I certainly think you have studied the problem thoroughly. You might have an easier time, however, if your version of Ghost can "clone" the drive. In this process the disk is copied as an image directly to the new drive, but the cloning process usually allows you to expand the information from the old drive onto the new one. In this way you have exactly the same partitions as before except that they have been expanded proportionally to take up the entirety of the new drive. Your diagnostic partition should work just as it did before you switched the drive. Or, you can just clone the existing drive into exactly the same size as the old drive, but use Partition Magic to expand the C drive to occupy the remainder of the disk.
If you want you can check to see if Ghost will adjust the diagnostic partition to be the same size as before since there is no reason to make it larger. Given that it is only about 32 MB in the first place I wouldn't think that any problem would result from making it larger, however.
I like your suggestion to use Norton Ghost. I didn't realize my Ghost 2003 version would clone.
Do I need to do anything to the new drive before cloning? Specifically, can Ghost see the drive if it is completely blank as it came from the factory, wthh no partitions?
Also, you may be able to answer another question I have, now that I have searched and studied some more.
Cloning with Gost makes this a moot point, but I would like to know how the original drive is partitioned. Is it:
1. A Primary partition, 31.35GB, formated FAT(16), hidden from Windows, with Diagnostic Utilities in it
2. A Primary partition, 39,166.3GB, formated NTFS (the C: drive), With Windows in it
3. A Primary partition, 7.8GB, Unallocated, with nothing in it
And, finally, was number 3 above where recovery software once resided? 7.8 GB seem too small to hold anything except a launcher for software located elsewhere.
As you can tell, I am in a LEARN mode and it is a steep climb.
What you get on a Dimension 2400 depends upon when you purchased it. The Dimension 2400 I bought in November, 2003, came with a 40 GB hard drive with two partitions; a small 32 MB FAT 16 partition for the Utilities, and a 39 GB partition formatted as NTFS to hold the C drive. The Master Boot Record (MBR) was set up to default to the second, NTFS partition, in order to boot into Windows. If you purchased your Dimension 2400 sometime after 16 July, 2004, you might also have a third, FAT32, partition that holds the image for Dell PC Restore. If you have that configuration you can tell by the sudden appearance of a blue bar at the top of the screen immediately following POST. The blue bar is an indication that you have the special MBR required to run the PC Restore program. Since you state that you found a 7.8 GB partition that seems to have nothing in it, I imagine that you have one of the machines that contains PC restore. That third partition is normally set to a value that prevents you from examining it with something like Windows Explorer. If you would like to study this in more detail, Mr. Dan Goodell has a paper on the web that should interest you: Inside the Dell PC Restore Partition.
Your cloning tool does not require you to do anything to the new drive. The contents of the drive you are cloning will replace everything on the new drive whether or not you have formatted it.
I'm afraid I don't understand why EZ-Drive should be on your 40 GB drive. Isn't that an overlay for machines that have size limits on the drive? The Dimension 2400 easily handles any size IDE drive on the market as it has 48 bit LBA support in the BIOS. Additionally, the version of Windows XP that shipped with the D2400 incorporated Service Pack 1, so the OS should also have been able to handle 48 bit LBA. What is really strange to me, however, is that a 40 GB drive would have been ok even if neither the BIOS or the OS could handle 48 bit LBA. So at this point, you are not the only one who is puzzled.
If your diagnosis is correct, the only way you cure this problem is with a clean installation from the installation CDs. If the EZ-Drive you are describing is a dynamic disk overlay (DDO), it must load from the initial sectors so that the overlay code is substituted for the BIOS code during the boot phase. Many DDO programs have their own translation scheme for the layout of the sector information, so while using something like FIXMBR may get rid of the overlay load, the standard BIOS code might not translate things in a way that allows you to retain your data.
I am going to take EZ-Drive off the system. The very worst that can happen is I would have to restore from the Ghost image I made.
Incidentally, when I used WD Lifeguard Tools to set up my new 160GB drive, it asked me to confirm that I had Windows XP SP1, twice. It notified me that if I was unsure, to stop the installation and find out, because if I didn't have SP1 I would have to start the install all over again.
What I suspect there is that If I did not have SP1 installed it was going to put a DDO on the new drive, and maybe on the old drive too. But, it would not have been EZ-Drive, because that is not on the Tools floppy.
So, I'm off to either correct the DDO/partitioning software problem, or use it the wa6y it is presently configured.
jackshack
6.4K Posts
0
August 10th, 2009 13:00
I certainly think you have studied the problem thoroughly. You might have an easier time, however, if your version of Ghost can "clone" the drive. In this process the disk is copied as an image directly to the new drive, but the cloning process usually allows you to expand the information from the old drive onto the new one. In this way you have exactly the same partitions as before except that they have been expanded proportionally to take up the entirety of the new drive. Your diagnostic partition should work just as it did before you switched the drive. Or, you can just clone the existing drive into exactly the same size as the old drive, but use Partition Magic to expand the C drive to occupy the remainder of the disk.
If you want you can check to see if Ghost will adjust the diagnostic partition to be the same size as before since there is no reason to make it larger. Given that it is only about 32 MB in the first place I wouldn't think that any problem would result from making it larger, however.
UncleTime
9 Posts
0
August 12th, 2009 10:00
Thank you for the reply, JackShack.
I like your suggestion to use Norton Ghost. I didn't realize my Ghost 2003 version would clone.
Do I need to do anything to the new drive before cloning? Specifically, can Ghost see the drive if it is completely blank as it came from the factory, wthh no partitions?
Also, you may be able to answer another question I have, now that I have searched and studied some more.
Cloning with Gost makes this a moot point, but I would like to know how the original drive is partitioned. Is it:
1. A Primary partition, 31.35GB, formated FAT(16), hidden from Windows, with Diagnostic Utilities in it
2. A Primary partition, 39,166.3GB, formated NTFS (the C: drive), With Windows in it
3. A Primary partition, 7.8GB, Unallocated, with nothing in it
And, finally, was number 3 above where recovery software once resided? 7.8 GB seem too small to hold anything except a launcher for software located elsewhere.
As you can tell, I am in a LEARN mode and it is a steep climb.
jackshack
6.4K Posts
0
August 12th, 2009 10:00
What you get on a Dimension 2400 depends upon when you purchased it. The Dimension 2400 I bought in November, 2003, came with a 40 GB hard drive with two partitions; a small 32 MB FAT 16 partition for the Utilities, and a 39 GB partition formatted as NTFS to hold the C drive. The Master Boot Record (MBR) was set up to default to the second, NTFS partition, in order to boot into Windows. If you purchased your Dimension 2400 sometime after 16 July, 2004, you might also have a third, FAT32, partition that holds the image for Dell PC Restore. If you have that configuration you can tell by the sudden appearance of a blue bar at the top of the screen immediately following POST. The blue bar is an indication that you have the special MBR required to run the PC Restore program. Since you state that you found a 7.8 GB partition that seems to have nothing in it, I imagine that you have one of the machines that contains PC restore. That third partition is normally set to a value that prevents you from examining it with something like Windows Explorer. If you would like to study this in more detail, Mr. Dan Goodell has a paper on the web that should interest you: Inside the Dell PC Restore Partition.
Your cloning tool does not require you to do anything to the new drive. The contents of the drive you are cloning will replace everything on the new drive whether or not you have formatted it.
jackshack
6.4K Posts
0
August 16th, 2009 21:00
I'm afraid I don't understand why EZ-Drive should be on your 40 GB drive. Isn't that an overlay for machines that have size limits on the drive? The Dimension 2400 easily handles any size IDE drive on the market as it has 48 bit LBA support in the BIOS. Additionally, the version of Windows XP that shipped with the D2400 incorporated Service Pack 1, so the OS should also have been able to handle 48 bit LBA. What is really strange to me, however, is that a 40 GB drive would have been ok even if neither the BIOS or the OS could handle 48 bit LBA. So at this point, you are not the only one who is puzzled.
If your diagnosis is correct, the only way you cure this problem is with a clean installation from the installation CDs. If the EZ-Drive you are describing is a dynamic disk overlay (DDO), it must load from the initial sectors so that the overlay code is substituted for the BIOS code during the boot phase. Many DDO programs have their own translation scheme for the layout of the sector information, so while using something like FIXMBR may get rid of the overlay load, the standard BIOS code might not translate things in a way that allows you to retain your data.
UncleTime
9 Posts
0
August 17th, 2009 08:00
Thanks JackShack.
Thanks JackShack
You pretty much confirmed my suspicions.
I am going to take EZ-Drive off the system. The very worst that can happen is I would have to restore from the Ghost image I made.
Incidentally, when I used WD Lifeguard Tools to set up my new 160GB drive, it asked me to confirm that I had Windows XP SP1, twice. It notified me that if I was unsure, to stop the installation and find out, because if I didn't have SP1 I would have to start the install all over again.
What I suspect there is that If I did not have SP1 installed it was going to put a DDO on the new drive, and maybe on the old drive too. But, it would not have been EZ-Drive, because that is not on the Tools floppy.
So, I'm off to either correct the DDO/partitioning software problem, or use it the wa6y it is presently configured.
Thanks much for your replies. They helped lots.
UncleTime