John B. Smith wrote:
On Tue, 26 Jul 2016 23:35:40 -0400, Paul
wrote:

John B. Smith wrote:
On Sat, 23 Jul 2016 13:46:39 -0400, Paul wrote:

John B. Smith wrote:
I have the ambition to align my main C: (XP) partition. It is on a
500gig hard drive partitioned in half for XP and Win7. Msinfo.exe says
that the Partition Offset for the XP partition is NOT divisible by
4096. AOMEI promises to align the partition and Optimize it, and I'd
like to try, if only I KNEW I could safely recover a backup if things
went south. I have a couple image backup restorers which I'm pretty
sure wouldn't work if AOMEI tampers with the partitioning. I think
what WOULD work a rescue is COPYING the files back onto the
'Optimized' partition if push comes to shove. My Easeus backup, when
booted from a CD will not do this. My ancient Drive Image 7 will, and
rewrite the MBR if I desire. So I'm here to pick some brains and MAYBE
get scared off enough to leave well enough alone if that's the
consensus. Thoughts?
You can never be too rich, or have too many backups.

Macrium Reflect Free, you can back up as your mixed
alignment image. Then, during Restore to the SSD, re-align
the partition on the fly.

In the filmstrip here, about a bit past the middle of
the strip, there is "Partition Properties". And there,
you can select 1MB alignment if you want. The one megabyte
alignment was invented by Microsoft, as their solution
to doing the best job possible for Flash Memory on
SSDs. Using 4KB alignment (not an OS feature), is of
usage for HDDs with 512e emulation. It makes them
perform a bit better. But 1MB alignment handles both
cases at the same time, doing a good job on a HDD with
internal 4K sectors, as well as SSDs with large
power-of-two flash memory pages.

https://s9.postimg.org/6mko7k7m5/Macrium_Restore_CD.gif

The process is not cosmetically perfect, but it is
functionally correct. While not shown in the example,
when I did a four-partition disk, there were "gaps"
between partitions. So it's not as suave as a real
Partition Manager. But considering it is free (i.e.
cheaper than a copy of the Paragon Alignment Tool),
it's a good deal.

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

The download process consists of:

A stub downloader program
Download main program
Download WinPE5 for making the Rescue CD

During the install, the WinPE5 is re-packed and
stored somewhere on C: . You make the Rescue CD,
in case you ever need to boot the CD, and overwrite
your entire OS disk from a backup. The Rescue CD,
while it is being prepared, can have NIC drivers
added. And that raises the possibility of using
file sharing for the backup. In my experience, it
doesn't always work, so you should always have
some facility on hand for connecting the backup
drive, locally to the machine. Like, a USB drive
enclosure, or an available bay with SATA port in
your tower. The WinPE5 should have some USB3
drivers.

Paul
Downloaded Macrium Reflect. Made the Emergency Boot CD, which worked,
surprising me as 2 other apps failed to make Windows PE work on my
system. I tried Restoring an image backup of the XP partition with the
"Restored Partition Properties" set to 'Vista/7/SSD (1MB)'. It
completed I rebooted, got my WinXP/Win7 menu, chose XP, boot failed:
"selected entry could not be booted because application is missing or
corrupt". Booted into Win7 OK. Went back and did a restore with the
"Restored Partition Properties' set to XP (CHS) and then booted into
XP successfully. So I'm still not partition-aligned, but breathed a
sigh of relief to be back in WinXP without major trauma.
When you were in Win7, you could have tried a CHKDSK on
both partitions.

*******

I don't have a theory for you, as to why WinXP
would not boot. If there was an Inaccessible Boot Volume, you
would have had a Stop code to hint at the problem. The various
stop codes are listed here.

http://aumha.org/a/stop.htm

*******

If you installed Win7 after WinXP, it should
have picked up an entry in the BCD for WinXP.

In an Administrator Command Prompt in Windows 7,
you can type

bcdedit

to review the boot menu.

Another possibility, is the partitions got put into
different slots than they were originally in. The boot.ini
on WinXP has a path specification that is partition
number sensitive.

On some boot loaders, even if one part of the
boot loader is successfully pointed at the
right place, some other part may still consult
a configuration file (like a boot.ini) and
then start claiming "cannot access boot disk" or
"inaccessible boot volume", even though it's
running off the boot material right now. Several
Knoppix LiveCDs were famous for this kind of bug,
where the current code is running off the CD,
yet the code claims it "cannot read the device".
Even though microseconds before, it was reading
the stupid device. On the boot line, you had to
"guess" what the boot device identifier might be
and enter it, and it might take a half dozen guesses
until you get it right.

AFAIK, the last boot partition which was "offset
sensitive" was something like Win98. If you shifted
the starting LBA, it might become ****ed off. For the
others, just preserving the partition table number,
or the BLKID, is sufficient.

Paul


I performed another try and came up with an additional piece of info.
I first chdsk-ed the drive thoroughly. I did find going into Win7 to
check the XP partition very helpful - no reboots.
After the Macrium Restore of the XP partition with Partition
Properties set to Vista/7/SSD, when I attempted the XP boot, it says:
"File \ntldr
Status 0xc0000225"
I booted to Win7 via the bootup menu and used EasyBCD to restore the
BCD info (which exists on the Win7 partition anyway) no help.
Macrium contains several boot repair tools but hate to try them blind,
without some inkling of what's going wrong with my 'alignment'
procedure. Macrium won't take questions without a license.

That doesn't seem like a WinXP error.

That could be related to the boot manager in Windows 7,
before it hands off (chain loads) WinXP or something.

https://social.technet.microsoft.com...w8itprogeneral

And by chance, does the volume involve GPT ? WinXP doesn't
support GPT, and would likely freak out if chain loaded
and it was partitioned that way.

If you can get any tool to boot, have a look at the disk
setup first, to see what's happened to it.

Paul