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Beware of GPT hard drives

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I made images of the system and recovery partitions on my ASUS GPT laptop. Then I upgraded the machine to Windows 8. Some features didn't work, and I discovered that ASUS recommends updating drivers before upgrading to Windows 8. I decided to restore the original system, update the drivers, and then upgrade to Windows 8 again.

True Image said that the system restore succeeded, but the machine would not boot. I discovered that I could also not invoke the original restore partition. So, I tried to restore the restore partition with True Image. Again, it said the restore was successful, but the machine still would not boot and I still could not invoke the restore partition. Converting the drive to MBR didn't help because, of course, the images were incompatible.

To make a long story short, I couldn't install Windows 8 because it was an upgrade version and the machine had no copy of Windows to upgrade. Neither XP nor Windows 7 would install on the GPT system. I bought a full version of Windows 8, which installs, but ASUS features of the machine won't work and the new drivers don't recognize the machine--they assume an upgrade to windows 8 from the original ASUS system.

My next step is to buy a restore DVD from ASUS to see if I can get back to the original Windows 7 system. So far, True Image has cost me $15 for the W8 upgrade, $100 for the OEM version of W8, and $50 for the recovery disk, on top of the upgrade to True Image 2013, and a lot of time.

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Sam,

Does your laptop use Secure Boot? If it does it needs to be disabled when restoring an image.

Some laptops have non standard partition layouts - normally certain Dell and Lenovo ones, it is possible that your ASUS is one of those that also uses non standard disk layouts. This is not necessarily fatal, just eh drive structure in the BIOS needs to be checked before a restore. Having said that normall a complete disk restore works OK.

Windows 7 will install and boot a GPT disk system but expects to be able to put the Protective MBR information at sector 0, Windows 7 can only boot a GPT disk if it is a 64 bit version.

The laptop does not use Secure Boot. I don't see anything in the bios about the drive structure. True Image made the restore partition unusable when restoring the system partition, making me think that it is changing the basic structure incorrectly. I would expect it to either do it correctly or say that it cannot handle the format.

Thanks Colin,

Sam

Looks similar to this one:
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/37937