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cdavis
Starting Member
USA
1 Posts |
 Posted - December 18 2014 : 19:33:00
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I love your product, but there's one thing missing that has been very distressing to me. I have an external 3TB NTFS GPT drive, divided into two partitions, that serves as my backup drive. For a reason not yet known, the first boot sector (NTFS now stores a second copy) sometimes goes bad. Google as I might, it has been difficult to find a way to backup, restore, or repair these. Chkdsk has not been able to fix the problem.
It seemed very natural to me that if I am imaging a drive, I *should* be able to image/backup important regions of the drive, like the boot sectors. The only alternative I see at the moment is to use cryptic open source apps, or to pay $50-$70 USD for a partition application. That seems extreme overkill, and I'm really surprised that you haven't offered such features in your imaging application.
Please consider such features in a future release.
Thanks!
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john.p
Moderator
887 Posts |
Posted - December 19 2014 : 09:34:13
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Hi,
Unlike an MBR disk, a GPT disk doesn't have a boot sector*, just a table of partitions. The boot code is located in the FAT32 EFI System partition instead (unlike the MBR code located in sector 0).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table
There is a backup table at the end of the disk and this can be used to reconstruct the primary table.
The fixgpt utility will do this for you, it takes the disk ID (as reported in disk management / disk part, as a the first parameter).
http://updates.macrium.com/reflect/utilities/fixgpt.exe
Note: You should only be using fixgpt as a last resort. You should first identify the cause of your GPT corruptions. It is likely to be causing hidden corruption to your data.
Note 2: NFTS plays no part in this; NTFS is a filesystem that is only responsible for data within a partition.
*Actually it does have a vestigial MBR table to ensure that tools that don't understand GPT don't miss-interpret the disk.
Kind Regards
John - Macrium Support |
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Backup/Restore Boot Sectors
