need recovery help - drive letters mixed & partitioning?

Hi,

My primary OS drive has been flaky the last 11 days and I bought a bigger drive to replace it.

I currently have 2 drives. Drive 1 contains all my OS and data and is partitioned into C: and D: Drive 2 is used for backup and currently called H:

When installing my new replacement drive, I would like to create 3 partitions: C, D, E where C and D are the same size as before and E is for a special purpose.

When I boot in the recovery disk, C: is shown as expected, but D: is now the full drive 2 and the orginal "D" is now called E:.

Two questions:
1) I forgot how best to partition the new drive - don't see that functionality in TI. I probably have an old WD disk utilities that would work- any suggestions?
2) If the backup drive 2 is now showing up with a name of D, how will I be able to proceed in recovery? Wouldn't it overwrite itself?

Thank you for your help!!!

Stephen

 

Hi Stephen,

The different letters of the drives are due to the fact that TI on the Rescue CD is Linux. There won't be any problem as long as you select the correct drive for the operations from Linux TI, regardless of the letter displayed. Giving every drive a meaningful name in the first place will help.

To add the E partition to the new larger drive without the use of special partitioning software, create a whole disk image (containing C and D) and restore it to the blank replacement drive (tick the checkbox next to Drive 1 upon imaging and restoring). Then use the Windows Disk Management tool to create a new partition in the unallocated additional space and format it.

Come back if you need more details.

 

Hi - thank you. and, yes, I could use more details.

to recap
I created all of my backups using TI and backed up drive C: and D: into a single image (with daily incrementals).

I now want to put C: and D: on a new drive that will have partitions C: D: and E:. However, the recovery boots up showing my drive H: as being D:. That is, when I boot up with the new drive I'll have C: D: E: F: In this situation, D: is supposed to be H and E: should be D and F should be E:.

From what I understand you are saying, that I should not worry about this? And, that TI will somehow automatically figure out that E is really D and not try to write to the wrong partition?

First question:
I'm not sure how to select the "correct" drives during restore as all but one are named incorrectly and the backup image contains data from two drives.

Next question:
I don't understand the description of partitioning. I've never created a partition within windows before - that's always been a pre-boot thing as far as i remember. What am I missing here? When you say "create a whole disk image containing C and D" are you suggesting I don't partition the new drive before doing the restore and that somehow TI will do it for me?

Sorry I'm not following this very well. I appreciate your patience and help.

Stephen

 

Hi again Stephen, you are welcome,

As long as you are able to tell which drive is which to select the one you want, you are OK. Forget the letters. You may click on the (+) in front of the drive's name to see it's contents and identify it. Better still, go into My Computer, right-click each drive in turn and click Rename to give it a meaningful name. But you shall have to recreate the image to see the new drive names inside the image.

[Edit, to be more specific: You don't need to partition or format the new drive.] After you restore the whole disk image to the new blank drive (installed as Master in place of the old one), the new drive will be partitioned, formatted and will contain all data copied from the original. The new drive will be in working order but being larger than the orginal, the additional space will be unallocated. Since you want to keep C and D the same size as original, all you have to do is create E in this unallocated additional space.

So, the whole process would look like this. Replace the already imaged (!) old disk with the blank new drive jumpered as Master (IDE/ATA only), boot from the Rescue CD, perform the whole disk restore (the image should be stored on a third drive or DVDs), retrieve the CD and exit TI. The computer should reboot from the new drive into Windows. Now click Start, Programs, Administrative Tools, Disk Management an you will see a section labeled Unallocated on the lower right. Rigt-click on that section and select Create New Partition (or something to that effect), Extended, then right click on it again and select Format, NTFS (assuming Windows XP). When formatted, exit the tool and in My Computer verify that you now have partitions C, D and E on the new disk.

Hope someone will chip in if I forgot something.

 

Perhaps you might want to add to add my link below ("Assign unique drive letters") to your reading materials. bvolk mentioned this need for renaming but my html might provide a little more detail.

 

Thank you for your help!!!!

Everything you described worked fine and I am mostly up and going (just a few more issues concerning the restored data).

Thanks again - I am very grateful!