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alan9182
Advanced Member
United Kingdom
527 Posts |
 Posted - June 22 2011 : 22:09:57
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As it stands Macrium is not "stand-alone",
It needs an assist from a Partition Manager that can put a partition in any position,
and only after I have provided a "left edge" boundary for Macrium to "lean on" will it restore an image that starts where I want it to.
On 20 June 2011, 20:54:41 I was using the Boot Rescue CD to image an entire HDD that had become non-boot-able,
and had even lost access to the WinPE Recovery facility that Macrium had installed in Windows.
I was doing quite a few exciting things with my system, thinking they should be safe to do,
but depending upon the Rescue CD I had on the desk.
I also did some boring things that I "knew" were safe.
Something was not as safe as I had hoped,
but all was well until I wanted to start-up after a power down and then the only thing to give a semblance of life was the Boot Recovery CD
Exciting things that cause my pulse rate to rise and my fingers to cross are :-
Level Red :- Restoring an image to C:\ - and also to "System Reserved" now I am up from XP to Win 7
Level Amber :- Using a third party Partition Manager (but never to resize a partition with data not imaged)
Level Yellow :- Restoring a Macrium image to one of the non-system partitions
Level Green :- Restoring a Macrium image to unused space
All these things I have done many times and never had grief until two days ago,
when all I did was one or two Level Amber and quite a few Level Green.
I now suspect an incompatibility between the semi-simultaneous use of the Partition Manager whilst Macrium restored images to boundaries defined by the Partition manager.
After the Partition Manager had created a new partition as a boundary edge I probably left it running but idle after all its "Pending" operations had been completed,
and I did not start restoring until Windows Explorer could see the new partition and Macrium could see the desired boundaries of the new partition.
Similarly after Macrium had restored and created a new partition I left it running whilst launching/using the Partition Manager.
I do not think that it would have made any difference if I had closed either Macrium or the partition manager because its job had been done - everyone could see the new partition.
BUT a reboot may be needed to ensure the Registry and Restore Point monitoring files etc. get updated to recognise and change to available drive letters,
and I believe either Macrium or the Partition Manager was not fully aware of what reboot changes were pending due to the actions of the other.
I suspect that without a reboot between the use of one tool and the use of the other tool at least one of the tools may be incompatible with the other.
Hence my request that Macrium allow control of free space on BOTH sides of a partition it is restoring so that those who are unaware of such dangers do not suffer what I suffered,
and so that I do not need to be continually rebooting the P.C. to avoid a repetition.
N.B.
The reason for wanting to restore a partition to the extreme right of the HDD was to observe the effects of track seek delays when CMD.EXE running in C:\ is sending data to a file at the opposite edge.
I once found an error log had a 5% chance of a corrupt entry when CMD.EXE was running 10,000 off Reg.Exe commands and sending both stdout and stderr to the same log file.
Most things launched by CMD.EXE will never output a stdout and stderr simultaneously, but Reg.Exe does.
With 10+ years designing electronic systems I recognise a race hazard when I see one, and disc caching was an obvious possibility.
Disabling the disc caching seemed to remove the problem, (and greatly increase boot up time.)
Then I restored disc caching and got back the 5% chance of corruption.
Then I changed the log file location from C:\ to a partition near the far end of the HDD, and got a 90% error rate.
With a 90% error rate it was easy to see when changes to the BAT script succeeded in cutting 90% errors down to zero
Regards
Alan
O/S: Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate *64 SP1
Graphics: HIS ATI Radeon HD 4670 1GB GDDR3
Motherboard: ASUS M3A32-MVP DELUXE AMD 790FX
Processor: AMD Phemom 9500 Quad Core 2206 Mhz
Hard Drive: Samsung HD103SJ, 931GB, MBR, 32MB Cache
Hard Drive: WD Caviar Black, 640GB, GPT, 32MB Cache
RAM: Corsair XMS 6400 4GB (2X2GB) 800mhz
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Edited by - alan9182 on June 22 2011 22:43:14 |
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Please Allow Free space on BOTH sides of partition
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