Greyed-out archives in B&R 2012, 2011

Yes, Winbuilder normally expects to use the Windows installation disk as its source for creating any WinPE build. But a hard drive copy of the contents made in advance, either from the DVD or from an OEM recovery partition, will do just as well and much faster. In some cases, it also requires a few files from the Microsoft WAIK package for mounting and modifying WIM images. In fact, I've never tried it myself using an actual Windows installation as the source and so can't really offer much input on that approach.

I think it is possible to find some scripts for including sound and other such incidental Windows components in Winbuilder PE projects, but AFAIK few people use them. Most are just looking for a barebones Windows bootup that will support utilities for "repair and rescue" when they can't boot their regular systems. However, almost anything that can be included in a normal Windows installation could, at least theoretically, also be included in the PE build.

To incorporate any OS service pack it would need to be intergrated into the source prior to building. Not hard with PE1, but SP integration into PE2 and PE3 isn't a trivial task if not already available in the ready-made source itself.

 

Made some progress.

It takes only a few minutes to make winpe3.1 sp1 boot media - entirely from your hard drive.

If you had sp1 pre-installed - everything is perfect, wired network, wireless, audio, video, thunbmnails, etc.

If you started with sp0 and then did the windows update to sp1 - I still need to get the audio to cooperate - close , but not quite there yet.

No dvd needed, no WAIK needed - just what you already have - plus a few runtime redists, reg entries and a few free apps that are useful - perhaps a 30mb download at most.



Winbuilder doesn't have any way of doing that - as you say, it needs the dvd and some files from WAIK.

Not a problem for the enthusiast, but the average user simply doesn't have those, or know to get them.

 

That sounds great! Will you be posting somewhere when you're happy with the final results?

 

The intention is so paragon users can have a decent pe media with their paragon app. included.


For those who had the misfortune to get win7 sp0 - they will have to do without audio.

Unless I do a completely different build for them - that will involve a lot of file copying.

 

Excellent. That archive filter box is turning out to be very important (it has popped up in other posts as a source of misunderstanding). Unfortunately the user's manual says hardly anything about it and its implications such as you experienced.

I think the fact that archives work fine in <file view> but are greyed-out in <archive view> indicates something is wrong in the programming. Documentation shouldn't need to explain how to work around a bug :^|

The button is a great idea for reconnecting to archives stored on removeable media. But the rest would be unnecessary if Paragon fixes the bug.

I had no trouble creating ~15 images of my Win7 x64 OS partition with B&R free 2011 and 2012. I have also restored the OS partition several times from within B&R (that is, using the Windows Restore GUI rather than a rescue CD -- apologies to the purists), and it booted beautifully. I have also mounted images several times and extracted individual files (again, using the B&R Windows GUI). I don't have any hesitation about relying on its images -- it was just difficult figuring out how to access the greyed-out archives, but now that that's past, we can make it work.

 

Awesome. Thank you so much, SIW2! With a good PE, and knowing how to get around the greyed-out bug, I will probably stay with B&R after all. I will be looking for a follow-up post.

 

Not quite sure I understand. Do you mean yes, you will be making it available to users yourself? Or do you anticipate its replacing Paragon's current WinPE utility in their product packages?

 

I was thinking of making it available to users.

Paragon can't do that - they can only use licensed winpe as it is part of a paid product.

Users can make their own for personal use and put in anything they like

 

Excellent! I thought that's what you had in mind, but wasn't quite sure.

If you're able to provide a simpler way for creating versatile WinPE builds (i.e., without the need for such tools as Winbuilder, WAIK, etc.) you'll certainly be doing the whole user community a huge favor.

 

Hi Scott_Y,

Been away from internet for a while. Thanks for the info. Seems B&R works in the core departments OK.

BTW, did you ever find out what was causing your archives in the Archive tab to be greyed-out? Cos I don't think you weren't using external drives and none of the other things the Support person said might cause it applied in your situation. So if no reasonable cause can be found we would have to conclude that despite their reckoning to the contrary, this is a bug in UI. And if it's really a bug, its a bad one...

 

Yes, I'm quite happy with the results of B&R and indeed any Paragon product that I've ever tried. It's just that the GUIs are sometimes not intuitive, and the documentation is sparse in some topics (though it is now far better on both accounts than eight years ago when I first started using their Partition Manager).

No, I still don't know what the cause is. Personally, I'm quite sure it is a bug somewhere between the <Archive View> and the image files. In my case, the files are local and have not been moved. Plus the <File View> has no problem with the very same greyed out image files. I don't think Paragon support said it's not a bug in their reply posted above, but it appears to me that they haven't really looked at this problem yet. We'll see.

 

Scott_Y,
This is an interesting issue which hopefully you can get to the bottom of with paragon support, etc. Since, you asked in another thread for the experiences of others in terms of the "graying" or not with other paragon prodcuts ..... I am currently using B&R 10 Home (paid) any I only have "grayed" archive entries under the normal two expected situations where: a) the archive files were physically deleted (outside of paragon gui) from their external backup drive, -- or -- b ) the backups are on an external drive and you have the external drive Turned OFF, then ALL the archive line entries on the archive tab will be "grayed out".

 

Thanks for your feedback, JosephB. It's just as important to know of good experiences like yours, as to report the problems. And I agree with you--those are the only two conditions where we would expect to have greyed-out archive files.

 

Hi all,

Just a (long) update from me. Since last post I've continued to trial B&R and ShadowProtect Desktop. Mostly concentrating on SP.

I think at the end of the day there isn't any difference in their core functionality, but they have different secondary features that distinguish them - the main ones being B&R has the partition tools (inherited from their other product lines) and this is useful. These don't do much more that you can't already do in Windows (7) Disk Management itself, but are slightly more comprehensive.
And on the other hand SP allows you to boot a full partition image up in a virtual server (either Virtual Box which is opensource, or MS Virtual Server). Although I didn't actually try this feature, it is a good one in my book, as it means for non critical but stubbornly unfixable errors in Windows (they do happen!) you can successively go back through images created at various points in time trying out each image in virtual operation to see which one was the first one to have the error, then restore the image taken immediately prior to that one. Otherwise there really is no way of knowing sometimes exactly when that error crept in, so knowing which image to restore can be a bit of a guess.

But if the Windows partition is completely gone and you need access to a working system with all your programs, data and settings asap, then if you have access to another machine, just have to download and install Virtual Box (is free), and run the Windows partition image you want in that and immediately get back to full operations without waiting to restore your actual damaged partition. (And even if the Windows on the other machine is a different version you can do an "adaptive restore" into the virtual environment you create on that machine). And that virtual Windows partition continues to be backed up (full, incrementally or diffed) as part of the original backup job. When you have some time you can restore your broken partition on your origianal machine and I think the virtual backups are then reapplied to it's original backup chain so you literally carry on as if nothing had happened. Many home users probably wouldn't need that SP feature, though it appealed to me.
Another thing SP does is fine grained scheduling for incrementals, ie down to every 15 minutes if you want, and it's fast, you never notice it happening. Then it can automatically collapse all those incrementals daily, and/or weekly and/or monthly into a single file, which manages the potential clutter but gives pinpoint backup control if needed on an adhoc or permanent basis. And also you can get it to automatically intelligently replicate some or all of your backup images to another disk on a schedule too, without double ups etc.

It's perhaps not quite as flexible as B&R in some small ways but that's because they have strict policies geared to making sure you have good backups. One thing many are griping about though is that they don't have any retention facility based on managing disk space. You can say how many entire backup chains you want to keep before older chains are purged, but that's it. If you misjudge how much space n number of backup chains will consume on your disk, and space runs out before you have made more than that number of chains it spits the dummy and simply emails you about the failed backup. B&R wins there quite big.

I'm still adding the finer touches to my newly built OS partition, and at some point I must have installed an app that has scheduling features of some kind (buried deep in the system as I found out). Anyway I noticed my hibernate had stopped working - either on schedule or manually directed to hibernate, it would appear to shut down, screen blank and everything, then after 30-45 secs hello my machine would always pop back into life. That pissed me off no end as I use a notebook and battery power is precious to me. I searched forums endlessly and looked in so many system crevices trying to find the triggering element, all the usual suspects were fine. In the end I decided it was time to try an image restore, so did it with SP, and worked just fine, so now I know it's also good at the true business end too. And the restored image had no hibernate error. Yes!

When I re-install those last few apps since hibernate was working, I'll be able to identify which oine was the culprit, and will also post here just for general info (my particluar version of this hibernate dysfunction had some people pulling their hair out in other forums).

So the outcome of all this is I've decided to go with SP - final.

I'm still think B&R is probably a pretty good application, and you certainly can't beat the price - has a free version, and B&R Home 11 is hardly expensive for what it does. SP Desktop is relatively quite abit more. You also have to somehow get them to agree via an application form to let you download the PE ISO image to burn to CD for your recovery disk. And seems they probably don't readily do it for single home users, but I was fortunate I think. (But others here have outlined ways/steps to make your own for B&R, maybe the same is possible for SP if you;'re so inclined). Anyway I've used the PE recovery quite thoroughly now (except the Virtual image load, and their equivalent of adaptive restore) and it works real fine.

But in the end there were three things that persuaded me to go for SP and not B&R.

1. Whereas B&R put a database in between you and your image files, SP doesn't, its just disk view based. But the way they present their disk views of your images just seems a lot easier to use, and it's actually a LOT easier to see your backup chains if you're doing incrementals and/or differentials. And I don't really need the database view, it often just seemed confusing to me (not that it is really if you study it, and get used to it, but for quick use I didn't really gel with it that much). That said I think the database is an OK idea in principle, could be really good, but it really needs to be super easy to use, and done really well. Stuck there as a "wow isn't this a good thing" is not really much chop unless it's clearly superior to just working in disk view IMHO.

2. I have stabilised my backup policy, and the disks, locations on disk, are all stable now. But until I sorted that out there were various backup jobs on different drives, and the "disappearing backups" scenario was just as real in SP as in B&R.
However in B&R if I wanted to use the B&R database (and I did as the GUI presents that as the main way of seeing your images) you have to delete all the archives and then find each one on disk in a disk view and add them back one by one. In SP to rediscover all my lost images took about 5 seconds. They have what they call Destination Objects. These are simply a set of folder paths that can be quickly created, edited, deleted etc. Each backup job is associated with a Destination Object. If the drive letter for a disk where I had backup archives on changed from say F: to G:, all I had to do was manually replace the F in the backup job Destination Object to a G, and bingo, SP would find all my archives on that same external disk immediately, no matter how many different images were in involved. None of this "one-by-one" business. Obviously SP has been programmed in a much more truly object orientated way.

NOTE: I also discovered though another way of getting round this issue in either program. In Disk Management in Windows you can change the letter each partition on a disk uses. When I did this for all my external hard disks (they are all only one partition per disk) it didn't matter what order I plugged them in, the drive letter sticks, stays the same.

3. There's something about the GUI layout, its flow, it's functioning, that just came across to me as simple, clear, yet still covering all the bases, in fact it's a pretty powerful feature set just under your fingertips. I have access to all the info I need, can easily keep track of my archives, can get things done hardly without thinking about it, and it all worked. Never came across a bug, or something that wasn't very logical. And I started to realise that if that's how the whole GUI has been designed it's a pretty sure bet that's how the core code to do with the imaging and it's functioning has also been designed. I do programming myself for a living, so I appreciate these kind of factors. Also the head developer himself is directly available to ask questions to on the support forum.

Of course no software is perfect, and I know SP won't be either. But given that I want as much peace of mind as possible as far as this aspect of running my computers go, I was determined to try and maximize this by starting out with the best software for this job that I could find on the market. I am so far really happy with SP - but now only time will tell if that becomes a long term thing.

 

Hoopus, thanks for a very thorough summary of your testing. I agree with you on the high value of simple, intuitive operations. Unfortunately, that is not one of Paragon's strong points (based on my experience with several of their products, both paid and free, since 2003).

 

What appears to be the same problem of greyed-out archive files has been reported at https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=2019415&postcount=6 for a paid version of HD Manager 11 Suite.

 

Another strange thing about a greyed-out archive is that its contents can be viewed in the file browser tree (in the panel on the right side above the archive list). So B&R knows the archive location and can even look inside it -- yet can't do any standard operations with it from the archives list or archives menu (restore, check integrity, mount). Sure looks like a bug to me.

 

Scott_Y, you have asked for messages about the greyed-out entries in paid versions. Yes, I have experienced this in B&R11 Home and today in HDM12 Pro. The first time I noticed the grey entry, I had moved the archives from E: to W:. So, that's not a bug, but an expected event. I do not understand today's grey entry, look at the attached screen shot. The “Show partitions” also had grey lines.

But I followed your advice, deleted the entry and re-added it; the db is up to date again.

To be honest, in most cases I use the express launcher (without the archive tab), I just select Restore and point to the file. When I started with the Paragon products, I preferred the Advanced Interface, because I felt more “advanced” this way.... I think most of us find the Paragon GUI a bit “strange”, but it is not difficult when you have learned what to do. In my opinion Paragon has the best graphical display of the the items to back up: MBR, System and the “real” C: partition.

 

Thanks very much for reporting your experience. I think it is helpful for the community to see where this problem is popping up.

Yes, the seemingly random appearance of greyed-out archives is not understandable.

Good point about using the simpler interface. I will try that in the future.