Tag Archives: Win7

How To

If Paragon Partition Manager causes your Windows 7 Machine to say ‘Missing Operating System’, Read This

June 16, 2010 – 1:11 AM

Firstly, DON’T PANIC!  YOUR INFORMATION IS (PROBABLY) STILL THERE!!!

DISCLAIMER: READ THIS OVER BEFORE ATTEMPTING.  Also, try at your own discretion.  I am not responsible for you f’ing up your computer.

What this How-To will address:

  • I’ve tried to add a partition on the drive containing my Windows 7 / Vista installation, and now when I start up my computer I get the message ‘Missing Operating System’
  • I accidentally deleted my system partition (contains your partition table and MBR)

What caused it?

Your computer has at minimum 2 partitions:

  • One is the system partition where your Master Boot Record and boot table reside.  Basically, when your computer starts up, it goes there, and asks where Windows is installed.  The MBR tells it.
  • Another is your boot partition.  This holds Windows.

Windows 7 and Vista have a different system partition structure than their predecessors.  I used Paragon Partition Manager to split my 1 TB drive with Windows 7 installed on it into two 500 GB drives – only one with Win 7 on it.  Paragon wrote over my system partition and wiped out the information saying where my OS was.  When I viewed my system partition, it appeared to be ‘unpartitioned space’

What to do:

  • On another computer, download Paragon Backup & Recovery (you can get the 30-day trial for free).  Burn this to a CD.
  • Boot up your computer from the Recovery CD (you may need to change the boot order in BIOS so that it boots from a CD-ROM before the HDD)
  • Browse onto your drive, ensure your files are there.  Use their tool to backup your files onto an external drive or DVDs.  It essentially creates an image.  You should probably use their tool to copy your files over too incase these next steps don’t work.
  • Note: I tried other methods, namely downloading software to re-create the system partition but this didn’t work, likely because it was trying to access an unformatted partition.  When I formatted the system partition to NTFS like it should be and then tried to recover the system partition, again it did nothing.
  • Now reboot your computer and boot up with your Windows 7 / Vista CD and delete all the partitions, partition the drive the way you want it, and then install Windows 7. (I created two 500 GB partitions, then installed Win 7 on one of them.  This automatically created a System Partition before these two 500 GB partitions and shrunk them by some trivial amount).
  • Once Windows is installed, reboot your computer and make sure it will go into Windows. (If you are still getting Missing Operating System, try everything again, otherwise you may have an f’ed up drive).
  • Then reboot again, but this time boot into the Paragon Recovery CD.  Using this software, restore your Windows 7 installation from the backup image you made onto the external HDD.
  • Once this is done, reboot again.  Windows will come up with a message saying it is checking the system partition or something like that.  Once it is done, you should be back into your Windows installation and it’ll all be as if nothing ever happened.  If not- at least you had your files backed up to that external HDD and a fresh Windows installation.  You’ll have to copy them over and download all your fav programs again, but at least your files are there.
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How To

Using Time Machine to Backup your Mac to an NTFS drive over the Network running Win 7

June 16, 2010 – 12:19 AM

Courtesy of Apple Inc.

So you have a Mac and instead of backing up to an external hard-drive ($$$) you’d like to backup to an NTFS drive that is on the network (maybe to your Windows 7 desktop machine)?  Sweet cuz that’s what this tutorial addresses!

What you’ll need:

  1. A Mac running OS 1.5 or higher with Time Machine Installed (I’m running 10.5.8)
  2. A separate computer with an NTFS-formatted hard-drive that has enough free space to fit all of the data you plan to backup (I created a a 500 GB NTFS partition on my Win 7 PC to backup my 200 GB Macbook Pro) Note: I don’t suggest using Paragon Partition Manager (aka ParaGONE Partition DAMAGER) to partition your PC as it wrote over my system partition and I couldn’t boot into Windows afterwards – “Missing Operating System”.  If you run into this issue as well, comment and I’ll tell you how I fixed this issue.

Follow these steps:

On your Windows 7 Machine

  1. Make sure you have a Windows password set up by going to Control Panel, click on ‘User Accounts and Family Safety’ and then ‘Change your Windows password’
  2. Turn on sharing by going to Control Panel and clicking on ‘Choose homegroup and sharing options’ under ‘Network and Internet’, select ‘Change advanced sharing settings…’ and under ‘Public’ click on ‘Turn on network discovery’, ‘Turn on file and printer sharing’, ‘Turn on sharing so anyone with network access can read and write files in the Public folders’, ‘Use 128-bit encryption…’ and ‘Turn on password protected sharing’.  Save your settings.
  3. Next, go to ‘Computer’ and right click on the drive you would like to backup to and click on ‘Share with -> Advanced sharing…’
  4. Click ‘Share this folder’ and give it a Share name (Mine is called TimeMachine)
  5. Click on ‘Permissions’ and with ‘Everyone’ selected, remove uncheck all the check boxes
  6. Click on ‘Add…’ and start typing your Windows Login name (mine is Chris-PC) and click on ‘Check Names’ and then select your Windows Login
  7. Click on ‘OK’ on all of the windows until they’re closed down
  8. Get your computer’s ip address by typing in cmd into the search box in your start menu and pressing ‘enter’, then when the black dos window comes up, type in ipconfig /all and scroll up to wherever it says IP Address (mine says IPv4 Address . . . . . . : 192.168.0.109).  Write this down.

On your Mac

  1. Go into Applications / Utilities and open up ‘Terminal’
  2. Copy and paste this command into terminal (all on one line)
    defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
    Apple does not display NTFS drives on the network, so this command allows you to see said drives
  3. Hit enter / return
  4. Mount your network drive by clicking on ‘Go -> Connect to Server…’, entering in smb://followed by your Windows machine’s IP address you wrote down earlier.  OR you can use your Windows machine’s name (this is probably better).  (Mine is Chris-PC).  It will then prompt you for your windows login and password, then the volume you want to mount (mine is T: – TimeMachine).

    Courtesy of Lifehacker.com

  5. Start up Time Machine. Click on ‘Change Disk…’ and select the Windows drive you want to back up to (mine is TimeMachine).  Time Machine will fail this first time.  Before it does:
  6. in Finder, go to ‘Go -> Network’ and navigate into your backup drive.  You will see a file there with your MacName_MACAddress.tmp.sparsebundle.   Copy this name.
  7. Open up Disk Utility, Click ‘New Image’.  In the next steps the order is very important.
  8. Under the dropdown, select your computer name (Chris Macbook Pro) rather than Macintosh HD.
  9. Use the following settings:
    Save As MacName_MACAddress
    Volume name can be whatever
    Set volume size to the max amount of space you have allocated on your Windows machine.
    Volume Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
    Encryption: none
    Partitions: ‘No Partition Map’
    Image Format: ‘Sparce Bundle Disk Image’
  10. Now change the dropdown from your computer name back to ‘Macintosh HD’. Save onto your Mac.
  11. Copy this file onto your Windows machine in the backup location
  12. Run Time machine again and it should be working!

Alternatively, if you find this frustrating or cumbersome, you can pick up Apple’s Time Capsule. It’s expensive, but an elegant solution.
 

 

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Resources:

http://lifehacker.com/software/mac-os-x/how-to-mount-a-windows-shared-folder-on-your-mac-247148.php

http://www.jasonhdavis.com/blog/2008/08/network-drive-backup-with-time-machine-backup-to-ntfs-windows-xp-and-vista/

http://imulus.com/blog/george/software/using-leopard-time-machine-to-backup-of-a-network/

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