I have an unallocated 1Mb partition as the first partition (according to Easus) on my laptop drive, in addition to the recommended reserved, system and EFI partitions. Could this extraneous partition be the reason for my inability to restore from an image backup? (Restores fail after making my laptop unbootable)
No - this partition is only to ensure partitions are properly aligned (especially for ssds).
There is something wrong with your image backup.
Do you have more than one hard drive installed?
A 3TB Western Digital for backup in addition to the 686 GB in my laptop; GPT filing system on both
This forces me to do a repeat install.
If you create an image backup, it creates just a file on larger drive, and it is totally irrelevant what the partitioning style is on new drive.
I suspect your issue is in one of two areas i.e image file is so large, something is glitching, or something is wrong with partitioning some how.
How did you create the image file, and with what package? Some imaging programs are better than others (Macrium Reflect Free is really good.
Is all your data on the C drive ie same partition.
When you have a lot of data, this is a pretty poor way of backing up data, as you need massive image files.
Far better to put partition data into two sections ie and OS+programs partition, and a separate data partition.
Then the image backups of smaller partition are much smaller eg less than 100 GB unless you have huge numbers of programs.
Then you do not need imaging to backup data program - in fact file history backup is probably a better tool then.
Post an image of your (both) disk partitions, so we can see if present partitioning makes sense.
Go to command prompt and type diskpart then select disk 0 then list par
Your first partition will by default start at an offset of 1024kb (that is what Windows installation does).Code:Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.10586] (c) 2015 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. C:\WINDOWS\system32>diskpart Microsoft DiskPart version 10.0.10586 Copyright (C) 1999-2013 Microsoft Corporation. On computer: HALI-WIN10 DISKPART> select disk 0 Disk 0 is now the selected disk. DISKPART> list par Partition ### Type Size Offset ------------- ---------------- ------- ------- Partition 1 Recovery 500 MB 20 KB Partition 2 System 200 MB 500 MB Partition 3 Reserved 16 MB 701 MB Partition 4 Primary 532 GB 717 MB DISKPART>
Mine is 20kb as I formatted my disk like that deliberately. As long as it is divisible by 4 then it doesn't matter either way.
In any case it isn't a partition - it is the starting position of the partition.
Honestly (unless you did it wrong deliberately) you don't have to think about alignment and 1MB isn't really a huge amount of space.
Depending on the partition manager you may see an offset at the start of the drive for 4k sector alignment. Yes, EASUS will show it while Mini Tool or AOMEI won't.
As mentioned above, there's something wrong with your backup. You probably need Macrium Rescue disk to boot from then click on "Fix Windows boot problem"
Partition ### Type Size Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
Partition 1 Recovery 1024 MB 1024 KB
Partition 2 System 100 MB 1025 MB
Partition 3 Reserved 128 MB 1125 MB
Partition 4 Primary 686 GB 1253 MB
Partition 5 Recovery 803 MB 687 GB
Partition 6 Recovery 10 GB 688 GB
This is my laptop configuration
Sans tiny partitions (for alignment?)
Apart from the two recovery partitions at the end which could probably be deleted, this does not look too bad although I would have split OS partition as I said earlier.
So I cannot see anything obvious here that would stop an image backup restoring. How did you create image backup, and can you see the backed up partitions in the image file?
Kudos to you all, cereberus, lx07, and topgundcp! The one thing I had not tried was Macrium Reflect Free---and it backed up, verified and restored beautifully without hitch nor glitch. The backup solution I've been looking for for over a year (or more, I lose track). Also, I want to try the multipartition thing when I get up enough nerve, cereberus.
Hi makridge, glad you got it sorted out. May I ask what other imaging software you had tried? I'm shortly getting a new laptop which will have UEFI and GPT formatting which I've not used before, and I use Aomei Backupper, which is supposed to handle GPT. Thanks!
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