Anything different backing up an SSD vs. an HDD with Macrium Reflect?

I tried backing up a 240 gb SSD drive for the first time with Macrium and found that the image shows up as two partitions even though I never deliberately created two partitions. One is 100 mb the other is 223.47 gb. I recently did a reinstall of Win7 x64 Home Premium and downloaded various games.

Is this what's supposed to show up? It's never done this when backing up HDD's which I've done numerous times.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0z...ew?usp=sharing

Brassplyer wrote:
I tried backing up a 240 gb SSD drive for the first time with Macrium and found that the image shows up as two partitions even though I never deliberately created two partitions. One is 100 mb the other is 223.47 gb. I recently did a reinstall of Win7 x64 Home Premium and downloaded various games.

Is this what's supposed to show up? It's never done this when backing up HDD's which I've done numerous times.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0z...ew?usp=sharing

The reason for this configuration, is all in
honor of "BitLocker Full Disk Encryption".

If a person wanted to encrypt C:, and there was only
a C: partition, that would make it rather hard to
boot the computer.

Instead, they create System Reserved which contains
a boot folder and a BCD file. The BCD file is binary.
System Reserved is never encrypted, and never contains
user files.

In Command Prompt, you can type this as administrator

bcdedit

and it will display the Win7 equivalent of the boot.ini
that WinXP might have used.

So the files critical to startup, are kept in an
unencrypted partition.

Now, the vast majority of people either don't have
the version(s) of Win7 that support encryption,
or they never considered encrypting the entire C:.
(I don't do that sort of thing here, because it
is dangerous. Encryption is a write-only technology.
It's just to easy to lose everything.)

For that vast majority of people, having a System Reserved
is silly. I removed the System Reserved on my laptop,
and dropped Windows 7 to a single partition, with this
recipe. I made backups before starting, but this
went off without a hitch for me (just pure luck, not skill).

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=409

So if you do that recipe, the boot flag ends up moved
to C:, and C: has its own C:\boot and BCD file. And it
all works as before. If I had a version of Win7 that
supported Bitlocker, then it would whine if I now
tried to encrypt C: .

You can easily leave things as they currently stand,
and continue to back up ( C:, System Reserved ) as a set.
That's how the Windows 7 built-in backup handles them.

So System Reserved is Active and has the boot flag. And
once booting is sufficiently advanced at startup, control
is passed over to C:.

System Reserved does not have a drive letter, and you're
not supposed to assign a letter either. If you assign a
drive letter, and you have System Restore enabled, that
will cause a System Volume Information folder to appear on SR,
which can rapidly use up all the space and cause
later problems.

While System Restore isn't always the
best piece of software for all occasions, sometimes
people have a good copy of the registry rescued because
of it, so it's not all bad news to leave it running.

When you get malware on a computer, everything in System
Restore is effectively considered to be ruined, which
is one of the downsides of it - it can easily be
infected by malware. Even though the user doesn't
have permission to get inside System Volume Information
folder :-)

*******

The next time you do a re-install, try this:

1) Create a single NTFS partition. Empty.
You can make the partition active if you want,
which sets the boot flag on that partition.

It's possible all of this could be done from the
installer DVD, but I generally like to set the
disk up first to my satisfaction before beginning.
You don't have a lot of options at your disposal
once an install starts.

2) Put the drive back in the computer. Start the
install process. Point Win7 to the empty partition
with the Custom option. With any luck, you get a
single partition install.

But even if you blow it, and have a two partition
install, the terabyteunlimited.com recipe is there
to bail you out. If you really need to free up a
primary partition, that's a way to do it.

HTH,
Paul

On Mon, 14 Sep 2015 19:34:57 -0700 (PDT), Brassplyer
wrote:

I tried backing up a 240 gb SSD drive for the first time with Macrium and found that the image shows up as two partitions even though I never deliberately created two partitions. One is 100 mb the other is 223.47 gb. I recently did a reinstall of Win7 x64 Home Premium and downloaded various games.

Is this what's supposed to show up? It's never done this when backing up HDD's which I've done numerous times.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0z...ew?usp=sharing

That extra partition is from Windows.

On Mon, 14 Sep 2015 19:34:57 -0700 (PDT), Brassplyer
wrote:

Is this what's supposed to show up? It's never done this when backing
up HDD's which I've done numerous times.

-
I stopped it from making a small partition on my last install,
although by default it's included.

On Tue, 15 Sep 2015 10:20:55 -0400, Flasherly wrote:

| On Mon, 14 Sep 2015 19:34:57 -0700 (PDT), Brassplyer
| wrote:
|
| Is this what's supposed to show up? It's never done this when backing
| up HDD's which I've done numerous times.
|
| -
| I stopped it from making a small partition on my last install,
| although by default it's included.

Windows wants to create additional partition(s) and leave you with UEFI boot if it
can. I've found if I install Windows in an unallocated space on the disk, it will
try to do that. But when I create and format a partition for it first, it doesn't.

Larc

On Tue, 15 Sep 2015 16:32:48 -0400, Larc
wrote:

Windows wants to create additional partition(s) and leave you with UEFI boot if it
can. I've found if I install Windows in an unallocated space on the disk, it will
try to do that. But when I create and format a partition for it first, it doesn't.

Larc

Same here. Seems I'd some trouble with W7 dealing with perfectly good
space, rejecting then taking the same space when repeatedly forced on
it. Keeping it simple is nice, but any manipulations on the disc (SSD
I'm using) haven't been encouraging when it doesn't take its own
install from a Ghosted image. Sort of like it's sector counting or
thinks I'm putting it on a new machine. Not sure. (Down to 2.5
minute Win7 reinstalls from prior images - be nice if I could shave
that to 30 seconds, what an XP binary restores at.) See how this
latest W7, one-partition wonder works out, I guess.

On Monday, September 14, 2015 at 9:35:00 PM UTC-5, Brassplyer wrote:
I tried backing up a 240 gb SSD drive for the first time
with Macrium and found that the image shows up as two
partitions...

I've wanted to try messing with disk imaging but I don't know how
well it works. Don't you copy partitions individually? Can you shrink
partitions that are mostly empty?

Davej wrote:
On Monday, September 14, 2015 at 9:35:00 PM UTC-5, Brassplyer wrote:
I tried backing up a 240 gb SSD drive for the first time
with Macrium and found that the image shows up as two
partitions...

I've wanted to try messing with disk imaging but I don't know how
well it works. Don't you copy partitions individually? Can you shrink
partitions that are mostly empty?

Many imaging tools, use "Intelligent Copy".

Say you have a 100GB partition, with 20GB of files. The
imaging program figures out each and every sector making
up the 20GB of data. And only copies that part. That
means the basic image takes only 20GB of space. If you
turn on lightweight compression on the imaging tool (like
LZO perhaps), the partition might shrink to 15GB. LZO is used
so it doesn't slow down the operation too much.

Now, let's say you threw a folder of files in the trash,
selected "Empty Trash" and the files were now gone. Next,
you did an image (20GB). Later, you restored the 20GB on
another hard drive. Then, you grabbed an "undelete" program
and attempted to recover the files you had deleted.

Those files would be gone. Because the 20GB that is backed
up, does not include the sectors or clusters of data from
recently deleted files.

Similarly, when you restore a 20GB image to a 100GB setup,
the other 80GB are untouched. They're not erased or anything.
So some recently deleted file that had been on that setup,
a forensic expert could recover them. That kind of imaging
is not "clean", if you were concerned about any deleted
files. Imaging with "Intelligent Copy" is concerned mostly
with preserving the files you expect to be there. The
"not-deleted" ones. The state of the "white space" on
the partition, is indeterminate. Nobody cares.

*******

You can also do a dumb image, and just copy the entire
partition. With the 20GB of data on 100GB partition,
that will take 5x longer, as the entire 100GB will be
copied to the image file on the backup drive.

*******

The image file, can also be randomly accessed later,
if you want to recover a single file. There is no
need to restore the entire 20GB. The partition(s)
inside the image file, can be "mounted" as if they
were disk drives. The imaging tool provides a
right-click context menu item for that purpose
(so the imaging software needs to be installed
on the machine where you want to mount the image
for random access). If the image file has four
partitions inside it, the mount operation will
prompt you with regard to which letter(s) you want.

Paul