Mirror Is Useless If First Drive Fails
Sep 10, 2009
So, I installed windows 7 ultimate with 2 drives. I'm running on a MB with an AHCI (ICH10R SATA controller - No extra drivers needed. Windows 7 sees the drives fine during install). It did the normal thing on 1 drive of making a system reserved partition with all the bootmgr and BCD stuff. I'm not able to mirror it. But, I was able to mirror the main installation partition.
Forward a few days - Drive 1 (the one with the "System" (BCD and bootmgr) and the main installlation) dies. Now I have another drive with just the main installation. Of course, I can't boot anymore.
OK, I think - I'll add the missing boot files to the still working drive. I boot the install CD, go into a CMD prompt. Break the mirror, and make the working partition standalone. I copy bootmgr onto the drive's root, create a "Boot" folder. A run diskpart and mark the partition as active. I run bootrec/rebuildbcd (which works and finds my installation), bootrec/fixmbr (also works) and bootrec/fixboot (also works). Great, so now I can boot?
Wrong. I just get a blinking cursor on trying to boot. I've run through the GUI repair, and still no go. I cannot figure out what's missing.
So, the bottom line is - If you're using a mirror thinking you're safe - Think again. Your data will be safe, but forget ever booting that installation again.
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Nov 25, 2012
i used to have about 2GB of free HDD space on my C: drive about a couple of weeks ago. i never install things on C: (where windows is) but only on D: and E:i know 2GB isnt enough for win7 but i had no issues with this amount of space. however now i have about 400MB which is too little and gets little every few days for a reason i dont understand. i know certain games have their save files on C: but im regulating the save folders of my newer games and they are always small and meaningless. i am afraid i have some temporary files that windows used for isntalling stuff and never removed these files, or something else that got bloated on my HDD and was never deleted.
i tried disk cleanup (didnt help much at all) and i looked in c:\windows\temp ( empty) but something is fishy around here. i had an issue a few days ago where the computer wouldnt restart without a BSOD first (the BSOD on restart has resolved itself, somehow) so maybe that was a period where files didnt get deleted properly.i dont know. in any case - i want to clear room on C:. i never install programs on C: so it's weird that it gets clogged.
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Nov 21, 2012
Can somebody please advise how to only copy data changes to a 2nd mirror drive (identical) is there any software free or buy that will do this job quickly as I have been doing it manually.I have 2 drive identical and I work on one for some time then I clone it to the 2nd drive but all I really want to do is copy the data/work only and not system files.
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Nov 1, 2009
Im getting a new harddrive, after being annoyed endlessly by loading objects in games (5400 rpm/uber slow). However I only have the upgrade version of Windows 7 Professional. So my question is can I use Windows 7 backup image to restore the image on a different hard drive to boot from? I do have multiple computers available incase I need them.
I know the best way is to use a Drive image utility, however I am not fond of paying extra $$ since I am on a strict budget at the moment. I need alternatives to fresh install because it would take me days to redownload or reinstall all the setup.
Mostly CS4 is what concerns me (legit). Now I could have it reinstalled but I won't be able to for a while due to the missing key/discs.
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May 27, 2011
I've an all-in-one computer but would like to mirror the hard drive with an external usb drive, main hd 1T internal and 2T external partitioned into 2x1T one for mirror and other for data. Is this possable, running 7 Ultimate.
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Nov 7, 2011
I have my present hard drive backed up using Windows Backup on an external hard drive. I want to replace the 500gb hard drive in my desktop with a 1tb hard drive, I am assuming (i know bad word) after the transfer is complete the new hard drive will be recognized and function on boot as the 500gb drive did.
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Sep 16, 2011
I built a new computer.I wanted it to be more reliable. So, I got two identical hard drives. I installed Win 7 Pro as one big C: partition. Then I converted to dynamic disks and mirrored the first disk onto the second disk. Everything works! I even gave it a test. I powered off, and disconnected the SATA cable on the first hard disk. Windows booted right up, off the second HD. Great! It seems the mirroring works and can tolerate a missing disk.(I had to rebuild the mirror after doing this test.)I have some questions about how this will work over the long term. I noticed that when the first hard drive was missing from the mirror Windows never gave an error message. How would I detect a failing or failed hard drive? This is important, I think.How does Windows deal with a bad read on one hard drive in a two drive mirror? Say if one disk reads correctly, but the second disk reads a bad sector, how does Windows know what is the correct data?I found that Windows gives a text mode menu when I first boot up the computer. It wants me to select which Windows I will boot: the first hard drive or the second "Plex". Is there a way to set a default, so it will always boot the first instance of Windows without user intervention? Or would this defeat the mirroring function in the case of a bad hard drive?
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Jan 4, 2013
I am replacing my HHD with a SSD and made a mirror image on my backup external drive. When I tried to do the system image recovery, it fails to find the recovery information. It says the no disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found.
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Oct 11, 2012
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May 4, 2012
My administrative account is totally useless right now. All of my icons are in word document form and only open in that form which makes everything useless, I can not do anything on this account. I don't know why it happened one day it was just like that so maybe its a virus but i do not know what to do to fix it. I have restored, backed up, everything i could think of to bring it back to the point before it messed up but no such luck.
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May 2, 2012
The ENTIRE purpose of the recycle bin is to provide the means to preserve deleted files in case they were accidentally deleted. When this feature was first introduced, it was a major improvement over the previous permanent deletion paradigm.However, ever several months, my recycle bin get corrupted, and the only way to delete files is to empty the recycle bin. As such, this feature has become a significant liability as I cannot ever expect to recover deleted files.Yes, I am rather peeved. This is a basic feature of the OS, yet it has failed at least four times over the past 18 months. No, there is no malware on my computer. No, there are no disk problems. No, nothing is reported in the Event Viewer. This is simply a major flaw in a very basic system component.
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Apr 23, 2012
Yesterday I disconnected a useless usb socket and ever since i am getting the message failed to boot when switching the pc on, I have tried taking out the bios battery and left it out for more than 5 minutes, I have tried my windows install disk and tried repair from that but issue still exists. I am running windows 7ultimate 32 bit, and the bios is phoneix, that's all I know.
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Dec 7, 2009
I'm trying to install Windows 7 on a WD 500gb freshly formatted to NTFS. Windows 7 first copies the files and then says its starting up and then hangs up. My bios see's the hard drive and knows it's there. I never get a chance to use F6 to load the Sata drivers that I have on a floppy drive.
It never asks me. I first tried to load with the Sata Drive unpartitioned but that failed. So I am now trying to do it on a formatted drive. I'm not sure if the problem is that Windows 7 doesn't recognize that I have a Sata Drive attached. Can anyone give me some ideas for things to try?
I took the motherboard, processor, and ram back to Frys and got store credit. I changed from a Gigabyte motherboard to an Asus motherboard, same processor, and associated ram. Windows 7 loaded with no problems.
Fry's stated that the motherboard must have been bad due to the issues that I was having. The processor and ram were suspected to be good. When I loaded Windows 7 I didn't have to load any Sata drivers the bios and windows 7 picked up the Sata Drive with no problems.
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Dec 1, 2011
I have 2 drives (connected one at a time to try and sort this issue) SONY AD-7260S and a LITE-ON
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Both these drives worked flawlessly with XP and only way to get the drive to recognise half the time with Windows 7 is to restart PC to either get it to show in Device Manager or press eject when booting to get the disk inside out.
Both drives are Sata and are only a few months old (not burned much and work exceeelnet on another xp machine)
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Feb 12, 2012
My Dell 1525 Windows 7 laptop had begun to experience more and more frequent hard drive errors. So, in an effort to fend off total disaster, I purchased a new hard drive. The new drive was slightly larger than the old one (250GB vs 160GB). With a week old backup in hand, I used Acronis to do a disk CLONE to the new drive in an external enclosure. I was able to do it without any apparent drive errors. I then swapped drive for drive and rebooted. My most frequent apps worked fine, network access was fine, etc. Then I went to do a Windows Update - not fine. The little shield in the upper left corner of the box was red and, when I clicked on the "Check for Updates" box, it replied Windows Update cannot check for updates because the service is not running. You may need to restart your computer." I went to Services, started the service, marked it Automatic, and tried again - no joy. So, as it suggested, I rebooted. No joy again. After trying a couple of different backup versions with the same result. I went back to square one and used the original Windows 7 install disk. The install went fine and I was able to use Windows Update successfully. I hoped that having verified that a vanilla Windows 7 worked, I might be lucky enough to just be able to restore my latest backup. Wrong. The system appears to work fine with the only KNOWN problem being Update - there may be other problems, as yet unknown. Differences I am aware of: new hardware partitions proportionally larger than the previous disk.
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Feb 24, 2011
I've recently been fooling around with ubuntu, and my latest install attempt did something to my local drive. I don't know what, but my drive no longer recognizes any OS (usually windows 7, 32bit) on the system at all. On boot, I receive the message:
"verifying DMI pool data .............
Boot from CD/DVD. :
Error: no such device : b2359ea5-e528-475a-819f-16885f1ed60e.
Grub rescue> -blinking underscore-"
I've tried setting boot priority to hard disk, but it doesn't work.
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Jun 11, 2011
I'm going to make a clean install of windows 7 and therefor have some question
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2) I want to move the Users data to a separate partition and found this guides: User Profiles - Create and Move During Windows 7 Installation [2]=User%20Accounts User Folders - Change Default Location(Don't know which one I chose to do so till now) But I see in Windows 7 there are much more useless directories in the users home directory:I've already learned the new Library system, but I still want to use the Users directory. But there is a great mess. Is there a useful/possible way to prevent the directory to mess up with all the sub directories, often created by some apps, don't really using the directory. Or are you just ignore the users home directory? Usually I got about 5 to 8 sub-directories in each Directory for a tidy system to find everything and have a good ordered system.
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Oct 29, 2011
I'm doing a new OS install, using my the same Windows 7 64 install disk as before. I do have new drives, but they are just newer versions of my old drives (which died) - and they are pretty standard HP slim drives.
For some reason, the OS install will not complete. It's saying that an optical drive driver is missing, and wants me to install it manually.
these drives did NOT come with any driver cd, nor is there a driver available on the HP support site. They must be plug&play.
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Apr 6, 2012
I have a PC on which the hard drive died. I had previously done the Advisor and it said everything is OK for new install of Win 7 Home Premium.
I removed old hard drive and 2 gigs of memory (now 2 gigs installed) installed new hard drive, set appropriate ( i think) BIOS parms. When I start the DVD I get the 'loading files' message and the colorful logo then a blank screen with a large arrrow cursor -- and nothing. Wait 5, 10 15 minutes and the only hint of activity is the hard drive light is flickering about once every 2 seconds. I've now waited for over an hour and still nothing else.
I've tried to do all the things that have been suggested for others who have had problems but it hasn't helped. Machine is a Dell 4700C with 3.4 GHz processor , 2 gigs of memory, only keyboard, mouse, and monitor attached in addition to the hard drive.
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Dec 21, 2009
I have Win 7 ver 6.1 (build 7600) on Desktop and I have a Linux server. I don't use a password to logon to windows.
I successfully mapped Linux drives using my Linux user (which happens to be the same as the windows user) but on Linux I have a password. All the mappings were OK (4 directories) asking me on each one username + password + ticking the box called "retain credentials".
All went OK until I rebooted, then a message pop-up that "could not reconnect all network drives"...appeared: => the old stupid message from win XP.
Ok I opened My computer and surprise: My user and my password from the sharing pop-up window were gone! I've inserted them again and all went OK.
I thought they solved the old windows XP problem which clears the user + password from the Network drive mapping IF you do not have the SAME password as the mapped drives.
What can I do to retain that User+Password combination for good in Win 7 Mapping?
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Nov 26, 2011
Attempting to backup my HP laptop to my new Seagate Expansion 3TB plug and play external drive returns the error shown in the screenshot below. After searching Google for a solution it seems the backup utility in Windows 7 is not compatible with high capacity drives over 2.5TB. Am I understanding this correctly? How am I going to backup my laptop onto this drive?I did come across a proposed solution here but apparently this would prevent the drive from working with Windows XP. As I need to move file between the laptop and an XP machine this is not an option for me.There is approximately 126GB of data on the machine and the drive is brand new, formatted to NTFS and otherwise empty.Perhaps I need to use a third party software to backup?
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May 20, 2012
Whether in the form of Windows software, this feature is that if we have two disk For example, one of the drives and disk drive 0 with one of the disc 1 are mirror.disk 0 if the is corrupted for any reason. Data from one come up?
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Dec 18, 2010
I have an Intel 80GB SSD (bootable OS Windows 7 installed) and a WD 500GB HDD (storage and backup). Is it possible to mirror my SSD onto an 80GB volume on my HDD using Windows 7's RAID1? If so, do I suffer a performance hit on my read/write speeds in Windows 7 on my SSD?
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Nov 3, 2012
I have windows 7, I have 3 harddisks.1 I use for my installation of windowsand on 2 harddisks I have my data but those 2 drives I made a mirror in Windows.What, if I reinstall windows, do I lose the data or does windows split the mirror?
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Nov 4, 2011
Disk 0 contains two partitions: System Reserved (active) and C: Disk 0 is dynamic
Disk 2 is unallocated Only the System Reserved partition can be mirrored, "add mirror..." on C: is greyed out. If I mirror System Reserved, I still can't mirror C:
I am guessing if I make C: active, my system won't boot?
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Jan 30, 2012
I have a new windows 7 64-bit computer and two 4-year old external Western Digital HDDs. They connect fine and transfer data okay except when i try to do a Windows system mirror.All was well with XP Pro and the same HDDs but Windows 7 tells me the HDDs are not formatted to NTFS.Firstly, what does this mean as i would really like a system mirror and secondly, is there a way round it withpout formatting the HDDs and losing all the data?
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Dec 15, 2011
I'm trying to find the best way to
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Nov 1, 2009
Is there any way to set up a mirrored monitor setup with monitors of differing resolutions, but simultaneously maintain the native resolution on both monitors?
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I know that I could "extend" instead of "mirror," and thus fix the problem. But because this computer is ultimately for my grandmother's setup, using "extend" will not be an option, as it will greatly confuse her and make matter exponentially worse.
Is it possible to mirror and maintain native resolutions with some sort of software? Could I achieve this by purchasing two separate graphics cards?
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May 4, 2011
I have an external enclosure. Could anyone point to me where to go and read in point blank detail step by step how to:
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Sep 29, 2012
How do I disable the infernal obnoxious and useless desktop cleanup that keeps deleting the shortcuts I put on the desktop.
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Mar 30, 2011
Just as the title says. All my files and programs open in free textpad. I was writing a program earlier today and absent mindedly cliked ok to open in free textpad without read the other points of the message. I am now sure that one of these other points sais something like "make free textpad default for all applications" or something. I have tried everything i can think of without any success with one exception. I was able to run itunes normally after selecting programs>itunes>run miniplayer. Im not sure why this is, as when i run itunes, it opens in free textpad. By the way, i run windows seven on an inspiron 530.
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