adventures with PING

A guest post from S:

The task I wanted to accomplish : Increase the space in C:\ partition (primary) by shrinking other partitions. I had D & E as Logical partitions. Cleared E to make it empty. It was a 60 GB ATA HDD. C was 12 GB, D & E sharing the rest in an extended partition.
I had :
a. PING 3.0 CD for backup. (I had used it earlier to restore primary partitions to identical machines/partitions with success. )
b. Lucid Puppy Live CD for useful tools like Gparted, Batch Renamer etc.
c. Ultimate Boot CD, just in case required.

Backed up C & D using ping to ping-images named PingC and PingD, just in case required. This would come in handy as things went wrong. During backup, C was seen by Ping as hda1 and D was seen as hda5. The backup image folders were written to USB External HDD.

Booted with Puppy for Gparted. It so happened, E being empty, wasn't reason enough for C to expand. Deleted D, thinking I would be able to restore later. C had all the space it needed to expand, yet it didn't. (??)
Deleted C, too and re-did the partitioning, thinking backups were handy anyway. Turned out, I would run into restoration problems.

Tried to restore C, from the image, to the now expanded C partition. Hmm, it failed. Apparently, as noted here, resizing of the partitions may be a problem ?

Firstly, PING would ask "where your images are stored" (the source of restoration), but at no point, it would ask "where do you want to restore to" (destination for restore). I had noticed this in my earlier experiences with PING, but in those case, didn't bother and it still worked because the backup and restoration environs were identical in size, order of partitions and hardware. This time I had re-done the partitioning. This problem has been noted by other PING users in forums, and I guess, by default, PING attempts to restore to the identical partition which you backed up from. This was noted at one of the forum posts, but not in PING's documentation.

Secondly, towards the last step ( just when you expect it to kick off the restoration), PING would ask something like "We found additional space in the partition you are trying to restore. Do you want us to extend the partition for you after restoration ? " . This problem too has been noted by other users. Here, either way you are caught, because I had tried both in different attempts (every time clearing up and redoing the partitioning). Either way it failed saying "Partitioning failed. May be, you have to do it yourself". If you didn't have a backup, the strange behaviour here can sometimes lead to catastrophic results, like here. btw, PING's errors and notifications are strange, they are in first person/second person in conversational lang (Some exasperation on this, here) . Like, after identifying drives, it would say "So, everybody is here". :) :)

Thirdly, during one of my many attempts with various combinations of answers to PING's questions, it "accidentally" restored the C partition successfully. This problem is also noted by a PING user in the forum. If you press the Cancel Button at one point in time, it would go ahead and kick off the restoration and finish it. (Natan acknowledges in the forum post that all is not well with the Cancel button behaviour).

However, after the above restoration, Gparted showed weird partition info. It showed the entire drive as unallocated. Pmount (in Puppy) failed to mount the partition giving an error. But Windows booted, hahaha. But it showed only C parition at 12 GB. I had had some Program Files in D, because C had run out of space. Since D hadn't been restored, I had a strange situation like IE works but Firefox doesn't, KM Player works but VLC doesn't and so on, because those other software were installed in D.

Windows XP's Disk Manager had even weird things to show. It showed drives as huge as 800GB with unallocated free space (where did she get that) and also a 23 GB unallocated space and another 230 GB unallocated space. When I tried Windows to create partitions in unalloacted free space, it failed. This problem of weird partitions sizes after a PING restoration attempt is also noted by other users in the forum. ( Can't dig the link now, don't remember).

In other attempts, I also tried PartImage from the UBCD to do the restorations. (PING is built around PartImage, I guess). That too failed.

In the meanwhile, my room-mate [Edit: me :)] suggested, 'Can't you mount D's ping image and copy files from there and worry only about C's restoration'.
Part of this suggestion would come in handy. Looked up on ways to mount a PING image. Unfortunately, this is not possible with PING, but while confirming this, Natan had suggested in an earlier forum post, that you could restore it to some other partition/machine and copy files from there.

Finally, after many rounds of trial, with every time re-partitioning from scratch, and I was about to give up, I bumped into the forum post, where Natan had suggested a solution for a similar situation of problems with restoring extended partitions. I took a clue from there and did the following.

Restoring only D :

1. In the PingD image folder, renamed hda5.001 to hda1.001, hda5.002 to hda1.002 and so on for all the zip files. Effectively, fooling PING as if it was an image of C.
2. Deleted the "hda" file created by PING.
3. Created a blank text file, called hda.
4. Deleted the "hda5-first sectors.txt" file created by PING.
5. Re-did the partition table, to create one big 55GB primary partition.
6. Tried now to restore PingD to hda1 as identified by PING. Strange, isn't it, since it is the D partition files that are getting restored to the primary partition.
7. When asked "whether you want PING to extend the additional space", say Yes.
8. PING completes restoration.
9. Boot with Puppy, mounted the partition and saw the D files in it.
10. Remembered my room-mate's suggestion and copied the D-partition files from HDD to USB External hard disk.

Restoring only C :

1. Deleted partitions, Re-did the partitioning, to create one big 55 GB primary partition.
2. In the PingC image folder, Deleted the "hda" file created by PING.
3. Created a blank text file, called hda.
4. Deleted the "hda5-first sectors.txt" file created by PING. (Strange, but it worked only after I did this deletion and creation of blank stuff).
5. Restored C successfuly, similar to steps 6 to 9 above.

Back to Puppy, Gparted showed a good C partition, was mountable.
Used Gparted to shrink C. Created the Extended partition, Logical partition and so on for D & E.
Copied the D-partition files from the USB external disk, including Program Files.

Windows XP now booted neatly. I now had enough space to provide for hibernation, additional space for the page file and 15% space for defragmentation.

At the end of two nights, all is well that ends well.

In retrospect, it's quite possible, some of these steps are silly and illogical and there are better simpler ways to do these things or to find the answers earlier on. Whatever, allow some crazy stuff for a novice like me in the open-source world. Also, there must be more sophisticated ways to do this from scratch from the Shell command prompt, as noted by Natan here.

Don't ask me whether I could have reinstalled Windows XP on Day 1. Haha, I could have. Had it ready, but I wanted to book something to adventurous exploration :) and open source problem-solving. Also, I had always relied on PING, it can't fail me now, so I have to find ways to make it work. :) :) It's a very useful piece of software and I love it. :)