Had to Restore a Windows 7 Workstation Yesterday

[coxhaus]

I have an old Windows 7 workstation where the hard drive started making noises. It was time to replace the old drives in the machine. They had been in there for around 10 years running as a RAID 0 stripe. I have plenty of bigger drives laying round from my old RAID 5 machine. I replace the 2 smaller drives with 1 bigger drive.

I then popped in the Client Computer Restore DVD from Windows Home Server 2011 in and booted up. The DVD found my Windows Home Server 2011 and asked if I wanted to do a full restore or just some files. I requested a full restore. It seemed to know which machine name I wanted to restore. The new drive had been used in a RAID5 so it needed to be partitioned and formatted so the software dumped me on a screen to do that. Once done then the restore started. It ran for about 4 hours as I had a lot of music on this machine. Once done I had a working machine just as before using one hard drive.

I decided I did not want the BIOS set to RAID mode any more as I will not be running RAID in this machine. I wanted to change to ACHI mode. I made the BIOS change to ACHI mode and the machine would boot up and then blue screen. It turns out Windows 7 only loads the storage drivers for what is running. The fix would require a registery fix which I found when I googled the problem.
So you need to change theStart value to 0 for both of the following entries in your registry. You can use regedit.exe utility.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi

So I made the registry fix for my machine. It now boots and runs in AHCI mode.

It is so nice to have backup and restore.

 

[L&LD]

(Backup and restore) is great when it works, I agree. (Just went through that with a two year old system which simply killed it completely, instead of fixing the issues that needed correcting).

But my experience is that most desktop systems are a little faster and just as stable when running a single drive with the BIOS in RAID mode. With a single drive, AHCI and RAID are effectively equivalent.

 

[coxhaus]

(Backup and restore) is great when it works, I agree. (Just went through that with a two year old system which simply killed it completely, instead of fixing the issues that needed correcting).

But my experience is that most desktop systems are a little faster and just as stable when running a single drive with the BIOS in RAID mode. With a single drive, AHCI and RAID are effectively equivalent.

The RAID code in my motherboard is old. I would rather run Microsoft's atapi code for AHCI using Microsoft's SATA software. My wife's machine is the same exact motherboard with one hard drive running Windows 10 which is faster than my Windows 7 machine in RAID 0 stripe mode. Her hard drive is one of the same RAID 5 drives as I am using in my Windows 7 machine.

PS
Microsoft's backup and restore has always been reliable for me.

 

[L&LD]

The RAID code in my motherboard is old. I would rather run Microsoft's atapi code for AHCI using Microsoft's SATA software. My wife's machine is the same exact motherboard with one hard drive running Windows 10 which is faster than my Windows 7 machine in RAID 0 stripe mode. Her hard drive is one of the same RAID 5 drives as I am using in my Windows 7 machine.

PS
Microsoft's backup and restore has always been reliable for me.

As long as it is stable, the age of the code doesn't matter for a single drive.

I too have noticed that Windows 10 offers a much faster experience than any older OS. Even on the same hardware as you've found out.

Any reason to not upgrade the Windows 7 machine to Windows 10?

 

[stevech]

Any reason to not upgrade the Windows 7 machine to Windows 10?

I don't like the UI of Win 10; that's an understatement.
Also, signed drivers are mandatory in win 10 and I use a variety of odd devices that can't have signed drivers. The work-around for this requires reboots, running special procedures, and blessings from above.

 

[coxhaus]

Any reason to not upgrade the Windows 7 machine to Windows 10?

Yes. I have an enterprise Windows 7 OS. It will not upgrade for free.

 

[L&LD]

I don't like the UI of Win 10; that's an understatement.
Also, signed drivers are mandatory in win 10 and I use a variety of odd devices that can't have signed drivers. The work-around for this requires reboots, running special procedures, and blessings from above.

And Windows 7 looks like an abomination to me today.

http://www.howtogeek.com/167723/how...8.1-so-that-you-can-install-unsigned-drivers/


Most fixes or workarounds for Windows 10 are as easy as a 2 second google search.

The advantages that Windows 10 continues to bring more than outweigh the occasional small stumbling blocks one may face.

 

[stevech]

Each to his own. I spent many hours trying to make Win 10 pleasant. Including many un-do things that others recommended (yes, I've heard of google search).
In the end, as an embedded systems firmware developer, heavy user of Windows to support my dev tools, it gets in the way far too much. These tools have no Linux version else I'd opt that.
No debate since this is just my experience.

 

[L&LD]

To each his own, agreed.

I too (initially) tried to make Windows 10 to conform to my idea of what an OS should be and how it should do it. I too gave up on that approach.

When I just accepted that I will learn to do (some) things differently, Windows 10 became a very good tool and better than what I used before (Windows 7).