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copy eisa partition to new drive
I got a new hard drive for my Dimension 2400, and used Copy Commander to copy both the EISA partition and the NTFS partition with WinXP to from the old drive to the new drive. I know that it successfully copied the contents of both partitions because if I boot from a Linux live CD and mount the EISA partition I see a reasonable list of files there.
When I boot off the new hard disk, it takes a very, very long time for the BIOS to do its thing, and then I get the "Press F1 to Continue, F2 to run Setup Utility" message. When I press F2, I go into BIOS setup and everything looks fine. On next boot, the same thing happens.
However, if I attach the old drive as a slave, the boot process happens very nicely and quickly, presumably because the EISA partition on the old drive tells the BIOS what it needs to know. Also, when I go into the WinXP Disk Management tool and look at the partitions on the two disks, the EISA partition on the old disk is identified as an EISA Configuration partition, while the one on the new disk is just a FAT partition.
I see that there is a utility for Dell servers called the Resource Configuration Utility or EISA Configuration Utility which can be downloaded and run to handle this sort of situation. I don't see any such tool for the Dimension series. Is there any way to rebuild the EISA partition to match a hardware change?
(I saw stuff about the utility for servers at http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/dsn/en/document?c=us&cs=19&docid=B2ED888E1BBA454981099FC0B8D7116E&journalid=6F6A7274553B11DBA6B3F13EC484CB34&l=en&s=dhs )
Thanks for any insights.
When I boot off the new hard disk, it takes a very, very long time for the BIOS to do its thing, and then I get the "Press F1 to Continue, F2 to run Setup Utility" message. When I press F2, I go into BIOS setup and everything looks fine. On next boot, the same thing happens.
However, if I attach the old drive as a slave, the boot process happens very nicely and quickly, presumably because the EISA partition on the old drive tells the BIOS what it needs to know. Also, when I go into the WinXP Disk Management tool and look at the partitions on the two disks, the EISA partition on the old disk is identified as an EISA Configuration partition, while the one on the new disk is just a FAT partition.
I see that there is a utility for Dell servers called the Resource Configuration Utility or EISA Configuration Utility which can be downloaded and run to handle this sort of situation. I don't see any such tool for the Dimension series. Is there any way to rebuild the EISA partition to match a hardware change?
(I saw stuff about the utility for servers at http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/dsn/en/document?c=us&cs=19&docid=B2ED888E1BBA454981099FC0B8D7116E&journalid=6F6A7274553B11DBA6B3F13EC484CB34&l=en&s=dhs )
Thanks for any insights.
ejn63
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October 6th, 2006 21:00
gustavo24
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October 7th, 2006 00:00
dg1261
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October 7th, 2006 07:00
gustavo24
4 Posts
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October 7th, 2006 13:00
How is the partition table entry masked?
I notice that when I try to use GNU parted (booting from a Linux live CD), to copy the utility partition from the old drive to the new drive, parted is unhappy with what it finds, and reports:
Warning: File system doesn't have expected sizes for Windows to like it.
Cluster size is 2k (0k expected); number of clusters is 16009 (63666 expected);
size of FATs is 63 sectors (249 expected).
Is there any sort of utility that can be used to copy the utility partition onto the new drive?
You ( dg1261 ) say that "many disk utilities" misinterpret the partition table entry.
Is there one (or more) that you recommend which can successfully interpret the partition table entry and make use of it?
Thanks.
dg1261
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October 7th, 2006 17:00
gustavo24
4 Posts
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October 8th, 2006 01:00
Your website is very helpful!