to stand out, removing the block background colour (set to white), to focus on the text changes themselves. I know the whole taste in colours is controversial, some people like one way and others like some other way, but I thought I might put it there - I know I changed mine quite late, on a slow Monday and kept them since :-)

Auslogics Disk Defrag

I’ve been using Piriform Defraggler for quite a while now and I like it does a good job at defragging your drivers, has an easy to use user interface, can run on a schedule, and last but not least it’s still evolving and new features are added in – one example is the SMART tab, to see information like HDD temperature for which you would need otherwise a separate tool. On the down side I found that it can be slow when defragging larger files and the remaining time calculation is not always accurate and sometimes way off. I occasionally find the need to defrag some larger VM images and not knowing how long is it going to take frustrates me a bit – true, you can leave that for later for an unattended defragmentation and have the software shutdown your PC when done, but still...

There are a few free alternatives out there and Auslogics Disk Defrag is just one of them, but what I like about it is that has similar features that I liked in Defraggler and in a way it looks similar (don’t all disk defrag tools do? :-)  Odd as it might sound though, I like the website (clean and easy to follow) and to me if the same level of attention is given to the software, that’s does it for me. On top of that, I like the fact that when defragging a larger file, it shows the number of clusters going through so you can see the progress being made.

I’m sure Defraggler will improve and I might even switch back someday :-), but for now I think I’ll give Auslogics Disk Defrag a try and use it for a while as the preferred tool.

Note: As with other free software, pay attention to the installation steps as it will ask you whether you want to install additional software like toolbars and the sort, it’s all up to you.

Running a command / application as Local System

Occasionally you may need to run a command or application as Local System, say a service application that doesn’t produce enough log information and fails due to security rights.

One way to do it is by scheduling a command through Windows Task Scheduler, as explained here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/adioltean/archive/2004/11/27/271063.aspx?Redirected=true

But I find easier to use psexec.exe from Sysinternals’ PsTools package.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896649.aspx

Not only you can run an application locally, but you can also use it to run it on another machine remotely; run psexec without parameters to get a list of options.

psexec –s cmd.exe

RAMMap – Freeing up memory

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ff700229.aspx

I found RAMMAP very useful in debugging memory usage scenarios where due to various file operations (copying files around, enlarging VMware Player virtual disks etc) a lot of memory would go into Standy, and then subsequent operations that would require large amounts of what I assume would be contiguous blocks of memory, like archiving large VM images with 7zip, would fail.

From what I understand Standy contains memory pages that were used by the cache manager and they are still kept around in case you might be opening the same file again, instead of reading it off the disk again it can activate it back from standby – it’s also the thing that makes the memory values not add up in Task Manager, as it is counted in both Cached section as well as Available, and Window will free up and zero these pages as needed.

Windows 8 is the first version to show it separately in Task Manager and make things clear:

Back to RAMMap, it shows everything in detail, as explained in this post:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2010/08/13/introduction-to-the-new-sysinternals-tool-rammap.aspx

The part that I discovered lately is where RAMMap allows you to empty different sections and gain back some memory – how you can benefit from that? Say you need a large amount of free / zeroed memory or you want to performance test your application and clearing the cache working set or standby would give you a “cold” start.

The “Empty” menu gives you a few different options – if you start from the top and go through the options, it will give you most of the memory back, but you’ll have a slight performance hit as the system will recover. In most cases you might just want to choose the last two, clearing just the Standby lists.

On a 4GB Windows 2008 R2 Server:

The same system after emptying all sections – notice the large amount of free (zeroed) memory.

JXplorer - Java LDAP Browser

http://jxplorer.org/

JXplorer is an open source ldap browser originally developed by Computer Associates' eTrust Directory development lab. It is a standards compliant general purpose ldap browser that can be used to read and search any ldap directory, or any X500 directory with an ldap interface. It is available for immediate free download under a standard OSI-style open source licence.

Microsoft Control Spy 2.0

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=4635

Control Spy is a tool to help developers understand common controls, the application of styles to them, and their response to messages and notifications.

Control Spy Exposes the Clandestine Life of Windows Common Controls
http://www.microsoft.com/msj/0798/controlspy.aspx

TreeSize Free

http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/

TreeSize Free shows the size of a folder including all subfolders and files. In an Explorer-like style, also the wasted space.

HashMyFiles - Calculate MD5/SHA1/CRC32 hashes of your files

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/hash_my_files.html

HashMyFiles is small utility that allows you to calculate the MD5 and SHA1 hashes of one or more files in your system. You can easily copy the MD5/SHA1 hashes list into the clipboard, or save them into text/html/xml file.

HashMyFiles can also be launched from the context menu of Windows Explorer, and display the MD5/SHA1 hashes of the selected file or folder.

7-Zip Theme Manager

http://7ztm.de.vu/

Many users of the excellent file archiver 7-Zip criticized its nostalgic appearance. That's exactly where my program "7-Zip Theme Manager", in short "7zTM", comes in and offers the following features:

Stylish...

• Toolbar Themes - change the look of the toolbar of 7-Zip
• Filetype Themes - change the look of archived files, for instance in Explorer
• *new* 90 Toolbar Themes and 22 Filetype Themes integrated
• *new* changing the SFX-icon (self-extracting archive) is now possible - see FAQ #5

Handy...

• automatic or manual search of the 7-Zip installation folder
• convenient activation of the Themes with just a click
• Themes previews integrated directly into the program
• multi-lingual user interface
• online update for up to date Themes and features - see FAQ #6
• possibility to create your own Themes
• *new* supports 7-Zip 32-Bit and 64-Bit

Costs?

0, Nichts, Nada, Niente, Nothing, Rien, Tipota, 12-3x4

ISO Recorder v2 & v3

I wrote a post on Alex Feinman's ISO Recorder a few months ago, but I haven't payed much attention on the ability to create ISO images from CDs/DVDs or even hard drive folders. I found this now quite useful say when you want to pack your application as an .iso image and test it on a Virtual PC without having to write it on a CD/DVD medium every time you make some changes.

Carefully read the release log and known issues before installing the correct version. Also you might want to give a quick glance over the ISO Recorder tutorial.

30 August 2008: If you get an error 80004005 then it's likely that you have spaces in the ISO target path / filename.

* * *

ISO Recorder V1 - for Windows XP Gold (no service pack) and Windows XP SP1

ISORecorder V2 - for Windows XP SP2 and Windows 2003 (including 64-bit OS)

ISO Recorder V3 - for Windows Vista

CreateCD - command-line CD burning tool for Windows XP (all versions), Windows 2003 and Windows Vista

DPC Latency Checker

http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

Thesycon's DPC Latency Checker is a Windows tool that analyses the capabilities of a computer system to handle real-time data streams properly. It may help to find the cause for interruptions in real-time audio and video streams, also known as drop-outs. The program supports Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows XP x64, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 x64, Windows Vista, Windows Vista x64.

DPC Latency Checker for Windows 2000, XP, XP x64, Server 2003, Server 2003 x64, Vista, Vista x64

Download dpclat.exe V1.1 (310 KB)

* * *

I found recently pretty high DPC CPU usage on my R2H with Vista when copying things onto external USB drives or copying file from it over wireless. This tool won't tell you much more than Process Explorer, although they do suggest a trial and error aproach to find the offending device driver. I believe RATTV3 doesn't work on Vista or I couldn't get any information from it anyways. I'll keep investigating this hopefully finding a fix soon...

Shuttle XPC Tools 1.7

http://global.shuttle.com/XPCTools.jsp

XPC Tools is a powerful yet easy to use system management utility designed specifically for your XPC. Within XPC Tools' fully customizable interface you can easily monitor system performance, adjust fan speeds, and dynamically overclock your XPC, without the need to reboot the system.

XPC Tools gives you complete control over your XPC. Safely increase bus speeds and voltages for extreme performance and stability when gaming, or configure optimal Smart Fan settings to keep your XPC "Super Quiet, Super Cool" while you watch movies. XPC Tools' versatile profiles system allows you to create save and load profiles customized for any use or setting.

How to configure HermesJMS to connect to JBoss JMS

http://www.hermesjms.com/

HermesJMS is an extensible console that helps you interact with JMS providers making it easy to browse or seach queues and topics, copy messages around and delete them. It fully integrates with JNDI letting you discover administered objects stored, create JMS sessions from the connection factories and use any destinations found. Many providers include a plugin that uses the native API to do non-JMS things like getting queue depths (and other statistics) or finding queue and topic names.

Here is a great step by step video tutorial showing you how to configure the connection to JBoss JMS.
http://hermesjms.com/confluence/display/HJMS/JBoss+Tutorial

* * *

If you follow the tutorial exactly but you still get an error like "No message, linked exception is: null" and an an exception like java.net.MalformedURLException: no protocol: Files/HermesJMS/lib.weaved/hermes-ems.jar in the hermes.log, then is mostly likely caused by the fact that you have installed the application in C:\Program Files or the like. Uninstall and then reinstall the HermesJMS in a path without spaces, if you want it in Program Files, use something like C:\Progra~1\HermesJMS - it will keep the settings, you won't have to make them all over again.

FastResolver v1.16

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/fastresolver.html

FastResolver is a small utility that resolves multiple host names into IP addresses and vice versa. You can simply type the list of IP addresses or host name that you want to resolve, or alternatively, you can specify IP addresses range that you want to scan. For local network, FastResolver also allows you to get the MAC address of all IP addresses that you scan. FastResolver is a multithreaded application, so it can resolve dozens of addresses within a few seconds.

User Profile Deletion Utility (Delprof.exe)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=901a9b95-6063-4462-8150-360394e98e1e&displaylang=en

Brief description

Delprof.exe is a command-line utility that you can use to delete user profiles on a local or remote computers running Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003.

Overview

Delprof.exe is available in the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit. It is a command-line utility that you can use to delete user profiles on a local or remote computers running Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003. User profiles can grow large and may take up considerable disk space, especially if there are several users using one computer. Because of this, you may want to use Delprof.exe to free disk space by deleting profiles that are no longer required. However, because each profile on the computer is presented in order when you run the utility, you may want to use the graphical interface instead of the command-line tool whenever possible.

Note: You must be logged on as administrator or as a member of the Administrators group to delete user profiles.

WARNING: Delprof.exe deletes all data that is stored in a user profile. This includes desktop settings, favorites, program-specific data that is contained in the Application Data folder, and the contents of the My Documents folder. Please be aware of any user documents that may be deleted before you use this tool.

Recover Microsoft Windows/MS-Office/SQL product keys

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/product_cd_key_viewer.html

ProduKey is a small utility that displays the ProductID and the CD-Key of MS-Office, Windows, Exchange Server, and SQL Server installed on your computer. You can view this information for your current running operating system, or for another operating system/computer - by using command-line options. This utility can be useful if you lost the product key of your Windows/Office, and you want to reinstall it on your computer.

Subtitle Edit

http://www.nikse.dk/se/

Overview

Subtitle Edit (SE) is an editor for movie subtitles - a subtitle editor.With SE you can easily adjust the start time of the subtitle if it is out of sync with the movie.

For a full list of features see below.SE is written in Delphi and full source is included:-)

Thanks to Antti Kirjavainen for adding Subrip 'Fime fix', 'Number fix', 'Character fix', and 'Go to line' :)The spell checking is build on the TJanSpeller component by Jan Verhoeven.

Download Subtitle Edit 1.8 here.

Features

• VISUALLY sync/adjust (start pos and speed) a subtitle.
• Export to/import from html (for online translation)
• Visual translation helper
• Adjust all subtitle times
• Adjust display time
• Remove text for hear impaired
• Convert between MicroDVD, SubRib, Substation Alpha, SAMI, and more
• Fix line numbering, casing, spaces, long lines, and invalid display time
• Split / append subtitles
• Spell checker: English and Danish included. Dutch dictionary exists in the TJanSpeller zip file