Hi!
At http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/#filesystems it says :
5.1 Supported filesystems
One of the questions arising a lot is "what filesystems does g4u support". The
answer is: "all of them". g4u reads the disk bit by bit, starting from byte #0
to the end. It includes any MBR, boot record, partition table and the
partitions themselves without further investigating the structure of the data
stored in these partitions.
For NTFS and Windows, this contradicts itself ;-)
Problem 1 :
If you copy a ntfs partition to another partition (let say on the same disk)
bit by bit, it wont work (at all, or will report errors; in Windows).
Namely, ntfs stores some data related to its position on the disk. After days
of debugging this problem, I found a web site explaining the background and
also how to fix it. Unfortunately, I don't remember the address of that site.
Basically, the start postion of the partition must be stored somewhere in the
ntfs system data sectors, expressed as bytes from the beginning of the disk
(warning, writing from memory).
Problem 2:
If you clone bit by bit a disk to another and it contains Windows, the clone
will probably not work (fail right in the boot loader). This is again, because
the Windows boot system has a dependency on certain crap that you surely know,
called "geometry". Which can be different for different disks. In this moment,
I have no idea how to fix this.
I believe this info would clear up a few things for users cloning Windows
related disks and/or partitions.
Regards,
David
PS: I would be great if you propagate this info to other implementors of free
disk cloning programs, so they can inform they users. (and by that reduce
traffix on their mailing lists; this of course should hold also for this list)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft
Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005.
http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/
_______________________________________________
g4u-help mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/g4u-help
