Help me with this restore please

Devrij · 5 Mar 2013 at 08:49

Hi guys, I just received my RMA replacement for my vertex 2e, but this is a slightly different vertex 2 that I was given, and has a useable capacity of 107GB instead of the 111GB my vertex 2e had.

That means when I boot into the macrium reflect disc to restore the image I made of my old drive, it doesn't fit. I restored it to a larger mechanical drive, from which I could open macrium reflect and shrink the image (which was mostly free space) and restore it to the refurb drive. Now, however, the drive letters are mixed up with the mech drive as C:\ and the solid state (which I want to be C:\) as E:\

How can I do this so I get my old install onto the SSD and keep it as C:\, since I can't change the drive letter of the OS drive?

I need windows to be able to shrink the image from the macrium reflect program, since the recovery disc doesn't support this, but as soon as windows is put on the disc it steals the drive letter.

HELP!

bledd · 5 Mar 2013 at 08:57

Macrium should let you restore the bigger image to the smaller drive. Do it with just one SSD in there

Dano · 5 Mar 2013 at 09:05

bledd. said:
Macrium should let you restore the bigger image to the smaller drive. Do it with just one SSD in there

Really? I've never managed to get macrium to perform that function, it's one of town things that I find it lacks, the other being the ability to restore and entire disk of multiple partitions in one go.

Devrij · 5 Mar 2013 at 09:07

bledd. said:
Macrium should let you restore the bigger image to the smaller drive. Do it with just one SSD in there

It does, but not from the recovery disc. It only lets me do it from the main program in windows, but by then the drive letters are all mixed up. Is there an updated version of the recovery disc that lets you do it?

Devrij · 5 Mar 2013 at 09:09

Dano said:
Really? I've never managed to get macrium to perform that function, it's one of town things that I find it lacks, the other being the ability to restore and entire disk of multiple partitions in one go.

It does restore all the partitions to one drive, perhaps you need to download the newer version? The recovery disc doesn't have the function I need though, even though the windows program does.

Devrij · 5 Mar 2013 at 09:29

Does the Windows PE recovery disc have more features than the linux one? It takes ages to download, but if it does then I could give that a shot.

thenewoc · 5 Mar 2013 at 23:58

If you do it in windows is it not the current install of windows that has the drive letters wrong. After you restore to the replacement vertex, what happens if you then shut down and remove the current system drive and then boot from the restored vertex? Surely that would see itself as c: but not sure what it would think about the other drives that were present when you created the image :-s prob best to have them connected too.

Devrij · 6 Mar 2013 at 07:11

I sorted it. For some reason macrium saw the other drive letters and autoassigned a new one to the one I was restoring. This wrecked the install of course.

Using the Windows PE disc instead of the linux based one allowed me to shrink the backup partition, set no drive letter, instead of auto, and when I booted it up, there was C

The bad news is that the new drive temporarily disappeared from my BIOS last night after BSODing. So now I'm worried that the refurb drive is also knackered.

thenewoc · 6 Mar 2013 at 07:58

Out of curiosity, does device manager list the new vertex rather than the old one since thats what would have been captured in the image?

Devrij · 6 Mar 2013 at 08:31

thenewoc said:
Out of curiosity, does device manager list the new vertex rather than the old one since thats what would have been captured in the image?

The original was a vertex2e bigfoot, and this is a vertex 2 3.5in so nearly the same, but this shows the new drive in both BIOS and windows. Why it would that make it disappear from the BIOS though?

I suspect either a mobo issue or a drive issue.

thenewoc · 6 Mar 2013 at 08:55

Is it using latest firmware?
No change to disk controller, was ahci when image created and when new vertex connected?
My other guess is whether the process of writing an image, which I imagine writes to the whole of the drive causes a large task for trim / garbage collection to deal with, without having any nand that hasn't just been written to.
I've read previously with image restoring on mechanical drives that its necessary to change some drive settings when restoring to a different drive model as the number of clusters etc would be different to that in the image but not sure whether that also relates to ssd's.

Devrij · 6 Mar 2013 at 09:08

thenewoc said:
Is it using latest firmware?
No change to disk controller, was ahci when image created and when new vertex connected?
My other guess is whether the process of writing an image, which I imagine writes to the whole of the drive causes a large task for trim / garbage collection to deal with, without having any nand that hasn't just been written to.
I've read previously with image restoring on mechanical drives that its necessary to change some drive settings when restoring to a different drive model as the number of clusters etc would be different to that in the image but not sure whether that also relates to ssd's.

I made sure it was correctly aligned, it was and still is AHCI, and the firmware for both the drive and BIOS is up to date. The original drive died this way, where it would occasionally disappear and reappear after a while before finally disappearing for good. I'm worried this is the beginning stage for this replacement (a refurb) to do the same thing. If it goes again in the next month it is going back to OCZ.

bledd · 6 Mar 2013 at 09:19

Try a new SATA cable / SATA port if you're getting problems

Devrij · 6 Mar 2013 at 09:33

bledd. said:
Try a new SATA cable / SATA port if you're getting problems

That was the first thing I did with the last drive, to no avail. I may replace the cable and swap the ports just to be safe though. Really hope it isn't a dodgy port

thenewoc · 6 Mar 2013 at 09:36

Yeah I've heard others say theirs did this prior to dying.

Devrij · 6 Mar 2013 at 11:22

Yeah, I'm hoping against hope that this isn't the case, but if it fails I'm going to jump up OCZ's ass and insist on a new drive.

thenewoc · 6 Mar 2013 at 11:47

I wondered if you could suggest to them whether you could have some sort of coupon that you could put towards a newer model instead? I'd imagine any decent business would raise (lol had to delete p r i c k, contextual error, got asterixed) its ears up at the prospect of a repeat purchase rather than purely a warranty replacement. It must cost them more to refurbish than these older ssd's are worth. Anything pre Vertex 4 I wouldn't personally touch.

Devrij · 6 Mar 2013 at 12:01

Good idea. I'll see if I can speak to a real human beyond the ticketing system they have in place (E: I can, I'll give that a go from my landline, but it might be bloody expensive). I wanted to upgrade anyway (although I was looking at an 840 instead). Maybe a vector would be better.