Pandlouk, I am extremely grateful to you for your hard work in devising and articulating the procedures above so that even I could follow them. I now have FD-ISR successfully installed on my Windows 7 64-bit PC and it is such a relief. None of the backup imaging programs I've tried (True Image, Paragon, Macrium Reflect) have been 100% reliable on my newest PC. Thanks to you and my beloved FD-ISR, I can compute with confidence again. The Bootsec_x64 file confounded me at first since I'd never dealt with a file which had double extensions. Once I researched how to reveal the second "hidden" extension so I could delete "txt", it was a snap to install FD-ISR. My only problem now is I haven't been able to delete the 101 MB of unallocated space which formerly held the Win 7 System Reserved. I made a backup image as you advised (using True Image Home 2010) but didn't see any obvious way to remove the 101 MB when I restored the image. I installed Partition Wizard and used it to expand the size of my C partition until it filled the unallocated 101 MB. After rebooting, however, the program gave an error message saying there had been some registry-related problem then check disk ran. After my PC restarted, Disk Management confirmed the 101 MB space had been incorporated into the C partition but, inexplicably, my D partition (which contains the HP system recovery files) was now untitled and listed as a "generic volume." I restored my PC using a backup image made just prior to installing Partition Wizard. I hope there's no problem with having this 101 MB unallocated space remaining on my primary hard drive. Finally, I wish there was some method where folks with a valid FD-ISR license who follow pandlouk's procedures and install FD-ISR on a Windows 7 PC could purchase a second license key from Leapfrog so they wouldn't have to uninstall FD-ISR from another PC in order to be in compliance with the licensing agreement.
Hi karen, you are welcome. There is absolutly no problem leaving those 101mb of unallocated space. Now on how to recover them. 1st method. Use a bootable media of paragon partition manager. For such operations ALWAYS do it from external media. - ps. Paragon is the only partition manager that I trust for moving partitions around; have not tried Terrabyte's Bing though. 2nd method (and safer). From a removable media delete the OS partition (acronis restore cd should be able to do it). Now you will have a free/unallocated space of 101mb+the size of the deleted partition. Now with your favorite image app (acronis in our case) restore the image to the unallocated space and enable the feature to use all the free space available. Pay attention to not restore the mbr. Some image apps (like drivesnapshot) do not allow you to restore in unallocated space. I do not remember if acronis has this problem too but if it does the way to circumvent it, is to create a new partition on the free space and then point the restoration to that partition. Remember to make the partition active after/during the restoration and to perform check disk of the partition after rebooting. ps. I hope that Partition wizard has not made your partitions to overlap each other. If you have a complete image of the whole disk I would advise you to restore that one and repeat the procedure. Panagiotis
Pandlouk 1. thanks for your prompt answer and your clarifications. 2. My HD has three partitions (NTFS). One partition (C) includes the OS. But as I can see (from Disk management) on all the partitions graphics representations I have the same 'dark blue' strip the same one as on the picture in post #3, meaning all three are primary ones. As I understood from the quote above I have to hide the two other partitions so that Win7 will load the boot file into C. I have Acronis Disc Director, and it has a 'Hide' option, but I have never used it. How to cancel this 'hide' process after Win7 installation? thanks
The exact same way that you used to hide it. Instead of "hide" you will see "unhide" when a partition is already hidden. Panagiotis
You're awesome, pandlouk! This will be my reference for when I "have" to make the move out of XP! Thanks for doing this for us.
Ok I follwed the instructions set out in this thread to the letter, everything installed and seemed fine untill..... this error popped up * the copy engine unexpectedly terminated FD-ISR will now close* and as it stated nothing was copied. Is this because I have windows 7 x64 or is this some other otherworldly reason I did wonder however if everything was going to work,as over 50000 directories were searched before it attempted to copy.
I did, you wouldnt believe the thrashing I gave the defragmenter, Absolute 0% fragmented on system files or page file
- You have disabled windows system restore, right? - What defragmenter do you use? FD-ISR is incompatible with Diskeeper 2010. Panagiotis
Strange. I have seen this problem once but after I defraged and run again the update procedure it was fine. Panagiotis
Interesting. I've done several installs of Win 7 and win 7 x64. I am using full downloads from the Microsoft site, that are licensed. I've just done a format, and then install, nothing else. Then I ran the files in the first post and FDISR installed fine. No 100mb partitions. I wonder if these are related to OEM versions put on my manufacters, or the OEM versions in general. Pete
I know that the Ultimate version of Win7 creates a hidden partition for the encryption feature but I don't know how big it is. Acadia
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2009/...reserved-partition-when-installing-windows-7/ Here is a way to avoid 100mb partition if there is already an existing Windows installation: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/7943-install-windows-7-fast-without-dvd-usb-device.html With a little correction: So the boot files will be copied into the new partition rather than editing BCD menu of the existing one.
How come? when I install Professional it still makes the 100 Mb partition, as do all other versions. I must be jinxed or possessed
Ok, then that means that the 100Mb partition must have nothing to do with Ultimate's encryption feature. Does that mean that the Ultimate edition creates two hidden partitions? Acadia EDIT: Just Googled and discovered that the 100-200mb (it varies in size) hidden partition contains files for the Recovery Environment and booting. It appears, from looking very quickly, that all versions of Win7 have it.
DVD+R Is it an OEM version. The version I have is what I downloaded from MS as a partner. All I did was boot the DVD, select the disk to install in, format, and the continue.
