Drive Backup 10 keeps screwing up my GPT

When I bought an Apple Mac (about 2 months ago) I used Boot Camp to install Windows 7 (so I could dual-boot). Originally I'd intended to use Drive Backup to create extra FAT32 partitions that could be shared between both OS's (since both Windows and OS-X support reading and writing of FAT32). I bought DB10 because I was assured by Paragon that DB10 understands the GPT partitioning model used by Apple Macs. But I soon realised that FAT32 partitions created by DB10 were strangely invisible to the Mac's OS-X (it just sees the partitions as free space). Consequently I had to create the partitions on an external (MBR) drive. Up until this afternoon, OS-X's partition manager (iPartition) agreed with DB10 that the main (internal) Mac drive looked like this:-

Code:

PARTITION1     PARTITION2          FREESPACE1             PARTITION3             FREESPACE2
EFI (200MB)    APPLE HFS (88GB)    UNALLOCATED (128MB)    BOOTCAMP NTFS (88GB)   UNALLOCATED (287GB)

This afternoon I decided to make a copy of the HFS partition (using DB10). My hope was that the final disk would look like this:-

Code:

PARTITION1     PARTITION2          FREESPACE1             PARTITION3             PARTITION4              FREESPACE2
EFI (200MB)    APPLE HFS (88GB)    UNALLOCATED (128MB)    BOOTCAMP NTFS (88GB)   APPLE HFS COPY (88GB)   UNALLOCATED (199GB)

The operation appeared to go okay - but after I re-booted into OS-X it still shows exactly the same partition layout that it had before I started! Much more worrying though, is that DB10 is now showing these partitions:-

Code:

PARTITION1     PARTITION2            FREESPACE1             PARTITION3             PARTITION4              FREESPACE2
EFI (200MB)    UNFORMATTED (88GB)    UNALLOCATED (128MB)    BOOTCAMP NTFS (88GB)   APPLE HFS COPY (88GB)   UNALLOCATED (199GB)

Note that after copying PARTITION2, DB10 suddenly thinks that the original partition is unformatted (which it can't be because it contains OS-X which still boots). What on earth has gone wrong here? My first impression is that DB10 might have created the HFS copy - but forgot to give it a new GUID. So maybe I now have two partitions with the same GUID. Does that seem likely? Why else would it now think that a perfectly good partition is suddenly unformatted??

 

I have Drive 0;
Partition 1 Primary Boot Manager
Partition 2 Primary Windows 7 (Games)
Partition 3 Primary Windows 7 (Applications)

When booting into either Games or Applications The boot manager Hides the other 2 Partitions; Example If I boot into Games then Boot Manager and Applications Partition's are hidden.

The problem is If I Restore , Partition 3 (Win 7) then Paragon Backup Pro 10 Modifies Partition 2 (games) BCD.. adds anther boot option.. I thought the Pro version would not add or modify any other partitions..


I am looking into other products because of what it did to my BCD Store. I thought the Pro version would be a Pro version, (Pro versions would allow you to either opt out of modifying other partitions.. or not making changes.)

Thanks
Chris

 

Are you using a GPT model (GUID Partition Table) ?

When I used to use Drive Backup 8 (on a conventional PC) I often used to see the problem you described so I don't think it's anything to do with GPT. I'm pretty sure you're describing an age old problem that also used to happen with the standard MBR partition table and boot.ini. Incidentally, you can correct problems in your BCD store using bcdedit.exe.

I suspect that my problem is something different from yours.... In my case after using Drive Backup, different OS's completely disagree about what the partition table looks like. That's a fundamental (in fact, potentially catastrophic) problem. I'm very disappointed at Paragon for telling me that DB10 was safe to use with GPT and Boot Camp. If anything, the exact opposite is true.

 

SOME FURTHER INFORMATION:-

Since my last post I've deleted the fourth partition (the one copied using DB10) and I re-copied it, this time using a Mac backup utility called SuperDuper. Now when I re-boot into Windows and launch DB10, it shows me this partition table (which is surprising - though exactly what I would have expected):-

Code:

PARTITION1     PARTITION2          FREESPACE1             PARTITION3             PARTITION4              FREESPACE2
EFI (200MB)    APPLE HFS (88GB)    UNALLOCATED (128MB)    BOOTCAMP NTFS (88GB)   APPLE HFS COPY (88GB)   UNALLOCATED (199GB)

Here's the reason it's surprising:- notice that Partition2 is now being recognised again (correctly) as Apple HFS (previously, DB10 was reporting it as unformatted). To me, this suggests that there are two problems with my copy of DB10, namely:-

1) When I copy an existing partition, DB10 is duplicating the partition's ID. Obviously this can't be valid for a GPT partition table where the partition ID's are supposed to be globally unique.

2) When I create a new partition, DB10 is only updating the MBR partition table and failing to update the GPT partition table.

I've reported these issues to Paragon Support. Hopefully they'll be able to provide solutions because if they can reproduce the issues, both problems should be pretty simple to fix.