Paragon Alignment Tool 2.0...

Discussion in 'Paragon Partition Manager Product Line' started by Christ0pher, Apr 21, 2010.

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  1. Barcath

    Barcath Registered Member

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    I really appreciate your efforts here! Alas, it didn't work on my system--errored out right away (I think because there is a space in my user name, so one of the first things it tried to do was misparsed: "C:\Users\John.exe is missing" is the first line on the console display when I run AddPATtoHDMinVXP.cmd as admin).

    I do wonder why Paragon does not supply such a disk themselves, or a tool to robustly create one. You shouldn't be asked to spend your time making their product work properly across a wide range of systems--too big a job for you, notwithstanding your generosity.

    OTOH, this PAT software's being temporarily free is a nice gift from Paragon, so I am not about to complain. It would just seem to be in Paragon's own interest though--I'd think it'd be extremely common to want to realign the system partition.
     
    Last edited: Jun 8, 2010
  2. Barcath

    Barcath Registered Member

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  3. MassiveOverkill

    MassiveOverkill Registered Member

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    My co-worker has succesfully partition-aligned volumes using another machine as host to align slave disks. I'm trying to build a USB-boot drive that has the Paragon WinPE image on it.

    I had to modify the batch file you all made in order to get it to work.
     
  4. Barcath

    Barcath Registered Member

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    Given that WinPE is free, and that until June 30, Paragon Alignment Tool 2.0 is free, would it be permissible for someone to (until June 30) publicly post a RapidShare.com or HotFile.com link to a working ISO of WinPE with PAT 2.0 capability?

    Or is a direct Paragon solution forthcoming?
     
  5. SIW2

    SIW2 Registered Member

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    Only Paragon can do that, because it is their program .

    Unfortunately, as a commercial concern they have to pay a license to MS for WinPe - so they can't give it away.

    You are free to make your own - it is quite simple .



     
  6. Boyfriend

    Boyfriend Registered Member

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    @SIW2 Thanks for HDMaddPAT. I made a WinPE CD and was able to successfully realign my system drive (Windows 7 x64). In Windows, it always failed.
     
  7. SIW2

    SIW2 Registered Member

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    Hi Boyfriend,

    Thanks for the response.

    Glad it worked for you.

    That appears to confirm the issue is with the "boot time" mode.



     
  8. Barcath

    Barcath Registered Member

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    Presumably, once Windows relies on the drive, it cannot be locked for exclusive use by PAT 2.0 (or at least PAT can't figure out how to do it). I'm a bit surprised they didn't take this into account before releasing the tool, since the boot mode still boots Windows.

    WinPE is indeed easy--but only after one spends the considerable time to figure out how exactly to do it. (The cookbook recipes for doing it typically assume such tacit knowledge.)
     
  9. SIW2

    SIW2 Registered Member

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    PAT flips into " boot time " to get access to the drive.

    It works for most systems, but there's something about it that means it doesn't actually do the realignment on a few systems.

    Not sure what that is , but I am sure Moscow team is working on it.



     
  10. Barcath

    Barcath Registered Member

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    I sent my log files to support--I hope that offers some minor help.

    In the meantime, it's unfortunately a better use of my time to do other things until the problem is fixed, rather than work on getting WinPE to work after some quickie, low-effort attempts failed.

    Thanks for especially your efforts, SIW2--I think your suggestions worked well for a lot of people.
     
  11. MassiveOverkill

    MassiveOverkill Registered Member

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    I succesfully made a WinPE USB boot drive which worked fine on my Win 7 boxes, but would not work on my XP box. I succesfully aligned a 1 TB disk that was 60% full. It set the offset at 2 megs instead of 1, which is fine by me since it's still aligned.

    I'll probably have to make a seperate USB boot for XP setups only.

    I still cannot align my XP OS drive though, even using the USB boot setup on my other box, slaving the XP disk (I'm not really slaving as it's SATA but you should get the point).

    I see alot of promise for this product, just needs a little more time/development to polish it. It's amazing Acronis, which is a much bigger company couldn't come up with this solution.

    I've tried a number of different tools to try to partition-align disks with data already on them and so far, this looks the most promising.
     
  12. SIW2

    SIW2 Registered Member

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    Hi Massive,

    Apart from putting it on a usb stick , did you make any adjustments to the HDMaddPAT.cmd?

    Any feedback on that would be useful.



    Did the usb winpe 3 boot up ok on your XP , but PAT didn't complete the alignment?

    If the WinPe 3 usb couldn't boot up properly, there is a known issue with the pe3 ahci.sys and some machines.



     
  13. MassiveOverkill

    MassiveOverkill Registered Member

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    Some of the changes were just for ease of use to install just the PA tool, others seemed to be minor errors:

    Original batch:

    :makeparfiles

    md "%btwdrive%\PARFILES
    md "%btwdrive%\PARFILES\sources
    md "%btwdrive%\parmount
    REM REMREMREMREMset parafiles="%btwdrive%\PARFILES

    My changes:

    :makeparfiles

    if not exist "%btwdrive%\PARFILES" md "%btwdrive%\PARFILES
    if not exist "%btwdrive%\PARFILES\sources" md "%btwdrive%\PARFILES\sources"
    if not exist "%btwdrive%\parmount" md "%btwdrive%\parmount"
    set parafiles="%btwdrive%\PARFILES"

    Original batch:

    REM ------------------------------
    REM ask if add HDM10
    REM ------------------------------

    My changes:

    goto getAT

    REM ------------------------------
    REM ask if add HDM10
    REM ------------------------------


    Original batch:

    :makewim
    mode con lines=5 cols=100

    bin\imagex /capture "%btwdrive%\parmount" "%btwdrive%\PARFILES\sources\boot.wim" "ParWinpe" /boot /compress max

    REM ------------------------------
    REM Ask if make iso
    REM ------------------------------

    My changes:

    :makewim
    mode con lines=5 cols=100

    bin\imagex /capture "%btwdrive%\parmount" "%btwdrive%\PARFILES\sources\boot.wim" "ParWinpe" /boot /compress max

    ECHO.
    ECHO NOW GOING TO LOCATION OF BOOT.WIM

    EXPLORER %btwdrive%\PARFILES\sources

    GOTO EXITLINE

    REM ------------------------------
    REM Ask if make iso
    REM ------------------------------




    Once I had the Boot.wim, it was easy from there.

    I could not get the USB drive to boot on my XP machine, probably because of the disk order. I made the USB boot on my Win7 machine. It could be the AHCI thing as well. I got the:

    File: \Boot\BCD
    Status: 0xc000000e
    error.

    I downloaded EasyBCDEdit, and this is the config that works on my Win7 machines, but doesn't work on my XP machine:

    Windows Boot Manager
    --------------------
    identifier {9dea862c-5cdd-4e70-acc1-f32b344d4795}
    description Windows Boot Manager
    locale en-US
    inherit {7ea2e1ac-2e61-4728-aaa3-896d9d0a9f0e}
    default {7619dcc9-fafe-11d9-b411-000476eba25f}
    displayorder {7619dcc9-fafe-11d9-b411-000476eba25f}
    toolsdisplayorder {b2721d73-1db4-4c62-bf78-c548a880142d}
    timeout 30

    Windows Boot Loader
    -------------------
    identifier {7619dcc9-fafe-11d9-b411-000476eba25f}
    device ramdisk=[boot]\sources\boot.wim,{7619dcc8-fafe-11d9-b411-000476eba25f}
    path \windows\system32\boot\winload.exe
    description Windows Setup
    locale en-US
    inherit {6efb52bf-1766-41db-a6b3-0ee5eff72bd7}
    osdevice ramdisk=[boot]\sources\boot.wim,{7619dcc8-fafe-11d9-b411-000476eba25f}
    systemroot \windows
    detecthal Yes
    winpe Yes
    ems Yes


    The other thing is that I previously had Windows Steady State installed on my XP machine. I uninstalled it, but that doesn't mean that there's some crap still stuck on there that PAT can't move, causing the alignment to fail. I also tried removing my System Restore files by turning it off.
     
  14. SIW2

    SIW2 Registered Member

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    Thanks for the feedback massive.

    If you just say no when asked if you want to make an .iso, HDMaddPAT goes to Exitline anyway.

    You will find the PARFILES directory still on the drive and you can use that to make the bootable usb.
    ( boot.wim is at PARFILES \sources\boot.wim )


    Also, if you run the app. again, it will announce that a directory named parmount, or PARFILES already exists, but it doesn't adversely affect the process - HDMaddPAT continues.

    %parafiles% isn't set as a var at that point - I changed it so it is set under getpaths - so I might as well remove the REM.


    You put in a nice little addition to take you straight there if you are making a usb.

    ECHO NOW GOING TO LOCATION OF BOOT.WIM

    EXPLORER %btwdrive%\PARFILES\sources


    I have a revised version already which hopefully will resolve John's ( Barcath's ) issue.
     
    Last edited: Jun 10, 2010
  15. Robin A.

    Robin A. Registered Member

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  16. MassiveOverkill

    MassiveOverkill Registered Member

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  17. xygor

    xygor Registered Member

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    WD offers two: one Paragon, one Acronis.
     
  18. SIW2

    SIW2 Registered Member

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    I understand Paragon was the first to do so - with a command line app in conjunction with WD.

    Now Paragon have the GUI version for all HD's.
     
    Last edited: Jun 10, 2010
  19. michaelgotberg

    michaelgotberg Registered Member

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    May 25, 2010
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    Hmm my setup is this: I have a raid 5 array with a 3ware controller running win 7 32 bit using three AFD 4k sector harddrives and using a 64 kb stripe size.
    The controller is set to create two drives.
    One drive is a normal one with first a win7 reserved partition on it and then a boot (C:) and another partition on it.

    The other drive is a GPT one with a large 2.7 TB partition on it.

    Running the new PAT 2.0 it informs me that the partitions on the normal drive (C: etc) are aligned. However by my calculation they are not aligned to a whole MiB as stated in the Whitepaper that I downloaded? I need that for the raid to be aligned.

    The large GPT drive is marked red and it states that it is not supported for alignment. Are not GPT drives and partitions supported yet?

    I had this array running before with 320MB drives and had over 300MB/s read speed.. Now it varies between 30-70MB/s... slower than the individual drives...
    Stay away from AFD drives is all I can say...
     
    Last edited: Jun 11, 2010
  20. SIW2

    SIW2 Registered Member

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  21. MassiveOverkill

    MassiveOverkill Registered Member

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    FYI, when you explore the archive or unzip it, it shows v2. I do show updated code/files.
     
  22. tgell

    tgell Registered Member

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  23. SIW2

    SIW2 Registered Member

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    That's just to keep you on your toes. LOL.

     
  24. MassiveOverkill

    MassiveOverkill Registered Member

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    ;) ...
     
  25. ptcruisergt

    ptcruisergt Registered Member

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    Having the same problem as KAMiKZ. Partition stays not aligned. Using the latest PAT in WinPE built from the v3 script linked to in here. Any logs that I can dig into to t-shoot this?
     
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