Win7 and >2TB disks

[mikeymikec]

I slightly screwed up the upgrade of a friend's computer. He has a 1TB disk, wanted a 3TB disk and an upgrade to Win7 at the same time, and I thought it might be best to set up Win7 on the 3TB disk so it would allow him to steadily move his stuff over to the second disk.

Win7-64: Check
Board that's able to handle >2TB disks and a recent BIOS version: Check

What I didn't count on was that Win7 only will only completely utilise a >2TB disk that it is booting off if you have a U/EFI BIOS. If you have an old-style BIOS, even if the BIOS sees a 3TB disk, Windows Setup only sees a 2TB disk, and after setup, even though you can see in Disk Manager the extra unused space, it won't let you do anything with it, and won't let you upgrade the disk to a Dynamic (GPI) disk partition layout because of the pre-UEFI BIOS.

I didn't even notice that C drive was only 1.99TB until a few weeks later. Doh.

So, plan B is so far:

1 - On 3TB disk, do an NT backup file including system state and everything, saving the backup file on that partition (which, come to think of it, I'm fairly sure it can do it... not 100% sure). (There's enough space on the partition to do this)

2 - Disconnect 3TB

3 - Wipe the now unused 1TB 'old disk', set up Win7 on it.

4 - Connect 3TB, copy backup file onto 1TB. (There's enough space on the 1TB to do this I'm pretty sure)

5 - Disconnect 3TB

6 - Restore Windows backup image onto 1TB, hope everything goes to plan, reboot, test, shout hurray.

7 - Connect 3TB, wipe, upgrade to dynamic disk, make 3TB partition and format, sigh with relief.

The board is an ASUS P6T-SE. Should this plan work, any suggestions, etc.? I could streamline it a bit, but there are points where I simply want to take as few risks as possible.

 

[Binky]

Download True Image from WD/Seagate website for free, or buy the 2012 version for cheap. Can the Win7 backup system handle different sized destination drives? I assume "NT backup" means the Win7 backup...

To restore the image, it must be on the 3TB drive. You can't restore to the 1TB drive if the image file you want to restore is on that drive.

 

[razel]

Sounds fine, except for the wipes. I'm assuming this is zero-ing the drive, which is unnecessary. If you meant, wiping the partition table and boot sectors, then absolutely it's necessary. I recommend the diskpart command and it's clean function during the Win7 setup 'Choose disk' screen. I think you press SHIFT-F10 to get to a command screen.

 

[mikeymikec]

Download True Image from WD/Seagate website for free, or buy the 2012 version for cheap. Can the Win7 backup system handle different sized destination drives? I assume "NT backup" means the Win7 backup...

To restore the image, it must be on the 3TB drive. You can't restore to the 1TB drive if the image file you want to restore is on that drive.

Hmm, reading up a bit it looks like either system would need to be restored to the same size partition, however this page suggests shrinking the source partition first:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com.../thread/63159837-734e-425a-aa52-6a39691c1cca/

@ the other person who replied

Yep, I only meant partition deletions. I haven't ever low-level formatted a hard disk

 

[Cr0nJ0b]

TI can restore into any size partition, so you backup the 1TB and restore to a 3TB partition. there is an option to keep the part sizes the same, but that's not necessary. just restore and make sure the target is the larger on.

BTW, I think you need to setup the boot partition as GUID to be larger than 2TB. I've never done this on a boot part, but on secondary, that's what I've done. The Mobo will support booting to GUID devices, so it all should work.

 

[mikeymikec]

GPT/GUID - different names for the same system IIRC. I can't upgrade the partitioning system on the 3TB because it's a boot disk and the board doesn't have UEFI to allow booting from that.

TI - I'll probably give it a try.

 

[piasabird]

In the old days they cheated and wrote 2 separate partitions to one drive. There is probably a workaround. Might try a 3rd party Partition program. Might be better off buying him a 2 TB drive and keeping the other hard drive for later.

 

[murphyc]

Windows 7 64-bit on BIOS computers only uses MBR for partitioning boot disks. That's the problem. MBR is limited to 2.2TB's worth of 512 byte sectors. Some disk companies have odd work arounds for this, but my vague recollection is they were hacks for XP not Windows 7.

Your idea of reverting to the 1TB disk as a boot disk is sound. But you do not need to make the 3TB disk a dynamic disk, just partition it using GPT instead of MBR. Then you'll have the entire 3TB allocation using a non-proprietary, industry standard method, and you'll have support for 128+ partitions.

Windows Vista and 7 both support GPT disks as secondary (non-boot) disks.

 

[mikeymikec]

@ murphyc

I think Windows refers to disks with the GPT partition layout as dynamic.

- edit - hmm, looks like I'm wrong.

 

[mikeymikec]

TI question - Could I simply wipe the 1TB disk, then tell TI to copy the boot partition and C drive partition over to it from the 3TB?

 

[murphyc]

I would take the opportunity to zero the 1TB drive, assuming you have reliable backups. Any bad sectors will have failed writes which the drive firmware will detect and remove from use. I tend to do this on disks periodically.

I can't answer the True Image question, as I don't know if it's doing file copies or sector copies, if it backs up the old MBR, if it restores it, etc.

 

[mikeymikec]

For reasons I'm not entirely sure of, I thought I would try the Windows backup image routine first. The whole experience has been quite infuriating.

I thought it might increase my chances of success by reducing the size of the C drive partition on the 3TB as much as possible. 2TB partition, 1.39GB free, shouldn't be a problem, right?

Windows says, sorry I can't reduce it to less than 1TB. Check the log entry for details.

1st attempt - your IE history file is unmovable apparently. Fine, deleted.
2nd attempt - some file to do with system restore is unmovable. Fine, system restore points deleted by disabling that feature.
3rd attempt - your IE temp files cache index file is unmovable apparently. Fine, deleted.
4th attempt - Windows still can't make the partition any smaller, but it has decided to sulk and not tell me what file is stopping it.

Fine, 1TB it is. Create a system restore image and store the image on the 1TB drive. Ok! It's 600GB in size. (Grr) No problem, done.

Ok, expand the 3TB's C drive back to 2TB. Ok, done. Move the image folder structure back to C drive. Permissions grumble. Sorted. Folder structure moved.

Disconnect 3TB, do a quick Win7 install on the 1TB. Done.
Connect 3TB, configure machine to boot off 1TB, Done, booted.

Boot off Win7 DVD, tell it to restore the image. It comes up with ambiguous wording about where the image might end up. It'll go on C drive, allegedly (great), but with this funny CLSID type identifier and the computer name I set for the old setup. There's no way on the planet I'm going to click on 'Next' now if it can't tell me where it's going with a reasonable level of certainty.

I assume it would try to restore onto the same drive it is restoring from and fail, but it might somehow bork both partitions in the process and leave me high and dry without a backup (no, I don't have room to backup friend's 500GB or so of personal data).

I feel slightly more comfortable with the notion of TI / DiscWizard doing partition-to-partition copies, assuming that it gives me a decent level of feedback.

The fallback option I guess (if data doesn't get fried) is to simply put up with a new setup of Windows 7 on the new disk and copy stuff over manually. It's becoming a incrementally more attractive option by the minute.

 

[mikeymikec]

I'm doing a backup of the Windows reserved 100MB partition and the original C drive, now shrunken to 1TB onto the newly created partition on same disk. I guess after that I'll tell it to restore that image onto the new C drive on the 1TB disk.

Initially I tried to use 'clone disk', but it said that the partitions are wildly different in size, so it refused. It also reckoned that the disks have errors on them, but I wonder if that's more of a "ick, 3TB disk on an ex-UEFI system" type mis-error.

If all goes to plan afterwards, I'll use Seagate's SeaTools program to check both drives.

I found it amusing in DiscWizard how the explanation at the top of the 'image compression options' window says that the higher the compression, the long it will take (logical), then when I specified a lower compression option, the ETA for completion was higher I ignored that and went for zero compression.

 

[mikeymikec]

It just restored all the files into a folder named 'Drive (C)' on the partition that I wanted it to restore to... thanks a bunch If I've gone this far, I may as well push the boundaries of absurdity and move all the files onto the root of the drive.

 

[murphyc]

This is the most convoluted description of a backup and restore process I've read in some time. It almost sounds like it's a files/folders backup and not a full system or full disk type of backup application. True to form, it's often the restore process that bites people in the ass, not the backup.

 

[mikeymikec]

Considering that I doubt a sector-by-sector restore is going to go to plan, it has to be this way. Moving the files didn't work (all the dummy junction points in the user profiles was one reason, then convoluted permissions in the Windows folder... I needed to reset some manually, then 11,000 to go).

Next revision of the plan, I think, is to quick-format the partition I've just been playing with, restore again but without the 'absolute folder path' option (which didn't do what it should have done IMO), then run Windows setup/repair and manually put a boot sector back on that partition.

 

[mikeymikec]

Yup, it was the "use absolute paths" option that bit me in the ass. Now to wait a few hours for the restore to complete before trying to hop the next hurdle.

 

[mikeymikec]

Ok, this is borked, I don't think I can recover the situation now. I got the system to boot (kinda) on the 1TB disk, but I think what's happened is that Windows on the 3TB had an ID and drive letter allocated to the 1TB partition, it gave it that drive letter again, so God knows how it managed to get as far as the welcome screen (I managed to get a command prompt up, but hardly any other commands would run (such as regedit/compgmt.msc), and it was trying to work with the 1TB as F drive, C drive being missing.

I'll try a couple of quick ideas, but I think I'll have to bite the bullet and do a new Windows install on the 1TB, then just copy whatever data that needs to be kept, then re-setup the 3TB with GPT.

 

[mikeymikec]

One theory I have is that the boot partition (the 100MB one) contains drive information, so if I hadn't recovered the 3TB's boot partition over the 1TB's, it would have worked. I suspect this is wrong though, because I think it's more likely that drive letter info is kept in the registry.

 

[murphyc]

A sector backup would work. But you'd have to shrink the partition on the 3TB first, which is actually a ~2.2TB partition to < 1TB. Then you could sector copy partition to partition.

But I'm still finding it hard to believe that your situation is all that unique, that these problems haven't been ironed out by now.

 

[mikeymikec]

If you read back a bit, I wasn't able to shrink it beyond about 1.01TB. The partition it had to go on was 931TB.

But I'm still finding it hard to believe that your situation is all that unique, that these problems haven't been ironed out by now.

I assume I did things arse-about-face, but as hardly anyone is piping up to tell me where I went wrong, perhaps not? Weird.

Perhaps if the 3TB disk's Windows install had never seen the 1TB disk, and a partition copying program outside of Windows had done that bit of work, then there wouldn't have been the issue I described with copying the OS over to the 1TB, then it coming up as F drive when booting off it when it should have been C. I don't think the reason why it went wrong was because I didn't use sector-by-sector copy, after all, it got past the boot process, and an OS install volume is simply a boot sector and a load of files.

The new install went fine, moved all the necessary data over without any problems, and converting the disk to GPT actually went without any hiccups

It's been an interesting experience, though I wish I had clocked a bit of successful experience in OS install cloning in the process.

 

[murphyc]

If you read back a bit, I wasn't able to shrink it beyond about 1.01TB. The partition it had to go on was 931TB.

Sounds like fragmentation. I'd have given it a good chkdsk /f and then reboot from a Fedora Linux LiveCD, install gparted and see if it can resize it. If so, then I'd follow that up with another chkdsk /f on the Windows side.

Contrary to someone else's assertion, the idea you don't ever need to zero a drive isn't exactly true. The only time a disks's firmware will remove a persistently failing sector from use is on failed writes. Failed reads will not cause the firmware to remove the sector from use because it contains data, and removing it from use would constitute data loss. So it's worth while periodically zeroing a disk as well as running extended SMART tests.

 

[mikeymikec]

The shrink process does a defrag analysis first, but I am almost completely sure I defragged it myself just in case. The only thing I didn't try this department was a defrag while running the quick WIn7 setup on the 1TB, because that ought to have not had any file lock issues.

Your point about zero'ing a drive and a sector with data in - I just do a full disk check and have Windows recover the data. Then whether the bad sector is logged and unused because Windows said so or the drive itself, it's covered one way or the other.

I don't mess around with partitions on Windows very much, let alone Linux. I've made a few mistakes in my time not to just trust partition management software (coming with an OS/distro or otherwise)

 

[mikeymikec]

I think the shrink process does a defrag but only looking for files that are restricting the partition from being shrunk further.

 

[murphyc]

Your point about zero'ing a drive and a sector with data in - I just do a full disk check and have Windows recover the data. Then whether the bad sector is logged and unused because Windows said so or the drive itself, it's covered one way or the other.

NTFS supports bad blocks lists. But this does NOT inform the drive hardware to remove them from use. Further, drive ECC can detect errors in sectors, consider them bad blocks, and will not inform the operating system if it's able to correct the error. Hence the bad block is still not removed from use. Only during write operations does drive firmware reallocate.

The NTFS bad blocks feature comes from an era when hard drives didn't do their own sector removal. Modern drives have spare sectors with no corresponding LBA. When a current sector is considered bad on a write event, the firmware simply remaps LBAs to a spare sector. So the file system doesn't need to be informed at all.

I don't mess around with partitions on Windows very much, let alone Linux. I've made a few mistakes in my time not to just trust partition management software (coming with an OS/distro or otherwise)

Partition maps are very straightforward and very very basic. They're way simpler and less fragile than filesystems.