CloneVDI tool - Discussion & Support

[mpack]

AFAIK, Windows 10 drives don't come in a form in which the system drive only has one partition. A separate boot manager partition (roughly 100MB) has been a feature of Windows since Win7.

Was this a GPT partition scheme, or MBR (legacy)? CloneVDI will only recognize the latter.

I'm afraid I have little experience of Win10 drives as yet, and I can't promise when I'll have time to play with one.

[socratis]

Actually Don, the previous poster "forced" me into putting into higher priority a subject that I wanted to bring to your attention.

Windows 10 creates another partition at the end of the HD. Inaccessible, about 450 MB, they call it the "recovery partition" (https://www.google.com/search?q=450+mb+ ... windows+10). I run into problems when I wanted to update my Win10 VM to the Win10 Anniversary edition, only to discover that there was not enough free space. Normal procedures of resizing the HD worked, until the point where GParted wanted to increase the size (I didn't use CloneVDI, I'm on a Mac, don't like "Wine" - more of a "Jack" person ).

I tried moving the recovery partition to the end of the HD (after the resize), and deleting the partition altogether. All resulted in failures down the line; either Windows complaining or crapping out, flat. I wanted to use CloneVDI in a VM to do the operation, I simply put the Anniversary update into a lower priority. Seems to have issues of its own...

[mpack]

CloneVDI shouldn't be bothered by additional partitions, it also shouldn't have a problem moving another partition aside in order to enlarge the main one. You say you didn't use CloneVDI, so I'm not sure what your question is?

[socratis]

Nothing yet As I said I am going to use CloneVDI, haven't had the chance yet. But the previous poster's issue "jolted" my memory and I thought I'd share what I knew. Gonna try it now, will let you know...

[Zeerob]

AFAIK, Windows 10 drives don't come in a form in which the system drive only has one partition. A separate boot manager partition (roughly 100MB) has been a feature of Windows since Win7.

Was this a GPT partition scheme, or MBR (legacy)? CloneVDI will only recognize the latter.

I'm afraid I have little experience of Win10 drives as yet, and I can't promise when I'll have time to play with one.

I'm not sure what is GPT or MBR. It was a pretty default clean W10 install. There is indeed an extra System Reserved partition of 500 MB.
CloneVDI recognized the NFTS filesystem.
I have attached a picture of Disk Managent.

disks.jpg (111.02 KiB) Viewed 3692 times

Thanks.

[mpack]

Ok, so as I suspected the drive has at two partitions, the boot partition and the system partition (C:). (@Socratis: AFAIK generic Windows doesn't have a recovery partition anyplace, that's something that some OEMs do, e.g. HP).

I don't know what else to tell you. I haven't had any other reports of problems with Win10, but then again Win10 is not yet the most popular choice of guest OS (wants too much resources).

Also missing from your report is any evidence that the errors didn't already exist in the original drive prior to cloning.

Also, you haven't given me details of what the errors were.

[Zeerob]

Hi mpack, thanks.
The errors did not exist in the original drive. I have kept the original VDI. I have run the diskcheck in that again, and there are no errors. I have also compacted the original VDI with CloneVDI, without enlarging it at the same time, and then diskcheck did not find errors in the cloned VDI.
I have looked at the errors, which are CHKDSK output. It was quit a lot, and I have not copied it, but there were corrupted and crosslinked files, there was a problem with the boot sector, and there was a hex dump in it. But I have not saved the report.
As I said, I have done it twice, and in both cases the result was the same.
I did compact and enlarge the drive and enlarge the partition.
When I only compacted, there were no errors in the resulting VDI.
I have not tried compacting and enlarging the disk but not enlarging the partition. I you want, I can try that too.
I do realize that this is free software, so I am not complaining, and I am happy with the option to compact much quicker than the original route with Sdelete.
Thanks, Zeerob.

[socratis]

@Socratis: AFAIK generic Windows doesn't have a recovery partition anyplace, that's something that some OEMs do, e.g. HP.

(you had me scratching my head there for a minute... That's a good thing, it helps brain cell regeneration)

Yes, I know. That used to be the norm, but no more. Windows 10 does it as well when upgrading from an older OS. I saw it when I installed my first Win10 on a Win7 clone. Today I retried it again just to be 100% certain. Win7-64 client shows two partitions. This is what it looks like under Win7-64:

Windows 7-64, System reserved and basic partition.

Win7-NoExtraPartition.png (56.4 KiB) Viewed 3662 times

Updated to Win10-64 Anniversary via the official MS ISO. Here's what it looks like, just after an update to Windows 10:

Windows 10-64, 450 MB extra Recovery partition at the end.

Win10-ExtraPartition.png (45.67 KiB) Viewed 3662 times

Key points:

• You can't do squat with it... That's a "right-click" that you see in the Win10 screenshot, with "Help" being the only thing you can do. That's all the option(s) you get.
• Doesn't have a drive letter or a filesystem for that matter. PartitionType==27 according to CloneVDI.
• What makes it a royal pain, is to try and increase the size of this. Not an easy task. GParted pretty much messes the HD.

Do you want me to do anything more with it before I revert my Win7-64 snapshot? I created a Win10-64 clone of the updated Win7-64 after all. I'll have it available for any test that you want me to run on the "thing"...

I will try to increase the size of this VDI using CloneVDI. I'll report back. This "experiment" was just to make sure that it isn't an OEM that adds that extra recovery partition at the end, but a normal upgrade from WinX to Win10. I've seen it from Win10-32 to Win10-64 as well...

PS. BTW, that is CloneVDI looking at itself! I pointed it to the read-only share that I have where the VM resides and it's reading it's own VDI. Kinda cool. I'll hit compact to see what happens

[mpack]

Hmm. I've never updated a VM, I always install from scratch. I have updated my tablet from Win8.1 to Win10, and then to Win10-AE, so I knew that Win10 created a backup of the old system, but I assumed it was to folders in the new filesystem.

Looking at where the recovery partition is, i.e. at the beginning of the drive rather than the end, I wonder if they don't just box up the old filesystem and create a new one further along the drive. ISTR there's a scanning step where they estimate how big the backup area needs to be.
Belay that. I was looking at the order the partitions were listed. I didn't notice that the graphic said something else.

If you want to be rid of the recovery partition I wouldn't do it with a partition manager, I'd use the Disk Cleanup tool in Windows itself.

PS. BTW, that is CloneVDI looking at itself! I pointed it to the read-only share that I have where the VM resides and it's reading it's own VDI. Kinda cool. I'll hit compact to see what happens

There have been past reports in this topic of problems when CloneVDI is doing I/O to a GA shared folder to an OS X host, perhaps it has to do with the file size. The VDI ended up filled with NULs as I recall. The last such report was a long time ago, but I don't know if it was ever bottomed out.

I'm not sure what you mean about increasing the size being a pain. Do you mean with some tool other than CloneVDI? Obviously when CloneVDI enlarges the disk it makes no difference what partitions are on it - but CloneVDI won't understand non-MBR partition systems. When enlarging the fileystem it only inspects the largest one. The others are ignored except to move them aside if they are "to the right" of the partition I want to enlarge. This is easy for CloneVDI because I don't physically have to move any partitions, I just copy them to a different location when making the clone. GParted has to physically move the rightmost partition as a separate operation, though that should be doable.

[Zeerob]

Socrates, would you be willing to try the same what I did: use CloneVDI to compact and enlarge your W10 VDI and also the partition, and then run CHKDSK on the c: drive. That might produce a confirmation of the problem that I had, or not. I am not sure if you would have to remove the 3rd partition first (or you could try both).
Thanks.

[mpack]

chkdsk before and after, otherwise it means nothing.

To be honest it probably means nothing now: if there's a bug with Win10 then I don't have time to work on it for the forseeable future. Maybe not until xmas vacation time.

[socratis]

@Zeerob
Yeap, that's the idea. I have now a new, stable Win10-64 guest (with a minimal snapshot so I can revert at will) and I wanted to see why it was failing with GParted. Now I will test CloneVDI as well of course. Something tells me that they're something fishy going on with that partition. It only appears if you upgrade and doesn't want to go away "without a fight". I'm simply testing another VM (OpenIndiana) for another user's problem right now, so it will be later today, or tomorrow...

@mpack
Of course. Makes sense...

Finally, a quick search for "partition type 27" led me to the following MSDN article: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd744364.aspx . They claim it's delete-able (is that even a word?) under Win7. Not the case under Win10. We'll see...

[Zeerob]

Hi Socrates,

Did you have time for this test yet?

Thanks, Zeerob

[socratis]

Nope, not yet, and it doesn't look I'm going to have some time until early next week. But since you brought it up, I might squeeze it tonight, if I can make it...

[HDD23]

Just getting into the world of VMs and came across this tool. It's working brilliantly for me so just wanted to say thank you for taking the time to create this.