Posts Tagged ‘dd’

How to fresh Upgrade mistakenly installed 32-bit Windows 10 Professional to 64-bit Windows / A failure to Disk Clone old SSD 120GB to 512GB HDD due to failed Solid State Drive

Wednesday, November 17th, 2021

upgrade-windows-10-32-bit-to-64-bit-howto-picture

I've been Setting up a new PC with Windows OS that is a bit old a 11 years old Lenovo ThinkCentre model M90P with 8 GB of Memory, Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU         650  @ 3.20GHz   3.19 GHz, Intel Q57 Express Chipset. The machine came to me with Windows 7 preinstalled and the intial goal was to migrate Windows as it is with its data from the old 120GB SSD to new 512 SSD and then to keep the machine at least a bit more up to date to upgrade the old Windows 7 to Windows 10.

This as usual seemed like a very trivial task for a System Administrator, and even if you haven't touched much of Windows as me it makes it look a piece of cake, however as always with computers, once you think you'll be done in 2 hours usually it takes 20+ . Some call it Murphy's law "If something could go wrong then it will go wrong". But putting this situation that I thought all well that's easy lets do it is a kind of a proud Thought for man and the to save us from this Passion of Proudness which according to Church fathers is the worst passion one can have and humiliate us a bit.

God allows some unforseen stuff to happen   🙂 The case with this machine whose original idea I had is to OK I Simply Duplicate the Old Hard Drive to the New one and Place the new one on the ThinkCentre is not a big deal turned to a small adventure 🙂

For this machine hardware I have to say, the old English saying "Old but Gold" is pretty true, especially after I've attached the Samsung 512GB NVME SSD Drive, which my dear friend and brother in Christ "Uncle Emilian" had received as a gift from another friend called Angel. To put even more rant, here name Emilian stems from the Greek Emilianos which translated to English means Adversary.. But anyways The old Intel SSD 120 GB drive which besides being already completely Full of Data,  turned to have Memory DATA Chips (that perhaps burn out / wasted),  so parts of the Drive were Unreadable.
I've realized the fauly SSD fact after, 
trying to first clone the drives with my Hardware Disk Clone device Orico Dual Bay 2.5 6629US3-C device and then using a simple bit to bit copy with dd command.

orico-6629us3-c2-bay-usb3-type-b2.5-type3-5.inch-sata


At first for some weird reason the Cloning of 120GB SSD HDD towards -> 512 GB newer one was unsuccessful – one of the 2 lamp indicators on Source and Destination Drives was continuiously blinking orange as it seemed data could not be read, even though I tried few times and wait for about 1 hour of time for the cloning to complete, so I first suspected that might be an issue with my  last year bought Disk Clone hardware device. So I've attached the 2 Hard Drives towards my Debian GNU / Linux 10 as USB attached drives using the "Toaster" device  and tried a classical copy   from terminal with Disk Druid e.g.


# dd if=/dev/sdb2 of=/dev/sdbc2 bs=180M status=progress conv=noerror, sync

 
dd: error reading '/dev/sdb2': Input/output error
1074889+17746 records in
1092635+0 records out
559429120 bytes (559 MB, 534 MiB) copied, 502933 s, 1.1 kB/s
dd: writing to '/dev/dc2': Input/output error
1074889+17747 records in
1092635+0 records out
559429120 bytes (559 MB, 534 MiB) copied, 502933 s, 1.1 kB/s

Finally I did a manual copy of files from /dev/sdb2 /dev/sdc2 with rsync and part of the files managed to be succesfully copied, about 55Gigabytes out of 110 managed to copy.  Luckily the data on the broken Intel 320 Series 120GB was not top secret stuff so wasting some bits wasn't the end of the world 🙂

Next, I've removed the broken 120Gb SSD which perhaps was about at least 9+ years old and attached to the Lenovo ThinkCentre, the new drive and as my dear friend wanted to have Windows again (his computer has Microsoft "Certificate of Authenticity"), e.g. that OEM Registration Serial Key for Windows 7.

Lenovo-ThinkCentre-M90p-certificate-of-authenticity

I've jumped in and used some old Flash USB Stick Drive to place again Windows 7 (in order to use the same active license) and from there on, I've used another old Windows 10 Installation Bootable stick of mine to upgrade the Windows 7 to Windows 10 (by using this Win 7 to Win 10 upgrade trick it is possible to still continue use your old Windows 7 License Key on Windows 10). So far so good, now I've had Windows 10 Professional Edition installed on the machine, but faced another issue the Memory of the Machine which is 8GB did not get fully detected the machine had detected only 3.22 GB of Memory, for some weird reason.

only-2-80-gb-usable-windows-10-problem-32-bit-cpu-cause-screenshot

After few minutes of investigation online, I've realized, I've installed by mistake a 32 Bit version of Windows 10 Pro…So the next step was of course to upgrade to 64 bit to work around the unrecognized 5.2GB memory… To make sure my Windows 10 Installation is up-to-date I've downloaded the latest one from the Media Creation Installation Tool from Microsoft's website used the tool to burn the Downloaded Image to an Empty USB Stick (mine is 16GB but minimum required would be 4Gb) and proceeded to reboot the Lenovo Desktop machine and boot from the Windows 10 Install Flash Drive. From there on I've had to select I need to install a 64 Bit version of Windows and Skip the Licensing Key fill in Prompt Twice (act as I have no license) as Windows already could recognize the older OEM installed 32 bit install Windows key and automatically fetches the key from there.

Before proceeding to install the 64 Bit Windows, of course double check  that the Machine you have at hand has already the License Key recognized by Microsoft  is 64 Bit capable:

To check 32 bit version of Windows before attempted upgrade is Properly Licensed :

Settings > Update & security > Activation

check-if-windows-is-already-activated-settings-update-and-security-Activation-menus

 

To check whether Hardware is 64 Capable:

Settings -> System -> About

 

is-hardware-processor-64-bit-capable-windows-screenshot

32 bit Windows on x64based processor (Machine supports 64 bit OS)

 

windows10-OS-Installation-media-install-tool

Media Creation Tool Windows 10 MS Installer tool (make sure you select 64-bit (x86) instead of the default

From the Installer, I've installed Windows just like I install a brand new fersh Win OS and after asking the few trivial Installation Program questions landed to the new working OS and proceeded to install the usual software which are a must have on a freshly installed Windows for some of them check my previous article Essential Must have software to install on Fresh  new Windows installation host.

How to install Microsoft Windows XP SP3 on Debian GNU / Linux Squeeze

Thursday, December 1st, 2011

Windows XP Service Pack 3 QEMU Debian Squeeze

I have never did a proper install of Windows XP on Debian before hand. Even though I experimented once long time ago. I had zero success with installing Windows XP Service Pack 2 . The only Windows I can make correctly working before hand on these early days on my Debian powered notebook with qemu virtual machine emulator was Windows 2000 .

I decided to give it another go today as I hoped the qemu has advanced and I’ve seen many reports online of people who were able to correctly make Windows XP SP2 work out.

As I’ve seen many blog posts online of people who succesfully run with qemu Windows XP SP2, in order to escape from repeating the other guys experience and conduct a fresh experiment, I decided to give qemu a try with Microsoft.Windows.XP.Professional.SP3.Integrated.June.2011.Corporate

Before I proceed with using latest qemu I,

1. Installed qemu using the usual:

debian:~# apt-get install --yes qemu qemu-keymaps qemu-system qemu-user qemu-utils uml-utilities
...

Afterwards,

2. Created a new directory where the qemu Windows image will be stored:

debian:~# su hipo
hipo@noah:~$ mkdir windows
hipo@noah:~$ cd windows
hipo@noah:/home/hipo/windows$

As a following step I loaded the tun kernel module which is necessery for Qemu to properly handle the Windows LAN networking.

3. Load and set proper permissions for tun kernel module

In case if /dev/net is not existing first step is to create the proper device, however in most cases /dev/net should be there:

debian:~# mkdir -p /dev/net
debian:~# mknod /dev/net/tun c 10 200

As a next step its necessery to load tun kernel module and set the proper permissions:

debian:~# modprobe tun
debian:~# echo 'tun' >> /etc/modules
debian:~# chgrp users /dev/net/tun
debian:~# chmod g+w /dev/net/tun

Next step is to create an image file with dd or with qemu-img which will be holding the Virtual Machine Windows installation.

4. Create image file for Windows using dd

I decided to create a the image file to be with a size of 5 Gigabytes, this is of course custom so other people might prefer having it less or more the absolute minimum for a proper Windows XP SP3 install is 2000 Megabytes.

debian:~# su hipo -; cd windows;
debian:/home/hipo/windows$ dd of=hd.img bs=1024 seek=5000000 count=0
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes (0 B) copied, 1.5505e-05 s, 0.0 kB/s

Notice here that the file dd will create will appear like 0 kb file until the Windows install from a BootCD is run with qemu.

5. Download an image of Microsoft.Windows.XP.Professional.SP3.Integrated.June.2011.Corporate from thepiratebay.org

Microsoft.Windows.XP.Professional.SP3.Integrated.June.2011.Corporate is currently available for download from the thepiratebay.org if in the times to come it is not available it will most likely be available from torrentz.net, isohunt.com etc. so I’ll skip more explanations with this step and let you use your favourite torrent program of choice to download the MS Windows iso. Just to make a note here I used transmission as this is my favourite torrent client. After downloading the iso I used K3B to burn the Image file as Bootable ISO. I’m naturally a GNOME user so to burn it as Image I just open it with K3B by using the GNOME menu and selecting Open with K3B

Next I instructed qemu to boot from the just burnt CD.

6. Boot windows Installation with Qemu from the Boot CD

debian:/home/hipo/windows$ qemu -boot d -cdrom /dev/cdrom -hda hd.img

Notice here that I’m running the qemu virtual machine emulator with a non-privileged reasons. This is important as qemu might have holes in the emulation of Windows Networking stack which if executed as root superuser. Can allow some malicious attacker to remotely compromise your GNU / Linux PC …

Qemu window will pop-up where one installs the Windows as it will install it using an ordinary PC. To switch qemu to fullscreen mode to have the complete feeling like installing Windows on an non-emulated PC ctrl + alt + f can be pressed.

The Windows installation took like 1 hour 20 minutes on my dual core 1.8 Ghz notebook with 2 GB of RAM. But I should say while installing I had multiple applications running; xmms, transmission, epiphany, icedove, evince etc. probably if I just run the Virtual Machine with no other applications to extra load my PC, probably the Windows install would have been done in max 50 minutes time.

After the installation is complete. To

7. Further run the installed Windows debian:/home/hipo/windows$ qemu -hda hd.img -boot c
...

As a next step its necessery to;

8. Bring up the tap0 interface and configure it for the user

I’m running my qemu emulator with my user hipo , so I run cmds:

debian:/home/hipo/windows$ su - root
debian:~# tunctl -u hipo
Set 'tap0' persistent and owned by uid 1000

9. Enable ip_forwarding and arp proxy and for wlan0 and tap0

debian:~# echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/wlan0/proxy_arp
debian:~# echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/tap0/proxy_arp
debian:~# echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/tap0/proxy_arp

10. Install the proper Network Drivers inside Windows

That’s just in case, if they’re not supported by the Windows default existing drivers.
To do so, I downloaded my LAN drivers from the Vendor and put it on USB and sticked the USB drive to my laptop. In order to make the Kingston USB drive I used to transfer my LAN and Video drivers. I had to restart qemu with the parameter -usb -usbdevice host:0951:1625 , where I used lsusb to check and get the correct USB ID 0951:1625, like shown in the command below:

debian:~# lsusb |grep -i kingston
Bus 001 Device 006: ID 0951:1625 Kingston Technology DataTraveler 101 II

After on I booted again the Windows XP with the following command line in order to make qemu detect the USB Drive:

debian:/home/hipo/windows# sudo qemu -boot c -hda hd.img -usb -usbdevice host:0951:1625

One oddity here is that in order for qemu to detect the USB stick, I had to run it via sudo with super user privileges.Don’t ask me why this is the only way it worked …
Next on used the Windows device manager from Control Panel -> System -> Device Manager to point my undetected hardware to the correct Win drivers.

For the GUI preferring user qemu has a nice GNOME GUI interface called qemu-launcher, if you like to use qemu via it instead of scripting the qemu launcher commands, you can install and use via:

debian:~# apt-get install --yes qemu-launcher qemuctl
...
debian:/home/hipo/windows$ qemu-launcher

QEMU-Launcher Debian Squeeze Screenshot

Another GUI alternative to qemu-launcher, which easifys the work with qemu is qemulator; here is a screenshot:

Qemulator 0.5 - Qemu GUI Screenshot Debian Squeeze

How to check any filesystem for bad blocks using GNU / Linux or FreeBSD with dd

Monday, November 28th, 2011

Check any filesystem partition for BAD BLOCKS with DD on GNU Linux and FreeBSD

Have you looked for a universal physical check up tool to check up any filesystem type existing on your hard drive partitions?
I did! and was more than happy to just recently find out that the small UNIX program dd is capable to check any file system which is red by the Linux or *BSD kernel.

I’ll give an example, I have few partitions on my laptop computer with linux ext3 filesystem and NTFS partition.
My partitions looks like so:

noah:/home/hipo# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x2d92834c
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 721 5786624 27 Unknown
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 * 721 9839 73237024 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 9839 19457 77263200 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 9839 12474 21167968+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 12474 16407 31593208+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 16407 16650 1950448+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda8 16650 19457 22551448+ 83 Linux

For all those unfamiliar with dddd – convert and copy a file this tiny program is capable of copying data from (if) input file to an output file as in UNIX , the basic philosophy is that everything is a file partitions themselves are also files.
The most common use of dd is to make image copies of a partition with any type of filesystem on it and move it to another system
Looking from a Windows user perspective dd is the command line Norton Ghost equivalent for Linux and BSD systems.
The classic way dd is used to copy let’s say my /dev/sda1 partition to another hard drive /dev/hdc1 is by cmds:

noah:/home/hipo# dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/hdc1 bs=16065b

Even though the basic use of dd is to copy files, its flexibility allows a “trick” through which dd can be used to check any partition readable by the operating system kernel for bad blocks

In order to check any of the partitions listed, let’s say the one listed with filesystem HPFS/NTFS on /dev/sda2 using dd

noah:/home/hipo# dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/dev/null bs=1M

As you can see the of (output file) for dd is set to /dev/null in order to prevent dd to write out any output red by /dev/sda2 partition. bs=1M instructs dd to read from /dev/sda2 by chunks of 1 Megabyte in order to accelerate the speed of checking the whole drive.
Decreasing the bs=1M to less will take more time but will make the bad block checking be more precise.
Anyhow in most cases bs of 1 Megabyte will be a good value.

After some minutes (depending on the partition size), dd if, of operations outputs a statistics informing on how dd operations went.
Hence ff some of the blocks on the partition failed to be red by dd this will be shown in the final stats on its operation completion.
The drive, I’m checking does not have any bad blocks and dd statistics for my checked partition does not show any hard drive bad block problems:

71520+1 records in
71520+1 records out
74994712576 bytes (75 GB) copied, 1964.75 s, 38.2 MB/s

The statistics is quite self explanatory my partition of s size 75 GB was scanned for 1964 seconds roughly 32 minutes 46 seconds. The number of records red and written are 71520+1 e.g. (records in / records out). This means that all the records were properly red and wrote to /dev/null and therefore no BAD blocks on my NTFS partition 😉