Resized clusters. Can't boot Vista

Okay... I've now tried this:

Deleted existing partition (drive cleared)
Created new partition with Vista Install
Aborted install
Ran Vista Command Prompt
Formatted the C: partition with format /Q /A:16K
Ran chkdsk and it reported no errors, showed 16K cluster size
Booted to DD, showed 16K cluster size
Partition still has 2,048 offset

I then rebooted to the Vista DVD, selected the partition and tried to install Vista.
Same error as above: Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation.

Perhaps the Vista installation (booting) partition MUST have 4K clusters?

 

I've been digging into this for the past 2 hours and from what I've read so far that appears to be true. See the article referenced in the last sentence in my post #24.

The statement on Paragon's web site implies that perhaps if bootmgr and the boot directory were on its own partition with 4k cluster size then the rest of Vista can be on another partition with a different cluster size.

 

Paul:

On your post #22, is the picture taken of a bootsector with 4k clusters?

If it isn't then the first thing that pops out is byte 0Dh, which is the number of sectors per cluster. In your picture the byte is (08h), which corresponds to a cluster size of 8 X 512 = 4k.

For a cluster size of 16k then byte 0Dh should be (20h).

You can find information about decoding the BIOS parameter block here, about 3 or 4 screens down under "The NTFS BIOS Parameter Block".

 

Mark,

You're correct. The screenshot is of the Vista partition after DD changed the cluster size to 16K and the offset to 64. Then I read in the saved 4K sector (changes in green). The original 0Dh is 20h.

 

I just used Vista's DVD and Diskpart to clean the disk, create a new partition, NTFS with 16K clusters. No DD, no conversions. Same error.

So, even with letting Vista do all the partition setup, it doesn't seem to work with 16K clusters.

 

The other bytes that differ (are green) are the parameters for the Number of Hidden Sectors (at 01Ch - 01Dh); the Total Sectors (at 028h - 02Fh); the Starting Cluster Number for the MFT file (at 030h - 033h); and the Starting Cluster Number for the MFT Mirror file (at 038h - 03Fh). All of these make perfect sense, so I think you can conclude that DD was doing the right thing when converting from 4k to 16k clusters.

Therefore it must be a fundamental limitation of the boot code for Vista. If it is really low-level code that handles the task of booting then perhaps it wasn't coded to handle cluster sizes other than 4k.

Maybe one of us can figure out how to split out the files needed to boot Vista into a small boot partition that is formatted with 4k clusters while leaving the main Vista partition able to be converted to 16k clusters.

Do you think that if you were to move the contents of the boot directory and bootmgr to a hidden NTFS partition set to be active, and leave the rest of Vista in its own partition that it could boot this way? (I am suggesting a hidden partition so that the main Vista partition remains as the C: drive.)

Comments?

 

On the Vista/Diskpart NTFS 16K cluster setup, you get the "error" message when the disk boots even if that is all that's on the disk. No Vista files, etc. It just boots to that error message. So it appears that the error happens before it can even locate any files since it happens when there are no files.

---

I used DD to create a small (approx. 150MB) NTFS 4K cluster Primary partition (set Active) and a Primary NTFS 16K cluster partition in the remainder of the drive. Vista is currently installing. I'll post back when it's done and see what it did. I'm assuming it's putting its booting files on the Active partition. We'll see how the drive letters come out too (if it boots).

EDIT: The small partition actually defaulted to 512B not 4K.

Addition: This did not boot reboot correctly during the installation. Same error. No files were installed to the small partition (and DD showed it as "corrupt").

 

Next try...

I used Diskpart from Vista DVD to reformat the small partition with 4K clusters and reformat the big partition with 16K clusters (just be make sure).

Restarted the Vista installation on the big partition and it proceeded through the reboots successfully. Vista installed successfully.

The Vista drive letter is C: (automatically assigned) and the boot drive letter is D: (automatically assigned).


Vista's Disk Management view:


The Vista "Boot" folder is on the boot partition (this is the BCD folder):

 

Paul:

Good job! Now what happens if you hide the D: partition?

 

Still boots after hiding the "boot" partition with DD.

Here is the BCDEDIT output before the partition is hidden:

Code:

Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier              {bootmgr}
[B][COLOR="Red"]device                  partition=D:[/COLOR][/B]
description             Windows Boot Manager
locale                  en-US
inherit                 {globalsettings}
default                 {current}
displayorder            {current}
toolsdisplayorder       {memdiag}
timeout                 30

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier              {current}
device                  partition=C:
path                    \Windows\system32\winload.exe
description             Microsoft Windows Vista
locale                  en-US
inherit                 {bootloadersettings}
osdevice                partition=C:
systemroot              \Windows
resumeobject            {eb83bb41-94a1-11dc-a5df-f06177a47724}
nx                      OptIn

Here is the BCDEDIT output after the partition is hidden:

Code:

Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier              {bootmgr}
[B][COLOR="red"]device                  partition=\Device\HarddiskVolume1[/COLOR][/B]
description             Windows Boot Manager
locale                  en-US
inherit                 {globalsettings}
default                 {current}
displayorder            {current}
toolsdisplayorder       {memdiag}
timeout                 30

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier              {current}
device                  partition=C:
path                    \Windows\system32\winload.exe
description             Microsoft Windows Vista
locale                  en-US
inherit                 {bootloadersettings}
osdevice                partition=C:
systemroot              \Windows
resumeobject            {eb83bb41-94a1-11dc-a5df-f06177a47724}
nx                      OptIn

Here is Disk Management after the partition is hidden:

 

Paul:

Man, that is cool! I suppose that running with a hidden boot partition might not be a good idea because it will make it more difficult to work on the boot files while Windows is running. And it looks like the boot partition doesn't have to be very large; you only needed 30 MB.

Now to ponder how to do this without reinstalling Vista like Louis and I were trying to do to our current systems.

In my case I have three partitions on my Vista machine; one primary and two logical like this [C: pri Vista NTFS 4 kB] [logical [D: Data 16 kB][Z: Backups 4 kB]]. I wonder if I can move the boot files (the C:\Boot folder and C:\bootmgr) to a small primary partition that I would create at the end of the drive and somehow get the system to boot from there? Louis could do something similar also. Once accomplished, the main Vista partition can be resized to 16 kB clusters.

I really don't understand enough about how the BCD works to know how to modify it to boot from a different partition. From your experiment I guess the Windows installer figured that out when you installed Vista. How do you do it after the fact?

 

Mark,

I did a little more testing and had partial success. I didn't try a straight copy of the BOOT folder and \bootmgr to the new partition.

I first resized the Vista partition smaller and created a small Primary partition at the end of the drive. I set it Active and set the cluster size to 4K (DD defaulted to 512B). I then converted the Vista partition from 4K to 16K clusters. (So far, chkdsk has always found errors on the partition after the conversion.)

Vista did not like this and I could only get various boot sector boot errors. Vista would not repair it or install/setup the correct files (BOOT folder, BCD, etc.).

I deleted the boot partition with DiskPart and recreated it. Then I ran bootrec /FixBoot and bootrec /RebuildBcd. This created the files on the boot partition. Then I exited the Command Prompt and ran a Startup Repair. This created the rest of the files. Upon rebooting, Vista started. However, it hung for a long time on the "Preparing your desktop..." screen (which is odd since it was already setup) and finally errored with this:


I OK'd this error several times and then it said it need to reboot. It rebooted, hung a long time on "Preparing your desktop..." again and finally switched to a blue screen and remained there. It never got to the desktop. Several more reboots resulted in the same blue screen (no error, just a blue screen). Vista Repair says nothing is wrong, which makes sense in this case because it is booting.

I think the problem is that the partition layout has changed. Vista was on the first Active partition and now it's on a non-Active partition that's in a different "discovery" position. That's assuming that the problem isn't being caused by the 16K conversion.

-----

Still to try...

A direct copy of BOOT and bootmgr
and
Leaving the Vista partition at 4K until booting works (assuming it will) and then convert to 16K

Not tonight, though.

 

Paul:

You are really dedicated to do this much work to help others. Thanks for your efforts. I can see now that had I attempted to convert my Vista partition to 16k clusters that it would have failed, and none of the contingencies that I had planned on trying would have worked. But maybe it is possible without a reinstall like you did in post #33.

I'm a little confused by this. Wasn't Vista on a primary partition that was not active (the C: partition as shown in the figure on post #35)? Or, put another way, it used to be in the second slot in the partition table but now it's in the first slot? And the small boot partition moved from the first slot in the partition table to the third? I'm not sure exactly how you did your test. However, it does seem that the system is able to start the boot process but apparently something goes wrong later (drive letter change caused by moving partitions around)?

I think that to answer the question for my own layout I should do the experiments myself, but since the target is a production machine that I can't afford to lose at the moment I'm a little reluctant to experiment, TI backup or not. In my case Vista is already on the first primary partition (with the standard 63-sector offset) and would stay there. I would add another primary partition and attempt to move only the boot files to the new boot partition. The location of the main Vista partition would not change.

If I were to do this experiment on a non-critical system then I would try doing the following:

1. Install Vista normally to the first primary partition on a drive.
2. Test
3. Add a second small primary partition at the end of the drive
4. Copy the C:\Boot folder and the C:\bootrec file to the new partition
5. Make the new partition active
6. Get Vista to boot from the new boot partition either manually or by doing a repair with the Vista DVD
7. Delete C:\Boot and C:\bootrec when they are no longer needed

If all of this works then as a final step convert the main Vista partition to 16k clusters.

 

You're welcome.

I did the test on my "base" Vista install. I should have stated that. I did not run the test using the setup that was installed with the separate boot partition. I ran the test starting with just a Vista partition (set Active), as in a normal installation and then created the boot partition at the end of the drive. The Vista partition is in slot 1 and the boot partition is in slot 2. I did this to be able to test the change that will happen when you change the partition from which Vista is booting. If I used the other setup, I'd just be moving the boot partition and the actual Vistal partition would still be exactly the same as before (and I assume it would work). However, your computer (and others) will not be setup this way.

This is what I suspect, but there were no futher error messages. The bootup was successful. The boot partition booted, bootmgr was loaded, it found the BCD file, booted to the Vista partition and Vista started normally. So the "link" part can be recreated successfuly. It's just a matter of figuring out what's going on once Vista is running.

I assume your boot partition would be located at the end of the drive? Or would you try and put it before your Logical partitions?

This is one of the things I'm going to try. Perhaps keeping the original BCD file will allow Vista to boot properly. I don't know why, but it is about twice the size of the new one created and many of the other fields are set. That may or may not be part of the problem. I'd still have to set the boot partition to the correct one, but that's easy.

 

I would just put it at the end of the drive. In my case it would be in the third slot of the partition table and would be the second primary partition like this: [Primary 1][Logicals][Primary 2]

I spent a lot of time this morning reading posts in the VistaBootPro forum. The most common posts are along the lines of "I installed XP first and then Vista. Now that Vista is working well I want to delete the XP partition but it won't let me. How do I do this?" The standard response by the forum gurus is that since XP was installed first, the Vista boot files are in the first (XP) partition. They advise copying the boot files to the Vista partition, booting from the Vista DVD and doing a repair, and suggest that you might need to repeat the repair step twice since the first repair may only fix the non-booting problem while the second repair will fix Vista so that it can complete the boot process. I'm not sure what they are alluding to there.

This is somewhat similar to what I am trying to do (just make Vista start booting from another partition but leave the installation of Vista as-is).

 

Thanks for clarifying this.

I ran into this in this experiment. Vista Repair does not fix everything in one pass. In one case, I had to run it three times to get Vista to boot. I just kept doing it until it said it was okay. If you do the steps manually, then the repair probably isn't necessary.

I'm working on the next post. I had SUCCESS with the new test.

 

Excellent! Looking forward to reading that....

 

SUCCESS on new test... Vista created 2,048 offset partition using entire drive. Change to boot from small NTFS partition at end of drive. In this test, I have not yet converted the Vista partition to 16K clusters. I wanted to see if this worked first.

Note: I purposely used ONLY Vista programs to do this. I previously had no success getting Vista to boot from the new boot partition created with DD. I wanted to find out IF it could work first before throwing more variables into the mix.

Procedure:
Used Vista's Disk Management to Shrink partition 150MB
Left space unallocated
Booted to Vista DVD, selected Repair and then the Command Prompt
Use Diskpart to create new partition at end of drive in unallocated space
(Note: Samples below are my disk and partition numbers. Your may be different.)

Code:

diskpart <ENTER>
select disk 0 <ENTER>
create partition primary <ENTER>
select partition 2 <ENTER>

Formatted partition to use 4K clusters

Code:

format FS=NTFS LABEL="VISTABOOT" QUICK UNIT=4K <ENTER>

Set partition Active and exited Diskpart

Code:

active <ENTER>
exit <ENTER>

Ran bootrec /fixboot to set new partition's boot sector
Rebooted to Vista DVD (to have drive letters reassigned), selected to Repair
Did not let Vista automatically "repair" anything (it said it found problems, but I skipped it)
Copied boot files to the new boot partition (\BOOT folder and \bootmgr file)
Deleted \BOOT and \bootmgr files from Vista partition
Ran BCDEDIT and changed {bootmgr} partition

Code:

bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device partition=C:

Rebooted
SUCCESS!!!! --- Vista booted right up perfectly the first time


----

Now to try converting the Vista partition to 16K clusters...

 

I wonder if you convert to 16k clusters, will DD will move the starting sector offset and if so, will this will cause any problems?

 

I converted the Vista partition to 16K clusters and DD changed the offset to 64.

However, Vista booted right up, no problems. Chkdsk still reported and fixed several errors when ran on the Vista partition.

So, it seems (in this scenario, at least) the conversion was successful. Vista just needs to boot from a 4K cluster NTFS Primary partition.

 

Great job, Paul. Let's see if I can summarize what I've learned so far:

1. You cannot convert an existing Vista partition to a cluster size of 16k; after conversion it will not boot.
2. Vista will only boot from an NTFS partition with a 4k cluster size.
3. If installing Vista from scratch you can create a small boot partition with a 4k cluster size, make it active, and then install Vista to a larger partition with 16k cluster size. You can direct the Vista installer to install to the larger partition and it will automatically install the boot files to the active partition. You will end up with a Vista partition with 16k cluster size that will boot from the small partition with 4k cluster size.
4. For converting an existing installation of Vista to 16k clusters you can create a small primary NTFS partition and move the files required for booting (\bootmgr and the \Boot directory) to the small boot partition, make the partition active and make it bootable. BCD repairs will be needed to get Vista to boot properly. Then the original Vista partition can be converted to cluster sizes other than 4 kB.

Does this sound correct so far?

 

Correct in all the tests I ran.

Vista seems to only want to boot from a Vista created (or, at least, formatted) 4K NTFS Primary partition. I have not run extensive tests with DD, but every time I tried using a DD created and formatted partition, it didn't work.

Correct. If you use DD to create the partitions, use Diskpart (or Vista's Format) to reformat the boot partition.

Correct. Also, remove the \BOOT folder and the bootmgr file from the Vista partition (this may not be necessary, but I did it so Vista wouldn't find any "stray" files). The only BCD repair needed was to relink the bootmgr partition. I have only tried 16K clusters, so, for my part, it's just an assumption that other sizes would also work.

 

Good. This is about 90% of what I need to convert my Vista installation to 16k clusters. The remaining 10% involves the use of Vista Diskpart instead of DD.

Since my current partition layout was done with DD and has all of the partitions aligned on cylinder boundaries with the older 63-sector offsets, I am reluctant to use Vista's Diskpart tool on this layout. I need to find a way to do this with DD or at the least, a way to assure myself that Diskpart will not corrupt the existing partitions.

From this:
[Pri 1][Log 1][Log 2]

I will need to do this:
[Pri 1][Log 1][Log 2][Pri 2]

Which will just involve resizing the Logical 2 partition a little smaller and creating another Primary partition following it. If I do this with DD I am sure that it will conform to the existing layout and that [Pri 2] will not overlap [Logical 2]. If I do it with Diskpart, I am not sure what will happen. Will it conform to the existing 63-sector offset layout or will it create the new partition with a 2048-sector offset? And will the new partition overlap the end of [Logical 2]?

Here is how I am thinking of proceeding:

1. Using DD from the boot CD (actually, from my bootable USB hard drive ), create the new partition with 4k clusters.
2. Reboot into Vista. Use Disk Management to reformat the new partition, assuming it will do this with the default 4k cluster size. Assign a drive letter and label.
3. Copy the C:\bootmgr file and C:\Boot directories to the new partition. Rename the existing files on the C: drive as backup files just in case.
4. Run DD from Vista to check and verify partition alignments (although I doubt that the Vista format command will affect these). Make the new boot partition active.
5. Boot from the Vista DVD and drop to the command line.
6. Run bootrec /fixboot to make the new boot partition bootable.
7. Run BCDEDIT -- and here's where I'm confused...

In post # 43 you used the command

Code:

BCDEDIT /set {bootmgr} device partition=C:

when the bootmgr file was on your F: partition. Was this a typo? If not, why the C: partition as an argument? If I manually change the boot partition drive letter in Vista Disk Management (to V:, for example), do I use the new drive letter here?

Stupid Windows drive letters; they are always confusing. I'm never sure how they are assigned and at what point in the boot process they are available for use. During boot I would not think that the boot manager is even aware of drive letters. This is one area where I prefer Linux because the methods for identifying a partition in Linux are unambiguous.

Again, thank you for your time, Paul. This has been extremely helpful to me.

 

You should be able to create the partition with DD and just use Diskpart to reformat the "boot" partition. In fact, you'll have to create the partition with DD. Vista's partition tools won't let you create a Primary partition after an Extended partition group.

I doubt the partition would overlap. I don't see how that could happen. As I said before, I did not do extensive testing on the DD formatted boot partition. In the tests I did do, Vista would not install to the DD formatted partition. Since you are going to copy the files manually, this may not even be a problem. In other words, you're not using Vista installation or its repair program to setup the files so it may work with a DD NTFS 4K cluster partition.

I had to create the partition and then change the cluster size. DD defaulted to 512B clusters because the partition is so small.

I wouldn't do this. You can if you want, but I don't know what will happen if you let Vista see the boot partition before it's ready. There may be complications later. I did everything from the Vista DVD using the Command Prompt. Also, I don't know what Vista will use for the cluster size on that small a partition. It may default to 512B. I used the UNIT=4K command to force 4K clusters.

This should be okay. I copied mine to a different hard drive, but I didn't end up using or needing them.

As far as I know, reformatting the partition will not change the alignment. I'm not exactly sure how Vista sees the Active partition, but I do know that sometimes it showed the partition as Active when DD didn't. What I did was to use Diskpart to set the boot partition Active just before I ran bootrec /fixboot so that I knew it was Active at that time (remember, I was doing everything from Vista's Command Prompt booted to the Vista DVD).

See note above. Make sure the correct partition is Active, otherwise it will just write the bootsector to whichever one is Active.

No, it's not a typo.

The drive letter is meaningless to the drive letter assigned by Windows. Use the drive letter that Vista is using for the boot partition when you are booted to the Vista DVD and at the Command Prompt. That will normally be C: because Vista seems to assign C: to the Active partition on the first hard drive. In my case, C: was the boot partition, D: was my backup drive and E: was where Vista was installed. The drive letters shown by BCDEDIT are dynamic. They'll be one thing when booted to the Vista DVD and another thing when you check from your running Vista system. If you want to use the UUID values, I suppose you could, but that's too many numbers for me.

You're welcome. And let me thank you again for your help. It's much appreciated too.

 

OK, that makes sense. Then how about using the following:

Code:

BCDEDIT /set {bootmgr} device boot

Doing it this way will cause the boot manager to look into the partition that the PC just booted from for the boot files, won't it?

And yes, I hate using UUIDs too. Kubuntu uses them in its GRUB setup and I always go back and change them to the standard /dev/sdx notation so that a human can look at the /boot/grub/menu.lst file and understand what's going on.