DD10 create partition size in sectors

Hi,

I am testing DD10.0.2160.

Can we create partitions using sectors to define to starting sector and size in no. of sectors?

I am trying to see if I could re-create an exact partition structure of my old HDD in a new HDD. Example:

Disk: 0 Size: 19G CHS: 2584 240 63
Pos MBRndx Type/Name Size Active Hide Start Sector Sectors DL Vol Label
--- ------ ---------- ---- ------ ---- ------------ ------------ -- ----------
0 0 07-NTFS 10G Yes No 63 20,608,497 C: system
1 1 05-EXTEND 9.0G No No 20,608,560 18,461,520 -- <None>


However, DD10 does not seemed to give us such granularity.

Thanks
Vince

 

Vince:

If you're creating or resizing partitions through the user interface, DD10 will conform to the usual standard of starting and ending a partition on cylinder boundaries. So with (255*63) = 16,065 sectors per cylinder then you will see that the boundary can be moved in increments of 16,065 sectors, or 8.225 MB (7.8 MiB). I think that other alignments not on cylinder boundaries is allowable but considered nonstandard.

I haven't tried this but I think that you may be able to edit the partition table manually to get what you want. Set up your two partitions to be as close as you can get to the sizes that you want, and then in DD10, click on the label for the disk (Disk 1, Disk 2, etc) and choose "Edit". The hex sector editor will open and you can choose "As Partition Table" from the "View" menu. You will see the partition table layout as illustrated in the attached graphic. Edit the boundaries to suit and select "Edit", "Save Sector" to commit your changes.

No guarantees (I haven't tried this).

 

If it does work, I would guess you'd have to reformat the partitions before you could use them.

 

k0lo:

You have invoked the Disk Editor, which edit the bits directly on the MBR (sector 0 of track 0) which contains the partition table.

However, the Windows OS will not be aware of the changes and you will probably end up with 2 unusable partitions.

I have tried this by deleting all partitions in Windows, then write directly onto the MBR the intended partition table as you suggested. However, Windows don't see these and you have no way to "format" those partitions as MudCrab suggested.

Thanks
Vince

 

Vince:

Right; I would assume that mucking around with the partition table would destroy any existing partitions.

After creating a partition table manually with a hex editor, the next problem would be formatting the partitions and then installing an operating system. Are you saying that you tried this and then tried to install Windows, but the installer did not recognize that there were any partitions on the disk so it would not format them, but rather only offer to create new partitions?

 

Just to be clear, I was assuming that the partitions would show up in DD and you would use DD to format them, not Windows.

I have not tried this method. However, I would guess that you might get away with a primary partition, but the extended partition would be problematic. You can change the sectors in the MBR to anything you want, but without also updating the linked table for the logical partitions, how will the partitions remain intact? You can't "format" an extended partition container.

DD doesn't show the extended container (except in the Partition Table) so you would have to make the changes and then look in Windows Disk Management to see if it saw it, but it would probably think it was corrupt and wouldn't let you create any logical partitions in it.

vince97: Is there a particular reason you need the layout to be exactly the same as the original drive?

 

k0lo,

I did more testing. If you edit the MBR to have a primary partition that existed before, Windows will automatically try to restore the previous data. If it did not exist before then it will format it.

If you edit the MBR to have a extended partition, then Windows will not recognize its existence.

MudCrab:

If you browsed the TI forum too, you will see my thread of problems in restoring using TI10, but not TI8.

I noticed that the partition layout is different if I use TI10 to restore. But TI8 will keep original partition layout during restore.

I was doing various testing to research this problem.

I suspect this is due to disk geometry issues and I am researching on this subject.

Thanks
Vince

 

Vince:

As you can tell, Paul (MudCrab) and I are always interested in experiments like this.

If you want to set up partitions that start and end on particular sector numbers then try Linux fdisk. Do you have a Linux distribution that you can use in your experiments? If not, download and burn a Knoppix CD.

 

Vince,

The Knoppix link is here, if you're insterested.

-----

Mark,

While creating the partition using fdisk in Linux may allow Vince to use the exact sectors needed, it won't solve the problem of TI 10 restoring an unbootable partition. Even if the fdisk partition is correct, TI 10 will delete it and create a new one in its place, which will then be wrong. See this thread: TI10 failed to restore XP system partition but TI8 OK

 

Mark and Paul,

Thanks for your interest in replying my messages.

Paul is right in that creating a partition before restoring using TI10 will not help, as I have confirmed that TI10 will delete the partition and create a new one along the cylinder boundary while restoring.

So I already gave up on the test on creating a special partition.

Please follow the TI thread of my TI10 vs TI8 issue if you are interested too.

Thanks again
Vince