W7's new "system" partition
I just built a new computer with w7 home 64-bit and am looking at backup software. TrueImage has a boot disk for restoring, but can it set up partitions also? including this new 100Mb "system" partition it creates? can can that contents be also backed up and saved. If restoring after a failed drive, that would be needed to fully restore the system.
My current setup is with 2 160Gb drives. On the first drive I made a 40Gb for the OS and left the rest for programs. W7 also made it's system partition. The second drive I made a 10Gb for temp stuff and the rest to be used for backups. Was thinking using that for the Continuous backup function. I used primary partitions for all thinking it would make the 2 on the first drive C and D and the other drive would get E and F. but instead the first drive got C and E and the second drive got D and F. Thats how I thought it would have gone if I used extended partitions for the secondaries on each drive.
I'm also wondering how w7 will react if I say, add another drive. It will stick it's lettering in the middle some where putting installed software on the wrong drive.
Timothy:
You don't have to accept the drive letters assigned by default. Just go to Disk Management and change them to whatever you prefer. Of course, you won't be able to change the system partition's drive letter C:, but you can change the others.
I just found out how to get Disk Management up. Only I all ready got stuff installed on E: :(
The bigger problem would be putting in new drives. The drive letter can't be changed until the new drive is in because it would change stuff windows is still point to. After the drive is in, letter would change, but windows still points to old layout.
One thing I just found out regarding the 100MB System Reserved partition with TI2010. Backed up is shows as 100MB but once it is restored it is 95MB and there is no way to change it (using TI2010) back to 100MB. Everything works but it is odd.
It might be related to SSD alignment since I restored to an SSD and correct alignment was preserved. I guess I'd take a properly aligned partition over an odd sized partition any day.
Anyone else have thoughts on this?
Tom
One thing I just found out regarding the 100MB System Reserved partition with TI2010. Backed up is shows as 100MB but once it is restored it is 95MB and there is no way to change it (using TI2010) back to 100MB. Everything works but it is odd.
It might be related to SSD alignment since I restored to an SSD and correct alignment was preserved. I guess I'd take a properly aligned partition over an odd sized partition any day.Anyone else have thoughts on this?
Tom
I believe the used space in that 100Mb part is less than 50Mb (I'm not on my W7 system now) so the 95Mb is still plenty big enough.
Tom:
Probably not a concern since the used space in the partition is much less than 100 MB. What size does Windows 7 Disk Management show for the partition? Same as TI or different? Each program uses different round-off techniques when displaying partition sizes, so if you see different sizes then it's due to round-off error.
When I create an image, Disk Management, Acronis Disk Director and TI2010 all clearly show 100MB. When restored, they all report 95MB and Disk Director will not allow me to, say, shrink the OS partition and enlarge the System Reserved partition back up to 100MB. I believe it would allow me to resize to a partition boundary near 100MB but not exactly 100MB as before. I didn't "commit" so I'm not sure.
I realize 100MB is plenty enough for the boot manager and even Bitlocker (if needed), it's just an odd issue that bugs me. I guess I'm more concerned why this happens than the fact that it doesn't harm anything.
I'm still thinking it might be related to the fact that I'm using an SSD (in this particular case). I recall reading on the OCZ forums something about using Acronis to restore to SSDs and needing to do it in two passes to regain alignment. The first pass to restore the partitions and not MBR and Track0 and then the second pass restore MBR and Track0 and not the partitions. In this particular case, I restored everything at once, it was aligned properly (but with the 95MB partition) and I didn't try it differently.