How to recover lost disk space used by RRBACKUPS

In March 2010 - the time had come! - the post that quoted me and my website, www.tempusfugit.ca, on TechReport has ceased to be relevant.

The page that WAS ON MY WEBSITE and now linked from there has been changed radically. This a New page  and is completely difference to one referenced on the TechReport blog.

As you can see the original question was posed in Dec 2007

While I have downloaded and used the utilities that were originally available from IBM and more recently Lenovo, I am not sure where I have kept them. In addition to the fact they they are totally useless there are much better ways of configuring and maintaining your computer.

You are far better off abandoning what came with your Lenovo computer on its hard drive and installing a clean copy of Windows 7. Even if your computer came with XP, Windows 7 is a far better solution for you. I have successfully installed Windows 7 on old Thinkpads and IBM desktops that were originally XP and with specs that (according to Microsoft) are far too low.

The procedure described in the link above represents a philosophy change for me in that it has been determined that a new computer is best configured with a "clean copy" of an operating system and all OEM/Manufacturer nonsense and customization be abandoned. A rebuild and recovery is therefore quick and easy, without having to use the lengthy restore and recovery programs  supplied by the manufacturer - this includes Lenovo, Acer, Asus, HP, Dell and more.

• The posting on TechReport by p645n - too many words indeed! - Wanker???
• A recap on RRBACKUPS
• Deleting the IBM/Lenovo Service or Recovery Partition
• File recovery from RRBackups data files - It probably can be done, but the effort to do so is too difficult.
• RRUTILS.exe is the utility that can be used to recover data and disc space.

Backup Technology

Asigra today announced that its partner, Backup Technology Limited (BTL), will present on the advantages of cloud-based Virtual Disaster Recovery (VDR) at the 2012 Storage Networking World (SNW) conference in Dallas.

Backup Technology has established itself as the world leading Online Backup and Disaster Recovery provider.  With individual customer data sizes ranging from 50GB to over 100TB, they currently protect well over 8 Petabytes including billions of files.  With clients across industries, be it public or private sector, including charities such as the British Red Cross to Premier League Football clubs such as Liverpool FC and global brands like Master Lock, Backup Technology has an impressive portfolio of customers.

Asigra is the leading Canadian cloud computing vendor focused on backup, recovery and restoration with more than 550,000 customer sites deployed globally. Asigra Cloud Backup™ transforms the way businesses manage and protect their data by delivering seamless end-to-end data protection that efficiently scales and easily adapts to any IT environment. Asigra Cloud Backup is built for progressive Managed Service Providers who focus on driving growth and increasing their total addressable market to better service their customers, IT constrained organizations, and industries with compliance mandates that are looking to improve their backup with a secure, proven and flexible cloud backup and recovery model. With more than 26 years of experience as backup/recovery pioneers, Asigra manages one of the largest business-class backup service provider ecosystems in the world who power their cloud backup services using Asigra technology. Asigra is recognized among top-tier industry analysts, including the Enterprise Strategy Group, Gartner, IDC, Forrester Research and the 451 Group. Recently, the company was recognized by Business Solutions Magazine as a Best Channel Vendor for 2012 and Storage Magazine named Asigra Cloud Backup its 2011 Product of the Year. Asigra is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, with offices globally.

Deleting the IBM/Lenovo Service or Recovery Partition

Deleting the service partition will recover disc space, however this is a non-trivial exercise.

The basic procedure is to restore a partial image of the HDD to a new HDD. The main partition  is restored only. The manufacturers service partition (IBMSERVICE in the case of Lenovo) is NOT restored.

You can also increase the size of the HDD at the same time - going from a 30G or 40G drive with only 20G of usable space all the way to a 320G, 500G or more - all space usable!

Alternatively you can completely re-install Windows (or the operating system of your choice) after reformatting your hard drive. All of the drivers, for Lenovo at least, are available for Windows on the Lenovo website. You may have more of a problem with obtaining Linux drivers. Lenovo/IBM/Thinkpad do have a very active support forum.

Other posts related to RRBACKUPS on this blog:

• How to recover lost disc space taken up by RRBACKUPS 
• Deleting the SERVICE partition and recovering even more disk space

A recap on RRBACKUPS

Having featured many pages on the Lenovo/IBM backup software Rapid Restore & Recovery on my website I am making this post on this blog so that I have a reference to the archived pages.

Links:

• How to recover lost disk space used by RRBACKUPS
• Deleting the IBM/Lenovo Service or Recovery Partition
• File recovery from RRBackups data files  It probably can be done, but the effort to do so is too involved.

File recovery from RRBackups data files

This post is a review of the procedures detailed previously in describing RR&R and the utilities RRUTILS.exe and IBMRRUTIL.exe

Links:

• RRUTILS.exe  - The utility that can be used to recover data and manage the RRBACKUPS files and directories.
• Other pages on this blog relating to RRBACKUPS

Type 12 Partition - HPA - Hidden Protected Area

12 Configuration/diagnostics partition

ID 12 (decimal 18) is used by Compaq for their configuration utility
        partition. It is a FAT-compatible partition (about 6 MB) that boots into
        their utilities, and can be added to a LILO menu as if it were MS-DOS.
        (David C. Niemi) Stephen Collins reports a 12 MB partition with ID 12 on
        a Compaq 7330T. Tigran A. Aivazian reports a 40 MB partition with ID 12
        on a 64 MB Compaq Proliant 1600. ID 12 is used by the Compaq Contura to
        denote its hibernation partition. (dan@fch.wimsey.bc.ca)

HPA - Hidden Protected Area - FWBACKUP - FirmWare Backup

This file (the FWBACKUP utility) is mentioned in the IBM white paper (hpa-aibm.pdf) that describes the  Access IBM HPA (type 12) Predesktop Area

• Type 12 Partition - HPA - Hidden Protected Area
• Where to download the FWBACKUP utility 

I have discussed this subject in greater depth on my website www.tempusfugit.ca

Western Digital Corp - warranty and repair service

WDC - Warranty & RMA Services - End User Customers.

I have made a choice when I purchase hard drives to favor Western Digital over Seagate. The main reason for this is that I have had excellent service from Western Digital and I have had few failures, and those that I have were largely due to an error on my part (dropped or shaking a drive when it was active),
these drives when in warranty were replaced by WDC with minimum hassle.

This is in part one of the reasons that I have a rebuild rather than a "recover" strategy when it comes to hard drives and the back-up and recovery of data and the restoration of computer systems. I originanly had a stratergy of making an image backup of a newly configured and cleaned system. I now favour the
complete rebuild of a system from scratch. This is due to a number of factors, the ease in which replacement WDC drives are obtained, the fact that I can re-install operating systems at will (by-passing Windows activation etc) and also that drivers are usually easy to locate on the Internet. There have been a few exceptions to the driver problem, but again, nothing that I have not been able to overcome.

In fact, the only HDD failure the involved a WDC drive was with an Acer AO722 that lastest of less than a month from purchase. The unit was an "open box" so I do not know whether the unit had been previously dropped by its original owner. I suspect that it may have been.

Links:

• The warranty repair that triggered this post
• The WDC website for end users