Tripredacus

Shutdown and unplugged the XP disk. Was able to boot into the Win7 and the partitions are all the same as before. Back in XP, Changing to the Microsoft driver instead of Intel for the PCI IDE controller doesn't change how the disk is seen. There is no newer storage driver for this board, I installed the latest chipset and it says everything was up to date. This board is a SFF board, it doesn't support RAID, so there is no IRST for it. I can try to install an old version to see if it matters. It does seem right now that this XP install doesn't see the disk properly because of drivers. PS: for reference. This PC has 2 disks in it. A 160GB with XP on it, and the 3TB with Win7 32bit on it. The 3TB was not used as a secondary disk in a different Win7 system. Win7 32bit is installed on to the 1.8GB partition. Still want me to try that TinyHexer from within XP? For older OSes like 2000 or NT4, I do not think I have any hardware that support that OS and also have SATA ports.

You can't rebuild that array now because you have changed the data on one of the disks. Usually in the case of a failed mirror, I would ghost (sector copy) one of the drives to a blank disk of the same size. Then erase both of the original HDDs, and recreate the mirror. Then ghost the backup drive to the raid array. But you say "the recovery utility" which makes me thing you didn't do a repair of the existing installation. Usually the case for IRST is that you can't create the mirror after the fact, say using 1 blank disk, because that is a feature not in "cheap" desktop boards, but more a feature in more expensive controllers. Some do apparently have the ability to do it, but typically the IRST will erase your FAT when it makes the mirror. You could use the outlined step from last paragraph to get your OS onto the RAID, but you would need the storage driver in your OS. You can experiment on getting that to work by changing the SATA mode in the BIOS to RAID and then boot your single disk. If it can boot, then the image should work on an actual array. I can't say about your Office key. A pre-install Office doesn't have a product key only in the software. The only reason it would be there is if you put it there. It should be on a COA on the machine, or on your original disk packaging that came with the computer.

I have Win 98FE with 768MB RAM and a 256MB video card. The OS is modified but I do not believe it has a RAM patch installed.

Last bits from Win7 testing. How Explorer sees the partition: Diskpart info: Chkdsk results: Fragmenting worked, Windows defrag analyze and defragmenter worked without errors. Also no errors, warning or info relating to the disk in Event Viewer at all. Will work on putting XP on this (or something) and see how that likes the disk. Windows XP Pro SP3 x86 on same hardware. D410PT. BTW SATA mode in BIOS is set to IDE, as it was for the Win7 testing. There is definately a problem here, so I'll presume I get to run some other tests. XP detects the disk alright, but the volume it shows is 764GB, which is not a size of either partition on the disk, nor the unallocated: It does not show a file system in Disk Management. If you try to open it from Explorer, it says it is not formatted. EDIT: The Size of D: it sees being 746.52GB "partition" is a partition that doesn't exist. BUT this size is the same size you can see as unallocated in a previous screenshot. This is the amount of space that would be unallocated past the 2.2TB boundary. Note that this PC does not see the 1.8TB partition at all.

I was wondering if behaviours would be different if there was more than 2.2TB data total on the disk, with the partitions/volumes laid out like it is. That is why I made the comment about adding more to C: Would it be enough to just put this disk as a secondary on an XP system, or do you have the same requirement that the OS be booted from it?

I have copied some files and then did a compare to the same on C: and it is the same. There is one difference, a recycler is on the D: drive. If I should put more files on either, LMK. I was using a 167GB set. I am running Chkdsk now.

I put the .cmd in the image, or deploy it after it but before the first reboot, then just put the path to the .cmd in the XML.

I am working to fill that partition with the same data also put onto the main partition so that I can do a diff on it for comparison reasons. It is taking a long time to copy the files. I've only got 170GB onto it so far. So it might be a couple of days before I can get to the other tests.

Here is the Drive D in explorer. Now I am seeing what you are getting at here...

I have a drive D: in Explorer now. If I try to open it, it asks to format.

Regular testing, without the use of grub or other tools. WinPE 3.0 x86 and Windows 7 Pro SP1 32-bit. Only using Diskpart for disk manipulation. Example where I create 1 14GB partition for the OS, then "remainder" for data. The second partition still ends within the 2.2TB boundary. Unallocated space cannot be manipulated. The same instance, Diskpart cannot create a partition here, the reasons it gives do not match with the current situation: Creating a smaller partition for the OS (or shrinking a 2.2TB partition) results in a divider between the usable Unallocated space and the not usable, in Disk Management. You can create a partition with Diskpart, only in the 195.31GB portion of the screenshot, or create new Simple volume with Diskmgmt, but the same issue with the 746.52GB Unallocated portion as before. However, there is this situation now with this testing environment. I can boot Windows 7 on a 2.2TB partition created with Diskpart, but not if created by Grub4DOS. I can work on this again next week starting Monday. If you want me to do any tests on the disk after being manipulated with Diskpart vs with Grub, I should be able to do that also.

Diskpart in WinPE 4, 5 and 10 will automatically convert the 3TB disk to GPT if not initialized. It does this after just these commands: sel disk 0 clean create part pri size=300 Or any size, it doesn't matter. With a smaller disk, it does not convert to GPT. I have now used WinPE 3.0 x86. Diskpart there lets you create a partition without automatically converting the disk. I have also changed to an older motherboard, the Intel D410PT with 2GB RAM. Because you said this is for OS that doesn't support GPT, then I can test with Windows 7 Pro SP1 x86, which does not support GPT or EFI booting. I cleaned the disk in diskpart in WinPE 3, then reboot into DOS and run the Grub commands from before. I then boot back into WinPE 3 and I check with diskpart and the two partitions are there and Part 1 is active. Format that part with NTFS and then apply the Windows 7 Pro SP1 32bit image onto it. What I get is the flashing cursor. I have still not formatted the second partition. I will now repeat the test but leave out creating the second partition in grub to see if the OS will boot.

It is not booting, or the motherboard is not seeing the volume as being bootable, so it doesn't even attempt it. I have tried different images, my regular Win7 images are designed to have the recovery partition and do not normally boot on a single partition, or where the boot volume is on the first partition. However, my System Builder images are, but they do not boot either. When using my normal process, on a 3+ TB disk (in the past) there would end up having a partially formatted disk, the OS would boot but there would be an unallocated portion "at the end" in Disk Management that wouldn't let you do anything. Currently, that is not even working because Diskpart is converting the disk to GPT automatically. This means the usual Win7 deployment will fail entirely. My DOS image fails to deploy also. It may be due to this version of PE being an issue. Have an older one I will try using for deployment instead.

The error you see, the "subsystem needed" indicates you are using the wrong architecture version of imagex.exe for your PE. It means you have a 32bit WinPE and your imagex.exe is 64bit, or your WinPE is 64bit and your imagex.exe is 32bit.

I could have rechecked it with RPM after cleaning the disk in diskpart but did not. Alas, Windows 7 64bit doesn't even boot, with and without BCDboot being used. Meaning, the board boots directly into the BIOS/Setup, no errors from the OS itself. I have attached the disk into from Diskpart after running the commands posted above in Grub. Drive letter was N in the information due to a script that is run in my PE to change the C drive to N drive. You see I change it later on after formatting, and before I imaged that partition. diskpart_info.txt

the command is like so: cat --hex--skip=446 (hd1)+1 an error you've made in the past, however I found the correction here: http://reboot.pro/topic/18611-vista-wont-boot-error-17-file-not-found/#entry173322 Of course, no one is immune from the scourge of typos: PS: the HDD shows as Disk 2 (or Disk 1) because my DOS is on a USB key. There was something up with how Fdisk deleted the partitions, which is why it was showing up as 782GB or so. When I booted into WinPE, Diskpart also showed no partitions and with that ~782GB as free space. I ran the CLEAN command and it returned to the 2700GB that is expected. I will go about putting both Windows 7 Pro 64bit and 32bit on this disk, but it may be a bit of time because I may need to add a storage driver.

The delay to upload these images was making me nuts. Here is how Ranish Partition Manager sees this disk: I had removed the existing partition with FDisk. I am not sure what to put into these fields to make the partition you want.

Is it required to "install" an OS or can I just lay one onto it using DISM or Imagex? I am going to be mainly limited by the board I have available for doing the testing, which is currently going to be in the current 100 series (150/250) Intel Chipset. So if I use existing images, I may be able to boot Windows 7 or Windows 10. If I am to install an OS using the setup media, I can install any Windows version. If the hardware being used is a problem, I may be able to borrow an older (like 3 years or so) chipset board for testing. I will look into this on Monday, and will see if I can get the sector count of the disk. For which tools to use, my primarily operating environments are WinPE v10 x64 or DOS 7.10. If something needs to be done in Windows then I would likely use Windows 7 to do it.

I have a 3TB Seagate Barracuda XT, ST33000651AS. If you want, and if this is the correct type of disk, I can do any specific testing on it if you provide the commands I should use.

Hey Jan, MSFT = Microsoft, we are MSFN

There is certainly a difference. I am using Firefox 55 on Windows 7. It shows like this: Here it is with 400% zoom: The IPB CSS fails validation. Would it kill them to fix their syntax errors before pushing new software updates?

What is the hardware required? A 4TB+ disk or virtual disk? Or do you think such testing should only be performed on a single physical disk and not on RAID arrays or VM disks?

Locking this thread. Use the pinned thread for discussion on this topic. http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/176950-msfn-will-be-taken-offline-12-august-2017/

Yes, Xper had been wanting to sell the site, but I do not know of any details regarding price or if anyone was interested or what.

It is a longstanding issue and Xper has said it is not only the financial burden but also there is no time he has to put into the forum. You can see from this post how long it has been known publicly about this: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/162548-multiple-messenger-recipients/?do=findComment&comment=1044695