Today was fun. After a long time I spent an evening completely geeking out at Krishna’s place swapping mother-boards to get a server back up and running. Initially we were going to hot swap the Bios chip to re-flash it as the chip seemed to have gotten corrupted. But then we realized that the board we were swapping to (my old motherboard) had a different Bios chip so the pin layout was completely different so obviously the swap wouldn’t work. 🙁 Then we decided to take the motherboard from another computer (Preeti’s desktop), put that in the server (who’s MB had died) and put my MB in the desktop as a temp solution. Spent over 5 hours trying to get this to work. Gah. Most of it was because of the trouble Windows gave when switching motherboards.
The desktop was originally running windows 7, and there is a new program called sysprep that you can use to prep a Windows 7 system to move it to another motherboard. At first I was impressed that Windows finally supports something that Linux has had for a while. Even though it was a bit clunky and required an extra step but this is an improvement from what it used to be. But then we found out that sysprep really messed up the system. It destroyed the Windows 7 partition and we had to recover it using the windows recovery CD (That Krishna had thankfully created the day before). We recovered the partition but nothing really worked even after that. Basically after answering all the setup questions we kept getting put in a temp profile that would be deleted when you log out. So even though the data was all there, the system was unusable.
Looking at the system log didn’t get us any answer and finally we decided to restore the original partition (that we had created before the sysprep using dd) to the drive and put it in the new system without running sysprep. Hopefully this will work (I Left while the dd restore was running), will find out tomorrow. Otherwise lets see what other options we have.
When I upgraded to this new motherboard, all I did was plug in my old drive and Linux detected all the new hardware and booted up without any major issues.
The funniest part was when we booted up the disk after cloning it but before running sysprep (we had swapped the USB keyboard and mouse around) I got a message that new device was detected and drivers were being installed for the keyboard (the same one that was being used earlier) and once the installed finished we were asked to reboot the system for the changes to take effect. I always thought that this was a joke (“Windows detected that you moved your mouse cursor, please reboot for the changes to take effect.) but this happened today.
Once I came back home I watched a couple of episodes of “The Guild” which is an web series about a group of online gamers, and how they interact online and offline. I had found the series after listening to their music video: I’m the One That’s Cool and searching for more stuff by them. Check it out if you have some time, each episode is only about 3-5 mins long so doesn’t take long to watch.
Well this is all for now. I was planning on doing some coding but its hot and almost 6am so I should probably get some sleep. Will write more later.
– Suramya
I ran into a similar problem today and am not sure what to do about it. Ran sysprep on Win 7/64 SSD with old mobo (790X), then installed new board (Z68) and Windows couldn’t find OS on the SSD, though it does see the disk: “Windows 7 Home Premium.” Put the old board back in and am now getting the same thing with it. Since it’s a dual boot system, I’m able to run XP and all the drives – SSD and 3 HDDs and partitions – show as good. Have backup images on the other HDDs and a Partition Magic recovery disk from last month, but can’t figure out how to run them. To top it off, on the old mobo reinstall the DVD drive is not recognized by BIOS, tho connections and cables good.
Comment by Hy — April 15, 2012 @ 8:50 AM
Try running the system recovery from the Windows Recovery disk if you have it. Otherwise you can try restoring the partition, dd is a useful tool for restoring from recovery images or search the web for instructions on how to use Partition Magic recovery disks.
Hope you manage to recover your data.
– Suramya
Comment by Suramya — April 22, 2012 @ 3:30 AM