EISA Partition

[ihawk]

Hi there

In the past I have been fairly competent in managing partitions, (bad experiences have taught me well!!). As it’s been a few years since building a pc etc… I need a bit of advice on a laptop upgrade.
My current Acer Laptop has an 80gb HDD split into 3 partitions,

8GB EISA partition with no letter (recovery drive)
33GB C Drive or Primary partition
33GB D Drive

I’m going to upgrade this to a 320gb drive, and have got an external USB connector to access the new drive for cloning etc…
I am intending to split the partitions with an aim to keeping the recovery drive (just in case) so the theory is 1x EISA partition 8GB and 2 x partitions of 150GB or there abouts.

So now for the questions I suppose,

Is this the best way to split the drive?
Would I do the partitioning prior to cloning?
Is cloning the best way to do it?

Thanks
Rich

 

[Ididmyc600]

Hi

on a Dell laptop the drive is split in 3

1) test tools
2) The OS
3) the recovery partition

This is what Dell use so on that basis have a read of ian goodhalls site, it explains how
the dell recovery system works.

on the basis that Acer build Dell laptops (so im led to believe)as well its likely that they use the same system and doing anything to the drive can lead to an unuseable recovery system.

Regards

 

[ihawk]

Thanks, went to the site which was quite useful in uderstanding how the recovery partition works, but I'm still a bit lost as to the best way to set up the new drive.
I mean do I just create 3 partitions on the new drive via partition magic etc... then load 3 different images? if so how would I create and then copy the Eisa recovery partition?

 

[Ididmyc600]

Hi

assuming the drive is the same, the EISA partition is only shown as that due to the way the partition table is marked, if you use PTEDIT to mark the drive as a fat32 partition then it will show as a FAT32 partition, it only shows as EISA as its marked with an unknown partition type.

I can tell you that making a duplicate dell drive requires you to use MBR copy program (as found on ian's site) and making the MBR an identical one to the original drive.

I did make a duplicate drive of an Inspiron 1300 (the original drive died and it ran XP pro without the dell restore function until i bought an identical laptop), here's how i did it


Connect the drive to a PC running XP or similar
use disk management to create the 3 partitions.
Use the MBR copy program to create a useable MBR on the drive.
Copy the existing files from the old drive to the new one.
Use PTEDIT to mark the partitions the same as the old drive.

PTEDIT when run will show you the partitions and how they are marked, just make a note of the old drives partitions and then recreate the new drive with the same markings.

Ian's site is a bit complicated to navigate around with links here there and everywhere, however his advice is sound, this assumes of course that the Acer is the same as the Dell, otherwise this is all Moot...

 

[ihawk]

Thanks, I have 3 NTFS partitions, should be the same though. I'll let you know how I get on.