1 Topic by tinkerbel

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Topic: Cloned OS to new partition..FAIL!

hi guys, hope you can help..

i have been using a combo of both IDE and SATA drives... decided to scrap my IDE drive (which has the OS on it) so i got a hold of Gparted..
partitioned a new TB sata drive to 100/900gb.. and cloned my OS from ide drive to the 100gb partition..

Now when i try and boot the pc with new cloned OS i get the dreaded DISK BOOT FAILURE!!

in Gparted the new partition has no set label (in the listings under the label column its blank) where as the other half of the partition has the drive name as the label..  could this be causing the issue??

when i boot in windows with the old (IDE) OS, windows shows the new partition has a label 'e:'...

any advice??

win XP(sp3) intel core 2 duo E6750 @ 2.66ghz
2gb ddr2 ram
hdd 40gig (OS..ide)
hdd 320gig (scsi)
hdd 1tb sata
hdd 1tb sata (new arrival)

2 Reply by tinkerbel

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Re: Cloned OS to new partition..FAIL!

nobody in here can help?

3 Reply by class413

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Re: Cloned OS to new partition..FAIL!

Perhaps the best method for the system drive transfer is to clone the drive to the newer bigger drive under Linux (with a software like Clonezilla), to take off the old hard disk, put the new one in place and reboot the system, so that windows doesn't look both drives at the time. Then you can modify the partitions (grow, shrink, add further partitions).

In your case, I guess it isn't so simple, because you have a multidisk system and you can't put the new (SATA) disk in the place of the old (IDE) one. The BIOS looks usually at the master boot sector of the first hard drive, to find the boot code. Perhaps you need to try the various SATA connectors to find the one that the system sees as the first. Or, take the other hard drives off and put them back one by one.

It is possible that you need to use the "recovery console" from the windows install cd, to fix the boot system from the command line (look for the commands bootcfg, fixboot, fixmbr). You can find documentation with google.

Another idea, is to use the BIOS setup settings to select the new hard drive as boot drive.

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***

4 Reply by PaulMW

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Re: Cloned OS to new partition..FAIL!

Hi tinkerbel

As someone who finds GParted to be one of the best "clone" apps that I've found recently, that one fairly critical thing, when using GParted to clone an OS partition, is to be sure to set the "Align to:" (the options are: cylinders, megabytes, none) setting in the Paste command to "None". To ensure that the partition is copied to the exact same spot on the new sdd.
That's, of course, assuming that the original partition was booting up OK.

And also that one usually needs to manually set the "boot" flag on the appropriate new partition. GParted does not seem to automatically copy that attribute. And not having that flag set can cause an OS to fail to boot.

And it's also useful to occasionally  run (from root in a linux is easiest) the excellent little bash script "bootinfoscript" which can pick up things in the partition table and bootup sectors that are not what/where they should be.

Cheers
PaulMW

5 Reply by gedakc

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Re: Cloned OS to new partition..FAIL!

PaulMW wrote:

As someone who finds GParted to be one of the best "clone" apps that I've found recently, that one fairly critical thing, when using GParted to clone an OS partition, is to be sure to set the "Align to:" (the options are: cylinders, megabytes, none) setting in the Paste command to "None". To ensure that the partition is copied to the exact same spot on the new sdd.

Choosing the proper alignment is important.  Recent operating systems can use, and often default to MiB alignment.  Old operating systems, such as DOS, require Cylinder alignment.  Generally you should choose either MiB, or Cylinder alignment.

See Specifying Partition Alignment.

6 Reply by PaulMW (edited by PaulMW 2012-07-24 23:10:49)

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Re: Cloned OS to new partition..FAIL!

gedakc Today 04:16:28 wrote:

>Choosing the proper alignment is important.  Recent operating systems can use, and often default to MiB alignment.  Old operating systems, such as DOS, require Cylinder alignment.  Generally you should choose either MiB, or Cylinder alignment.

Yes, you're probably correct - but in my understanding all that C,H,S bizzo is, to a large extent, mostly extinct/irrelevant by now.

And I've only recently found out that SSDs apparently need to have their partition "start offset" aligned to something exactly divisible by 4 (in Msinfo32 - the winDoze "inspecting"/reporting app) in order to be "properly aligned".
To do this involved moving a partition 2Mb to the right and then 1Mb back to the left - there doesn't seem to be any way in GParted of moving it to the right by a fractional starting offset. And doing this on one of my SSDs did seem to speed things up a bit.

And I have found a lot of cloning jobs to only work properly (eventually - and with a little "self-correction" by the OS itself or using its install CD/DVD) when the Paste alignment is set to "None".

For what that's worth from someone who is not extremely technoliterate - only moderately - and hopefully getting to be more so :-)

Paul W

7 Reply by class413

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Re: Cloned OS to new partition..FAIL!

And I've only recently found out that SSDs apparently need to have their partition "start offset" aligned to something exactly divisible by 4 (in Msinfo32 - the winDoze "inspecting"/reporting app) in order to be "properly aligned".

In fact, it is a little more complicated, because the various SSD drive models don't use the same  identical internal format. The relevant seems to be the minimum segment size that the specific drive uses to write on the "disk" space.
The old legacy rotational drives are able to write one sector only (512 bytes). The various memory-based media (SSD drives, flash usb sticks, memory cards ... ) use much larger segments to write at once, although the sector size is 4KiB ( i.e. 8 "old"sectors). This segment size varies for the models and manufacturers, up to 64KiB, 128KiB, even 256KiB as fas as I know. This could change in the future, as the SSD technology is constantly evolving. So, the operating systems chose to use 1MiB to align their partitions, because this is a multiple of every segment size used. Using 64KiB alignment would be a problem for drives with larger segment organisation.
On the other hand, 1 MiB is much lower than the old cylinder size, that was almost 8 MiB (16065 sectors).

Of course, it would be possible to work well with an SSD drive aligned exactly to the segment size of that specific model (64KiB or 32KiB or so... ). However, this would complicate much more the format process and the hardware versatility.

You are right that the CHS concept is really irrelevant for the operating systems now, and this since early or mid 1990s. It was however more relevant for the BIOS.
The main problem with the SSD drives, in my mind, is that their optimal use needs an entirely new system concept, from the hardware and software points of view. Actually, the operating systems or maintenance tools don't really support the 4KiB sector format, so the drive firmware emulates a 512-byte scheme. UEFI BIOS and GPT were designed to be more compatible with newer hardware and software concepts, but legacy solutions are the majority in the small personal computer world.

Regarding the issue of the original post, it could be a driver problem too: windows xp used the IDE drivers during installation. To use a fully SATA configured hard drive (i.e. in AHCI mode), special drivers were needed to provide in floppy disk (it was similar for motherboard-based RAID array configuration). In this case, to easily migrate the system, it is better to use the hard drive in IDE emulation, loosing the AHCI benefits (higher data transfer rate, HD replacement without need to power down the system).

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***