Get Ready for Rebuilds

Whatever your rebuild mission might be, users want you to replicate their old system's look and feel. Surprisingly, that's where the opportunity to enhance your bottom line comes in.

In fact, working with a customer to discover how they want their system rebuilt is a great opportunity to build, or enhance, your relationship. For instance, an agreed-upon price from a pre-standardized price list will help the customer understand and appreciate, ahead of time, what you'll be doing for them. That's a service most system builders don't offer.

Also, your customer will have opportunities to tack on extra purchases—from you, of course! These might include the external USB hard drive that held the cleaned-up data from the customer's current drive during the transition. Or a hardware firewall that could have spared them the attack that brought down their system in the first place. A system rebuild is a great opportunity for building your relationship and increasing your bottom line.

Ingredients

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Whether you're building to a new machine or simply a new OS, work closely with the customer to call in the materials from the old/current environment. These will include hardware, software and stored data. It's best to begin with the components in the complete, current hardware system:

After that, move on to the software, which will include:

Finally, on the system builder's end, here's what's required:

Getting Ready for the Rebuild, Step-by-Step

1. Pricing Up Front

Whether your customer needs a rescue from disaster or is looking to make a trophy purchase, they typically won't be technically knowledgeable enough to perform a smooth rebuild from the old situation (disk, OS, single computer, single graphics card) to the new. That's where you, the savvy system builder, comes in. Begin by discussing your services with the user by referring to a comprehensive price list. Once you agree on the scope of the project, you'll know exactly what's needed to set up on the new system. Also, you will make your customer aware of what services you're providing. A sample list could include such items as:

You should also include the customer's price for each item on the list. For example, for reinstalling the programs, you might specify that the fee is, say, $50 per program. Put hard numbers on each item on your list.

None of this is a "ghosting" operation. It's skill. Explain to your customer that you won't be dragging in any old problems. Tell them that programs will be newly installed from disks that have been hosed down by your kit (see Step 2 below). Add that you'll need to re-establish user settings through an elaborate process (as in Step 3 below). Put your best marketing skills into your price list. Think of the things you can offer on this rebuild that you might list with a price. You can always use some of them as items to waive, since you're a good guy (or gal).

2. Collecting Ingredients and Working With Your Client

Using the ingredients list above, call in the equipment and data from the old system, and lay them out on your workbench. Your goal is to capture, on a gross level, many things you can then go back to—from system files to data. Don't back up to a machine or drive connected to your network; instead, use a sacrificial lamb (such as SimpleTech's external drive, SimpleDrive Portable)—an independent device you can afford to lose if necessary, and that you've run checks on. This will help immensely in avoiding adding to the client's problems—and your own.

Depending on the reason for the rebuild, containment may be in order on the system you're backing up. A check and treatment with a good malware suite is highly recommended before you go any further.

From here on, there are potential restoration sources on disks and possibly other drives. They must all be checked, and treated when necessary before proceeding to the interim backup.

Once everything that passes inspection is in one place, tell the client about any items that could not be saved, and find out whether they want to replace these lost items. Next, ask if any items on your bench (and not on the old disk) should go on the list. Again, ask if anything else needs to be purchased before you proceed.

Next, ask if anything on the disk should be left off this time, but backed up elsewhere, such as to a DVD. For the time being, everything rescued from the old machine will go to your shuttling sacrificial lamb.

3. Backing Up To the External Drive

Before you copy anything to the external drive, create exactly the same drives that exist on the client's machine (for example, C:\ and D:\). This will be important later, because it will help you find the small minority of fussy "look and feel" files that have to be reconstituted wherever they may be—not just in C:\Documents and Settings, for example. You'll not only recreate a sense of the familiar, but also make many things easy to find on the newly loaded machine.

Make sure your Windows Explorer can access "hidden" system files and folders. To do this, click on Folder Options from the Tools menu, then click View. Under "Hidden files and folders" in the list, click the radio button for "show hidden files and folders." Click Apply, then OK. At some point, the new computer will be Windowed up and ready to swallow what you're loading on the external drive.

4. Useful Icon Tricks

There are two types of do-it-yourself tools I represented on the Start Menu as imported icons that would be as useful to you as they would be to your customer. They're also the perfect proving ground of the "look and feel" principle of this Recipe, which will come last.

Before that final test, all the data your client wants should already be copied from the old system to the external drive, and then to the new system.

Also before the final test, Windows administrators should be set up in a special way. The first special Start Menu item is a folder called "Text Files." It contains two Notepad files. You may want to create files like these on a machine in your shop. They'll not only come in handy for you, but will also serve as demonstrators as you go down your price list of offerings.

Descriptions.txt is a simple, two-column list of every program in a special directory of downloads and other files that are likely to be re-installed in the future. The file name is in the left-hand column; a description with such useful information as version, download date, and location is on the right. Here's an illustration:

Also worth noting in the screen shot is Serials.txt, a simple, two-column file. It shows the name of a program, followed by its serial number. You'll like this, because rebuilding a system by looking up and down at groups of numbers with dashes gets old fast. Also, the registration cards or CD jewel cases may fall under somebody's foot or be shuffled out the door. With this file, you and your users will never misplace a key again. The serial numbers are easy to copy and paste, four-digit-group at a time, each time a program needs to be reinstalled. Also, this list could even inspire your clients to record serial numbers as they register new programs in the future. Well, we can dream!

The second Start Menu item is Utilities. This includes, among other things, a group of batch files. These batch files, in turn, can back up select files to a floppy drive, notebook, USB ports for an external hard drive, or thumb drive. Here's a look at Utilities:

On my system, all the thumb drives get different robot icons. What goes into the back-ups depends on the destination. Just don't forget to assign distinctive icons that aren't part of the offering in Windows' own library. That will help prove your test as well (as shown towards the end of this Recipe). Hit Google for +icon +"32 X 32" under its Image tab, or take a screen shot of anything if you have the tools to save a piece as an .ICO file. Make sure you keep the icons in a local directory, and not online. The Big Test: Make Settings Appear from Old to New

This is the trickiest part, so don't skip a step here. You're going to steal most of the files from Documents and Settings in Windows Explorer, without letting it stop because of files "in use." Then you're going to put the files up properly at their final destination so that Windows—Registry and all—takes them seriously. Here are the steps:

1. Copy all data files from the external drive to the new build with Windows properly installed (if you've not already done so).

2. On the customer's old PC, create a new Temporary User account with Administrator rights. (If you don't know how to do this, click Start Help. Then, in the Search box, type "create new user.") Be sure to make the new user an Administrator. Log into the new Temporary User account. While on the Temporary User account, Unhide your system files on the old PC.

3. In the left pane of Windows Explorer, click the C:\Documents and Settings folder. In the right pane, select everything except the Temporary User Account folder, then copy it all to an OLD\Documents and Settings folder on the root of the external drive, where you can find it easily. Then copy the folder C:\Windows\Web\Wallpaper to OLD\Windows\Web\Wallpaper on the external drive.

4. Move to the new computer. Make a new Temporary User Account on the system with Administrative rights, just as you did on the old PC in Step 2 above. Log on. Create User Accounts on the new PC with the exact same names you used on the old PC. Remember, you must log in to each of the user accounts you've just created; otherwise, Windows will not create subfolders in the C:\Documents and Settings folder for them, and no Registry entries will be created for them.

5. Once you're finished logging into the user accounts, log back in as the Temporary User on the new machine. Plug the external hard drive into the new computer. Unhide System Files here, as the Temporary User, as well.

6. Copy C:\Documents and Settings from the external hard drive to the new computer in the exact location it lived on in the old computer. For any overwrite prompts, choose Yes. Next, copy C:\Windows\Web\Wallpaper from the external hard drive into its namesake on the new machine.

One bit of clean-up, and you're done. There will be empty icons representing programs referenced in the old system, but not installed on the new. Delete those icons on the new system. Otherwise, if the customer sees them, they could get confused or feel cheated.

Before you test your results, did you move and install the data first? If you've just completed the above section, double-check to ensure that your special icons, batch files, text files, personal wallpapers, and other properties are all in place on the new computer.

If you're set, see if the "iconized" text and batch files are up in the Start Menu on the new machine as they were on the old one. If they are, give yourself a well-deserved pat on the back: You did it!

REBECCA ROHAN is a freelance writer who has written well over a thousand articles on technology since 1987. She is also the author of Building Better Web Pages (Morgan Kaufman, 1998).