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Should I even try?

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Gordon Pegue avatar
Gordon Pegue avatar

A couple of weeks ago, my main PC suffered a fatal failure in the BDC/bootloader segment of the primary OS (Windows 11 25H2) SSD.

My data was unaffected due to proper backup strategies and keeping data on separate physical SSD’s.

I was able to mount the unbootable SSD as a second USB drive using an M.2/USB adapter and see the file system however.

Thus I was able to recover the binaries/data in ProgramData, Program Files (x86), Program Files and my user profile folder, including all the bits and pieces of the PixInsight 1.9.3 installation.

I just installed PixInsight 1.9.4 and activated it.

My question is whether I should venture down the rabbit hole of attempting to migrate settings files from the old install into the new install.

I do realize that I will have to manually rebuild my repository structures, paying close attention to inserting the correct URL’s for tools that have been updated, plus I’ll have to reinstall my RC-Astro stuff.

But if it’s possible to recover the systems settings (preferences) by reusing the correct items, that’d save me a fair chunk of time.

Anyone care to comment on this “plan”? Good? Bad? Why??

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Brian Puhl avatar
Brian Puhl avatar

I don’t think you lose anything all that important. Most all of your presets are in your icon set. I recently installed Pix on my laptop for when I’m on the road. Honestly, the only thing that I lost that took any time was my GPU acceleration, which took me a bit to reinstall because it had been awhile.

Had to setup my scratch/temp folders, install GPU acceleration, add repositories and download, then download my icon set. Ignoring a little extra time for GPU acceleration install, maybe 20 minutes? I know RC has something in his repositories that are supposed to help install the GPU acceleration stuff, but it didn’t work for me.

Based on that, I wouldn’t think the effort is at all worth it.

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Willem Jan Drijfhout avatar
Willem Jan Drijfhout avatar

Going through the same here. MacOS, but idea is the same. I ran a system cleanup using CleanMyMac, which apparently saw all the PixInsight profile settings as system junk that could be deleted….

It’s not a big deal. Building repositories from scratch also cleans up stuff that is not used anymore anyway. I did have my icon sets, but even if they were gone, I could easily open a recent project and just safe the icons from there.

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Quinn Groessl avatar
Quinn Groessl avatar

To me it would be a waste of time. I’m on my third pc that I’ve had Pixinsight on, and it’s only taken 5-10 minutes to set it back up how I like each time.

Depends on what your time is worth I guess.

Gordon Pegue avatar
Gordon Pegue avatar

It was most definitely NOT a waste of time!

Over-writing the core-001-pxi.settings file did in seconds what it would have taken me many minutes to try and remember how I’d set things up previously.

My multiple swap file entries, where I had the various GUI elements docked and other stuff that I never would have remembered, all restored in a blink.

So, rolling forward, my backup strategy will include grabbing a copy of the C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Pleiades folder contents.

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Jim Raskett avatar
Jim Raskett avatar

Did you use the RC Astro tools get CUDA configured? I found that it worked perfectly and saved a lot of time.

Gordon Pegue avatar
Gordon Pegue avatar

No, Jim. I ran a test StarXterminator run on an 180 MB H-alpha master of IsWe1 and it was pretty slow. So the RC-Astro default tensorflow.dll is not doing the trick.

On my task list to finish out my setup of PI is to find my notes on how I setup the tensorflow manually.

I had run into this previously and the manual method worked… I just hafta find my notes!

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Jim Raskett avatar
Jim Raskett avatar

Hi Gordon,

I guess that I got lucky. It had been years since I configured cuda and after a recent clean Windows 11 install, I was plucking around trying to get it working. RC Astro saved me a lot of time.

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Mark Theissen avatar
Mark Theissen avatar

Yeah, I would definitely want the *.ini files from ..\AppData\Roaming\Pleiades folder where the “…” is your users folder (typically C:\Users\xxxxx). Also, recreate whatever PI Swap Folders you had set up on that drive. Otherwise, reinstalling Windows from scratch on a system every couple of years is never a bad idea, although it’s time-consuming to reinstall and setup all your apps.

I’m surprised that the RC Astro repository to setup the GPU acceleration didn’t work. Stupid question, but did you have the Nvidia driver installed? Did you download the “GPU” version of the repository of the “CPU” version?

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Gordon Pegue avatar
Gordon Pegue avatar

Mark —

They are actually .settings files, not .ini files and I am fully aware of where they live in the AppData folder structure.

My PI swap folders live on a separate physical SSD volume (which remained intact and unaffected by the boot SSD failure), so the .settings file overwrite reinstated those (and many other) paths, settings and repository URL’s (I have 37, not counting the default OI and RC-Astro ones). Only URL I have had to change was the Seti Astro URL but that was documented on the Seti site and in the lengthy CN thread on process/script updates for 1.9.4

In any case, I was not surprised that the “out-of-the-box” RC-Astro GPU repository URL (and the resulting tensorflow.dll that gets installed) did not work. In answer to your specific questions, yes, the NVIDIA driver was latest and greatest (all hardware drivers get updated early in my rebuild process - not something new to me as the last 25 years of my career were in Enterprise IT). Yes, I used ONLY the GPU repository URL from RC-Astro.

As I said, I had this issue previously with my system and had to resort to a manual fix. I have my notes and it WILL work, I just haven’t done the steps yet…

Finally, I’m also doing something I should have started doing before I retired and that is to add to my data backup strategies the ability to capture system images in whole with periodic system image incremental snapshots, so that if I have another SSD failure, it’ll be hours to recover instead of days.

CS

Mark Theissen avatar
Mark Theissen avatar

Gordon,

Just trying to help. BTW, I 100% agree with your updated backup strategy. I do an image backup of my system disk every week. Make sure to test at least once that it actually works. I keep an offline copy of all backups once they are generated. I had a bad power/network spike about 15 years ago and lost the entire computer, disk drives and all and learned my lesson from that. 😣