System Reserved partition and cloning system drive

[cheer8923]

I installed Windows 7 on a unallocated block of 80GB. Once finished, disk manager shows 2 partitions:

System Reserved, 100MB
Windows, 79.90GB, letter C

I can assign a letter S to it and open it in Explorer. It's the boot partition.

My question is:

I used to run Ghost on XP to duplicate my system partition. In case of total crash, I can switch to the back up partition and it has saved me a couple of times. It involves copying the partition and MBR, and then modify the boot.ini file.

I don't see the similar structure here. How would I do this?

Thanks!

 

[kjv1611]

Use Ghost to ghost the entire disk, not just the partition.

 

[cheer8923]

I can't do that. My disk is 1.5TB. The rest is a partition for data.

 

[kjv1611]

Yeah, didn't realize that - not usually suggested to put system and data on same drive - if possible to split up..

Well, not saying it's bad, just I'd not prefer it, myself, for a desktop.. with a laptop, you wouldn't have much choice (I'm purty sure this is a desktop at 1.5TB hard drive. )

Anyhow, in that case, I'd just use Ghost to image EACH partition. So, if the system failed you would just need to restore both image files.

Also, if you only had the system partition, you could use a Windows 7 Install disk or recovery disk (if they made one of those separate for Win7) to "correct startup issues". But if it were me, I'd definitely back up both. It's possible to fix a system where you removed the boot partition, but it's much easier to deal with if it's there. ;0)

 

[cheer8923]

I've found instruction to remove this reserved partition and boot directly from C:

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

This would remove the problem as I can just copy the partition as I used to do.

Has anyone tried it?

 

[kjv1611]

I suppose it won't hurt to try. but before you do, I'd backup everything first, so that if it goes wrong, you can restore back to where you were with little hastle.

Terabyte Unlimited makes good products, so their instructions, I would imagine, are probably accurate.