Can't boot without restoring utility partition
I'm running an older Dell Dimension 8200, XP SP3, with an 80 GB HD containing a small (31 MB) FAT16 primary utility partition, and the remainder of the drive is the C: system partition. The entire drive is imaged with TI Home 10. If I restore both partitions to a new drive, the computer boots and all works normally. If I restore only the C: partition, the computer boots to the boot menu (I have PCLinuxOS on a 2nd slave drive and it boots ok), then starts Windows with the splash screen, and about the point where my desktop should appear I get a stop error (STOP: 0x8E, 0xC5, 0xBAE3CC9C, 0x00). Boot.ini has been corrected to refer to partition 1, and I have tried 'fixmbr' from the recovery console to no avail. Same thing happens if I try safe mode. The partition table looks fine with an entry in the second position for the system partition. I moved the entry to the first position in the table with same results.
I know the easy solution is "just restore both partitions", which is fine, but I am curious as to why the utility partition seems to be needed to make the system boot completely. The MBR checks byte by byte with a 'standard MBR'. I have not checked the partition boot sector (volume boot record?) and possibly this is where the problem lies? Or does the Dell OEM version of XP maybe look for the utilty partition to be there before completing boot? Perhaps this question cannot be answered except by Dell? I would appreciate inputs anyone may have on this situation.
As an aside (not related to my main topic), while researching this topic on the forum I have read some posts which indicate that XP will pop up a "Found new hardware" baloon after booting to a new restored drive. I have never seen this happen on my machine and am wondering if the original disk signature is retained on a restore?
Thanks in advance, ziggy
When the Windows partition was restored, was it restored as an Active partition?
What boot manager are you using? Is it doing anything that would need adjusted due to the change?
When you boot into XP, can you get a screenshot of what Disk Management shows for the drives and attach it to a post? It may help to see it.
Thanks Colin B and MudCrab for the replies.
Yes, the Windows partition was restored as active and I did verify that with Disk Director which showed it as the boot partition.
I am just using Windows boot manager (boot.ini) to select the operating system. It contains 3 choices: Windows XP, PCLinuxOS, and Safe Mode. I did check the boot.ini file and the Windows boot partition number had been changed from 2 to 1. Apparently TI10 did that for me during the restore process.
Am attaching a shot of Diskmgmt as currently running. As you can see, the Dell utility partition is the first partition on Disk0. This is a new 500GB drive onto which I restored the original 80GB drive, so I've still got a lot of unallocated space at this point.
On the Dell support site I did read a post where someone was looking for the "seal.ini" file which resides on the utility partition, thinking that was the file that the system was looking for during boot. Don't know if that is valid or not. The utiltiy partition is used at first boot of the machine to have the user agree to all the license terms. Once that is done, the Dell partition is no longer active and the system partition is marked as active.
Thank you, ziggy
Update:
I've attached a slightly more readable shot of diskmgmt showing more of the relevant partitions. I've also attached a shot of the paratition table as shown by DD10. The partition table from the disk which had only the system partition restored showed the first table entry empty, with the second entry containing the system partition.
Since you can always restore the image and have it boot properly, I'm wondering if you would try something. Use DD (from the CD or from Windows) to delete the Dell partition. Do not make any changes to the XP partition. Edit the boot.ini file on the XP partition to point to "...partition(1)". When finished, reboot the computer and see if Windows starts properly.
If Windows fails to boot, restore the Dell partition (or the entire drive -- whichever is required to return booting) and then use DD to just format the Dell partition (instead of deleting it). See if Windows will reboot successfully.
MudCrab: I'll try your suggestion and see what happens. I probably won't get at it till tomorrow since I've got about 50,000 cables on the back of this thing and I want to install the original drive to try this on. Thanks for the help and I'll be getting back to report after I have run the tests.
ziggy
MudCrab,
OK, got back sooner than I expected. I did a complete new restore to the old 80GB drive including the Dell utility partition, booted from that drive, ran DD10 from within Windows, deleted the Dell utility partition, rebooted, and all appeared fine. So I went back into DD10 (within Windows), created a primary FAT16 partition in the unallocated space where the utility partition was, formated the new partition, and rebooted successfully. The main difference I could see after formating the partition where the utility partition had been was the partition type which is now type 04h whereas with the Dell partition was type DEh which is apparently EISA configuration.
As an interesting aside, I forgot to change boot.ini after each of these delete and create operations but was still able to boot. I just now checked boot.ini and it is using partition 2 which is correct since I created a new partition where the utility partition had been. I also just now again deleted the partition I created, looked at boot.ini and apparently DD10 changed the partition number for me because it was now set to 1. Learn something new all the time.
I'm not quite sure what all this tells me, since you would expect about the same outcome by doing just a restore of the system partition. The only diffenence would seem to be where the system partition is located. I am now going to change the partition type to DEh and see what happens. Will be back after I break this thing, maybe not until tomorrow-it's my bedtime!
ziggy
Since Windows booted okay after the Dell partition was deleted, the next step would be to use DD to resize the Windows partition larger (from the left) to use the space previously used by the Dell partition. Then see if Windows will boot. Assuming it does, that would be what you would try on the new drive.
MudCrab,
Well I finally got logged on to the forum. Seemed to take forever this morning.
I did change the partition type back to DEh and that had no affect-booted normally.
I had already tried your last suggestion to resize the system partition to include the unallocated space left by deleting the utility partition. I did this from the rescue CD and all went well. However, I now could not boot and wound up with the same stop error as before. I always get the same basic stop error 0x8Eh with the third parameter in parenthesis varying somewhat. I also restored the partitions in reverse order-system partition first and utility partition last-and that also gave me the same stop error. It appears that moving the system partition to the front of the drive causes a problem. I now have the drive restored back to original working condition.
I'm not sure what I'll try next. Perhaps it's not worth persuing this any further since it's a rather trivial problem, but I hate to be defeated by my computer.
I hope this post will take, as I'm having very slow response from the web site this morning. Thanks for all your help and sticking with me this far.
ziggy
Just for information, the DE type has nothing to do with EISA configuration - it is just Dell's strange way of designating the type of this hidden utility partition. I have an older Dell Dimension 8300 with this partition, which I use as an accessible DOS partition, since I have some tools that work only under DOS. I've found lots of useful information from Dan Goodell's website: http://www.goodells.net/dellutility/
Dell still puts this partition on newer systems. At work, I have a months-old Dell Optiplex that has the same utility partition!
Thanks Gary,
Yes, I've been to that site before and it has lots of good information about the Dell utility partition. To me is seems like a waste to use up one 31MB primary partion (of only four) just to hold about 10MB of data. Anyway, it appears that I am able to delete the partition and gain back another possible primary partition and the system will still boot. Just can't seem to move the system partition without causing problems.
ziggy
If you resize the Windows partition a little from the left to increase the unallocated space before it, does Windows still boot okay?
The error you're getting makes me wonder if there is a drive error (bad sector) or there is a RAM error. However, I would think a RAM error would show up under a normal working boot-up into Windows.
Are you getting the same error on the new 500GB drive?
Ziggy-
Thanks for bringing this topic up. One of my future plans is to move to a larger HD in my Dell system, and I was wondering about this utility partition also. I wonder if Colin's idea about the Dell BIOS locked into a specific offset actually applies to the system partition such that it can't be moved? I wonder about booting from additional system partitions on a Dell system like this - is this known to work? (This seems like more DD questions than TI questions, though).
Well I finally got logged on. Anybody else have problems logging on? One time my browser just sat there for 6 minutes waiting for a response and finally said 'done' but never got me logged in. I don't seem to be having trouble with other sites.
It's taken me a while to get back here with all the restoring I've been doing. I'm going to be an expert on TI hard drive image restoration soon.
MudCrab, I tried your last suggestion of increasing slightly the unallocated space before the system partition. I increased it by only 102MB and that was enough to make booting fail. I then removed the failed 80GB drive that I had been testing with and installed a 500GB drive which I had restored some time ago and had labeled as "tested ok" at the time. Now I couldn't boot from this supposedly known "good drive" (same old stop error)! It almost seems like there's a lingering or memory affect occuring when I install a different drive immediately after a boot failure where the next installed drive also fails. This happened to me once before when I installed a "known good" drive after a previous boot failure. I then restored the image to the 500GB drive and all was well again. I then ran the tests previously run on the original 80GB drive with the same results. Seems as soon as I mess with the system partition the boot failure occurs. I don't think I have a hardware problem (I ran memtest86 on my ram with no problems) because I have always been able to boot into Linux on my second internal HD and everything works great. The Windows boot process seems to proceed very well with drivers getting loaded and I can see my external drives getting enumerated and about the point where the desktop would appear the stop error pops up.
Gary, I'm beginning to think that Colin's idea about the Bios (or some other software) looking for a specific offset could be what's happening. It's hard to imagine the Bios doing that because it looks like it's actually running the volume boot record from the active partition or the boot process could not proceed as far as it does. I've never tried booting from additional system partitions as you indicated. I don't know enough about that topic to be of any help.
So guys, I'm about to give it up as a lost cause. Is it possible that the registry could be involved with this problem? Registry problems have gotten me into trouble in the past and I'm wondering what role the registry plays in this booting process. Several weeks ago I bought these new hard drives in the expectation that my old 80GB drive might be ready for the junk yard soon. It's been faithfully running for 8+years now without any problems (other than self imposed ones). So I decided to restore my drive image to a new 500GB drive from one external drive to the new drive in an external enclosure. These drives are running with firewire. Anyway, TI10 started the process and somewhere down the line got hung up and I was not able to recover without just shutting down power. When I rebooted after that was the first time I had ever seen this 0x8E stop error. I was never able to recover from the stop error until I restored my image to the drive mounted internally in the boot position. This was the first time I had ever had to restore a hard drive to regain operation. Previous problems always seemed to get resolved by restoring earlier registries. I assume the drive somehow got corrupted during this hang up.
Thanks for the interest and help,
ziggy
Do you have a standard XP installation CD? If so, you could do a test install to a blank drive (with the partition being created at the start) and see if it boots.
I doubt the problem is in the BIOS unless something in Windows is checking something in the BIOS. I think the problem is in Windows (something in the Registry, a driver, etc.).
I've got an XP installation disk but it's a Dell CD so I don't know how "standard" it is. My old 80GB drive is not booting right now and I haven't restored it so I may give that a try tomorrow. Right now I'm getting tired of messing with this thing. I gotta do something else for a while.
I'll let you know what happens.
ziggy
Yes, it is taking forever to log on.
I don't think the Dell CD will do any good. It's most likely the same CD I have labelled Reinstallation CD which is not even good enough to create a BartPE build. I don't think one can install XP from scratch from this CD - it is probably far from "standard".
My musings about booting from an additional system partition were more directed at MudCrab - he's the expert in this arena.
I don't have any answers, just a strong interest in what you find out. I want to be assured that I can restore to a new 500 GB drive and get a working system with my Dell system, utility partition and all. True Image restores work just fine on the same disk.
Gary,
That was the reason I asked about if a clean install would be able to successfully get all the way into Windows. I suspect it would. Linux is apparently booting correctly.
I suppose that there might be something installed in Windows that wasn't original that's causing the problem. If that's the case, doing a "recovery" install and resizing the partition should work.
I don't have a Dell with the Dell partition or a recovery partition so I can't run any tests. My old Dell was an 8100 and it came with Windows ME, not XP.
Sorry to take so long to get back here. I've been busy on other things this morning.
Gary, I got your PM and yes I realize that the partition table entries order does not mean anything, only the sector locations on the drive indicated in the table. Freeing up an additional potential primary partition was my main interest in getting rid of the Dell partition. There's nothing usefull in there that I need and the 31MB space is insignificant. You shouldn't have any problems moving to a larger drive. Every restoration I've done so far has worked ok until I did something to mess it up. It just bugs me that I'm not able to physically do anything with that system partition without making it unbootable.
MudCrab, I was able to do a clean install of XP (on the old 80GB drive) with the Dell CD. Everything during the install went without a hitch. Only strange things I noticed were that the install left about 8MB free space at the end of the drive and I didn't seem to have a handle on that during the install. The other thing was that my system drive got labeled K: instead of C:. That was probably due to the fact that my secondary drive has partitions which were labeled by the installer and one of them was labeled as C:. There wasn't an option during the install to choose a label. Anyway, the install was done on one big partition and it was bootable. I checked with DD and it showed the system partition at the very beginning of the drive at Cyl 0, Head 1, Sect 1. I also resized the one large partition to include the 8MB unallocated space at the end of the drive and the drive booted OK after that. So it appears that the drive is OK and my hardware is working so whatever is going on must have something to do with software, although I have no idea what that might be. I don't have anything strange or unusual installed that I'm aware of. I'm glad that hardware always seems to be much more reliable than software.
MudCrab, when you mentioned a "recovery" install were you refering to a "repair" install? Is this done with the install CD? I don't know what happens during a repair but I suspect that all the old drivers and files from the CD would be reloaded. I have never attempted a repair install because I figured it would break more things than it would fix.
As an aside, I've never seen XP boot up so fast as with a clean install. It took about 25 seconds to do a complete boot.
ziggy
Could that 8 MB space be the "test cylinder" referred to in http://mirror.href.com/thestarman/tool/de/PTS-DE.htm ?
Gary,
Maybe that's the explanation. Thanks for pointing me to that page. I had never heard of this "test cylinder" before and that could well be what it was. During the XP install I don't recall having any options to change partition size, but I may be wrong. It didn't seem to matter that I increased the size of the system partition to include the empty space. By the way, I was surprised that the Dell CD turned out to be just what it said it was - Reinstallation CD for Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition. It didn't load much of anything specific for Dell, just a folder with a few items and a link on the start menu. It pretty much seemed to be a standard XP install. I bought this machine back when they still gave you CD's instead of a restore partition on the HD.
ziggy
I have the analogous Reinstallation CD for XP Pro (Service Pack 1a!) but have never used it, but I assume it would work the same. Nice to know, but with all the specialized apps, reinstallation from scratch would be very painful - thus the reason for True Image in the first place. Thanks for all of your experimentation. Very interesting results.