Windows 7 Windows Update Broken After Disk Clone - Resolved with other good info.

[Harvey]

I am helping a friend who bought a Seagate Momentus 7200.4 ST9500420AS for his HP G61-320US laptop, which originally came with a 250 GB drive. I used the version of Acronis True Image in Seagate's DiscWizard to clone the drive for the machine.

The clone appeared to work very well until I tried to update his machine through Windows Update. When trying to download updates, the download stalled at 0%, and I had to force the machine to power down and reboot it.

I searched Microsoft's site for information and found these pages which may apply to this problem:

An update that improves the compatibility of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 with Advanced Format Disks is available

Windows 7 windows update broken after disk clone

Google finds a number of articles about this problem. Some suggest that it may be related to "advanced format," but I don't know if that applies to this 500 GB drive.

I submitted a request for help to Seagate's support. Waiting for a reply. I'll report back if they have any help.

Meanwhile, TIA for info or ideas on how to resolve it.

< update >

See info in my reply (post #10) about manually setting partition sizes. 😎

 

[razel]

Try the following. Each will gradually affect your system more.

1. Run Disk Cleanup on everything (or just temporarly files)
2. Run indepth Disk Cleanup
- on command line type cleanmgr /sageset:0
- check everything (or everyting temp files related)
- on command lilne type cleanmgr /sagerun:0 (this runs the settings you just saved)
3. reset the Windows Update download folder.
- stop the 'Windows Update' service
- delete files in: C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download
- if you can't delete the files, 'Windows Update' may have restarted
- start the 'Windows Update' service

 

[Harvey]

Thanks. razel. I'll do those steps and get back with results.

FWIW, when I cloned the disk, I used the "Automatic" setting, which expanded drive D:, the recovery partition proportionally, along with drive C:, the data partition.

Could that have made a difference?

If I have to clone again, should I manually set the recovery partition on the target drive to be the same size as the original?

---

Update -- Excuse my dumbness, but where is the Windows update download folder?

 

[Emulex]

always use manual mode dude. don't resize the alignment partiton! always resize the other partition even if that means giving up 10meg (resize forces by file copy skipping unused portions of disk)

 

[corkyg]

Echo what Emulex says. I clone WIn 7 drives on several machines regularly. I never use automatic anything - stay in cotrol! Also, do not clone from within Windows. It has to reboot and do it from command prompt anyway. Best to use Rescue Media and bypass the OS completely. In this weay, I have never had a bad clone job in several years of doing it.

 

[Harvey]

First, thanks to all who replied. I went back to the original drive to confirm that Windows Update worked, and it did. I installed Win 7 SP1 and other updates and tried the clone again, again using the automatic setting, and it worked, even with the resized partitions.

As noted, I submitted the question to Seagate's support, and they replied before the end of the day with links (which didn't cover anything I hadn't already read) and a toll free number for further support. I called them to report that installing SP1 resolved my issue, and in turn, the tech gave me a piece of info that could help others. Specifically, he said Seagate drives now include auto-alignment to get past such problems.

That brings me to Emulex and corkyg's posts. This is an HP laptop so there are actually two partitions in addition to the main C: drive, the Win 7 recovery partition and HP's own recovery partition for restoring the factory installation.

The HP partition is FAT32 and started out at 103.2 MB so not much was lost in the expansion. However, the Win 7 recovery partition started at 13.11 GB and expanded to 26.3 GB. Questions:

1. Now that I know cloning this drive works, I have no idea what Windows stores in the recovery partition. Is it worth re-cloning it to recover the 13+ GB of storage space, or will Win 7 work better with the larger recovery partition?

2. If Windows doesn't need the space, can partitions be resized in Win 7, or is there a good (preferably free) utility to resize them?

I have an older version of Partition Magic that works well in XP, but I know it doesn't play well with the new alignment of Win 7. Will it work on the Win 7 recovery partition if I don't allow it to touch C:?

3. If a little bigger is better, any guidance would be appreciated. This comes to mind because another friend is running Vista, and she'is constantly getting messages that her recovery partition is full, but there are no files listed that could/should be deleted. This suggests that resizing her D: drive could fix that.

Finally, I started the clone in Windows, but when Acronis reboots, it launches the clone proceedure in Linux, which automatically bypasses the OS, as recommended.

 

[corkyg]

OK - yes - when you start in Windows, it reboots and you do end up in a much lesser linux based. The advantage in using the Acronis prepared Rescue Media (I use a thumb drive with my laptop) is that is does not involved Windows at all. It really doesn't matter about partitions - it even does the hidden ones.

What I do with my laptop is clone the drive to an external (eSATA.) I then swap the internal drive and clone back to the laptop. If you have a laptop than can handle 2 drives, it is possible to do a 1:1 direct cloning.

 

[Harvey]

The new drive is a Seagate going into an HP lappy that's still under warranty, and both companys gave me good info. Seagate's tech told me their current drives include an auto-align system to avoid known problems and that manually setting the Windows recovery partition to the original size wouldn't cause any problems. HP's tech confirmed the obvious that their recovery partition can be set to the original size because it's never used for anything other than restoring the factory base installation.

I suggested to Seagate's tech that they should include more info about that in the manual for their version of True Image because it added over 13 GB of usable data area to the 500 GB drive compared to using the auto setting. That would only increase when moving to larger drives.

I suspect the original failure with Windows Update was fixed when I updated to SP1 before redoing the clone. I re-cloned the drive, manually setting the recovery partitions as close as possible to the original, and everything appears to be working well.

Props to both Seagate and HP for their support. :thumbsup: