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98-Guy

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Ghost (any version) and cloning large FAT32 drives
Jan 31^st, 2007 at 6:38pm

I partitioned a 160 gb SATA drive (seagate) as a single FAT-32 partition with 4kb cluster size (resulting in about 40 million clusters). Win-98 runs great off it, no problems with the 137 gb barrier.

I've tried various drive-cloning softare (including Ghost - from a boot floppy and a live CD) and nothing seems to work. Acronis too. Ghost can see the source and destination drives (destination is a Samsung 160 gb SATA) but all attempts at cloning fail.

Any ideas?

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Rad

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Re: Ghost (any version) and cloning large FAT32 dr
Reply #1 - Jan 31^st, 2007 at 8:15pm

why did you change the default cluster size? never heard of that before. if you want 4kb clusters., ntfs is the way to go (defaults at 4kb).

all imaging prgms are going to have difficulty.

i mean, if u get it to work, i'd think you were lucky, and then i wouldn't be confident about the restore working properly.

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98-Guy

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Re: Ghost (any version) and cloning large FAT32 dr
Reply #2 - Jan 31^st, 2007 at 8:34pm

I chose that because XP is garbage and NTFS isin't all it's cracked to be.

There is nothing that prevents FAT-32 from having 4kb cluster size (that's what it has default when you have a partition size of 8 gb or less) and there is nothing limiting FAT-32 from having more than 2 million clusters (aside from DOS scandisk and defrag not working). DOS chkdsk works fine though. Win-98se has no problems with it.

The DiskWizard software that you can download from Seagate (which is Ontrack Disc Manager licensed for use only for Seagate drives) allows the creation of FAT-32 partitions with any cluster size you want.

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El_Pescador

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Re: Ghost (any version) and cloning large FAT32 dr
Reply #3 - Feb 1^st, 2007 at 11:49am

El_Pescador wrote on Oct 31^st, 2006 at 3:01pm:

Quote:

"... So what about the Fat32 issue limitation in cloning to the larger 80gb hd? I just with MS and it did say XP is limited to 32gb for FAT32..."

Mackjazz

For "overstuffed" FAT32 HDDs, I prefer the 16kb cluster size option (see below):

"... Theoretically, Windows XP FAT32 volumes larger than 32 GB have to emanate from other operating systems, but be advised that Seagate DiscWizard is a "loophole" utility running inside XP that can do the "over-32GB" trick with some -but not all - HDDs larger than the

illusory 137GB threshold

. Whereas DiscWizard assigns file system format by the volume of the partition selected, be advised that were any secondary partition to be selected - and any subsequent - are going to be in an extended partition as a set of logical drives no matter what you do or don't do. So, forego fighting any of this early on:

(1) After using Norton GDisk to perform a so-called "low-level format" (actually a "zero-fill" routine), use DiscWizard to assign the target HDD as

'Additional Storage'

and when underway proceed to slide the scale LEFT-to-RIGHT until the leading partition changes from GREEN-to-PURPLE (FAT32-to-NTFS) at about 36GB;

(2) then, gradually revert by sliding the scale RIGHT-to-LEFT where a PURPLE-to-GREEN transformation occurs with the default FAT32 file cluster size dropping from 32kb-to-16kb at which instant you mark

SET

;

(2) then, select the

NEXT>

radio button (you will find the remainder of this phase to be straightforwardly automated);

(4) then, upon exiting from DiscWizard, reboot your PC into SAFE MODE and reenter DiscWizard to select the

Maintenance

radio button to go to

'Maintenance Options'

, select

'Partitioning and Formatting Options'

where you in turn select

'Grow a Partition'

(this feature actually pumps up the physical drive to force the primary partition to occupy the remaining freespace albeit while retaining the 16kb cluster size - you will find the remainder of this phase to be likewise straightforwardly automated as DiscWizard will reboot without intervention on your part); and

(5) after the system reboots, you merely hit the

Finish

radio button, then in turn the

Exit

radio button - et voila^' - you now have a FAT32 HDD to the full extent of the physical HDD capacity which functions in just about any operating system extant..."

EP

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El_Pescador

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Re: Ghost (any version) and cloning large FAT32 dr
Reply #4 - Feb 1^st, 2007 at 12:59pm

98-Guy wrote on Jan 31^st, 2007 at 6:38pm:

"... I partitioned a 160 gb SATA drive (seagate) as a single FAT-32 partition with 4kb cluster size... tried various drive-cloning softare (including Ghost - from a boot floppy and a live CD) and nothing seems to work..."

El_Pescador wrote on Aug 4^th, 2005 at 2:42am:

"... theoretically Windows XP FAT32 volumes larger than 32 GB have to emanate from other operating systems - and DiscWizard is a "loophole" utility running inside XP. Luckily, the Iomega HDD was Seagate-compliant, but when confronted with an older Maxtor HDD the DiscWizard simply bombed out.

Preliminary indications are that the technique of using the GDisk DiskWipe procedure on a HDD, followed up by letting DiscWizard create the MBR and "pump-up" the FAT32 volume with 16kb clusters may very well result in improved performance and - more importantly - in improved host controller/device controller flexibility with internal HDDs mounted in external enclosure kits

just as it restored the initial capabilities of the Iomega 80GB HDD

..."

El_Pescador wrote on Aug 3^rd, 2005 at 6:02pm:

"... based on excellent experience with the 'Seagate DiscWizard for Windows' I rebooted and let the DiscWizard independently target the Iomega HDD by default. I started off by establishing a single modest 25GB FAT32 partition (roughly midway in the 16GB-32GB range for 16kb clusters), and then exited out of the routine because progressing much above that would result in default to the NTFS file system format. However, once the FAT32 partition was firmly fashioned, I then chose to reenter the DiscWizard and use the GROW command to completely utilize all the remaining space. The default cluster size for 25GB was 16kb initially, and that size was maintained during the expansion to 80GB expressly contrary to those published specifications for XP promulgated by Microsoft.

Between having a new MBR and the 16kb cluster size granted by the Seagate DiscWizard software, I succeeded somehow in

regaining

the capability to use the Norton/Iomega driver from GUEST.EXE for USB 2.0 operations with my external Iomega 80GB HDD. I suppose I am must be the beneficiary of 'Serendipity', considering my original intent was to employ the DOS-based Partition Magic 8.0 Rescue Disk software..."

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/YaBB.cgi?board=general;action=display;num=10784...

EP

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Rad

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Re: Ghost (any version) and cloning large FAT32 dr
Reply #5 - Feb 1^st, 2007 at 4:00pm

oh, i see .. 98-guy means *windows* 98 ..

well, i respecfully disagree that 98 is better than xp .. having used both myself for a good many years.

but that's besides the point. and i can certainly dig retro. =)

in that case i would have at least made my 98 system partition, where windows resides, no larger than 8 gigs. that should be plenty, long as you install multi-cd prgms to another partition.

that way you are sitting at the default, and as i'm sure you know, things just seem to work better when you take the default road. make a change and there's instantly a chance - no matter how small - that you'll generate a quiry compatibility issue.

then you could image (& restore) the system partition without any trouble. and that's the only partition you really need to image anyway. all other you can drag-n-drop copy, or burn to dvd for back-up.

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Brian

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	Re: Ghost (any version) and cloning large FAT32 dr Reply #6 - Feb 1^st, 2007 at 4:35pm Rad, nice answer.
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98-Guy

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Re: Ghost (any version) and cloning large FAT32 dr
Reply #7 - Feb 1^st, 2007 at 6:48pm

Reply to El_Pescador:

I don't know why you re-posted such convoluted and complicated instructions on how to use Disc Wizard.

I simply created the 2-floppy Disc Wizard boot-set and used it to format a 160 gb Seagate Barracuda SATA drive as a single Fat-32 partition with 4kb cluster size. I don't know why someone thought it had to be done in a more complicated way.

I don't know how you (or someone) used Disc Wizard on a non-seagate drive (I tried to do the same thing with a 160 gb Samsung SATA drive and Disc Wizard said it only works for Seagate drives).

Reply to Rad:

I'm currently messing with some new motherboards and large Sata drives and doing some tests with win-98 compatibility. I know that there are modified versions of ESDI_506.PDR that break the 137 gb barrier for win-98 and large P-ATA drives.

I've used Ghost 2003 (booted from floppy) to clone XP drives for 2 years now, and as part of my testing SATA drives I wanted to see what I could use to clone a large SATA drive.

But right now I'm experimenting and I might very well create 2 partitions for my eventual win-98 installation. I intend to soon obtain 2 500-gb SATA drives for my win-98 system, and I'll be doing performance tests on the imact of different cluster size on file performance.

Even if I had an 8 gb primary fat-32 partition, I'm still going to end up with huge secondary partitions, so it really doesn't matter whether or not I split large drives or not. They're all going to be fat-32 anyways, and they're NOT going to be dual-boot. It's Win-98 all the way.

So again I'm asking if there is any known issue regarding Ghost (any version) and the ability to clone large FAT-32 SATA drives with millions of clusters or allocation units (32 or 64 times the "normal" number of clusters).

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Rad

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Re: Ghost (any version) and cloning large FAT32 dr
Reply #8 - Feb 1^st, 2007 at 7:48pm

you said:

"

Even if I had an 8 gb primary fat-32 partition, I'm still going to end up with huge secondary partitions, so it really doesn't matter whether or not I split large drives or not. They're all going to be fat-32 anyways, and they're NOT going to be dual-boot. It's Win-98 all the way

."

i think you are wrong here, or perhaps i haven't made myself clear. i'm not talking about dual-booting, and the "huge secondary partition" you mention won't cause you any grief, cuz you won't be imaging that one.

you said everything else works fine, right? .. that the only problem you had was with ghost/imaging. yes?

long as you make your windows partition and the partition where you store/receive images no larger than 8-gb, then it sounds to me like all your problems are solved. 8)

you can still make all your other partitions big as you want.

but .. as i alluded to in my previous post (about problems departing from defaults) , i wouldn't jump thru any hoops to bypass the 137-gig barrier. i would simply truncate any partition so they stayed less than say 120-gb. that should be plenty big for you.

as a side note, i have a guide which discusses partitioning strategies which you may (or may not) enjoy:

http://partition.radified.com/

partitioning, as i say, is a *personal* thing. but if your strategy is causing headaches .. maybe you should revisit...

thanks, brian.

(i snooped & saw your pics from the trip.)

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Re: Ghost (any version) and cloning large FAT32 dr
Reply #9 - Feb 1^st, 2007 at 7:58pm

you said: "

So again I'm asking if there is any known issue regarding Ghost (any version) and the ability to clone large FAT-32 SATA drives with millions of clusters or allocation units (32 or 64 times the "normal" number of clusters

)."

i think the answer is

we've never heard of

an issue like this before cuz

you're the only

one we know who is tweaking large FAT32 partitions to (artificially) generate 4kb clusters.

and if you're the "only one" doing this, then that's never a good place to be. (to be the

only one

doing anything with a computer)

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98-Guy

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Re: Ghost (any version) and cloning large FAT32 dr
Reply #10 - Feb 1^st, 2007 at 8:31pm

First item: SATA vs P-ATA

A SATA drive connected to a system via Silicon Image controller does not use ESDI_506.PDR in Windows-98. If the SATA drive is connected to Intel controller hub ICH5R then windows-98 hangs during startup when it loads ESDI_506.PDR.

What I'm trying to say here is that given the right SATA controller, windows-98 doesn't encounter the 137 gb problem. For a regular P-ATA drive, then you need the modified ESDI_506.PDR files (available on the MSFN website) to break the 137 gb barrier.

Item 2: I'm pretty sure that even if you partition a large P-ATA drive (say, 160 gb) into 2 partitions (say, 40 gb and 120 gb) that you will have problems crossing the 137 gb boundary on the drive (which would happen when writing to the 97 gb area of the second parition in this example: 40 + 97 = 137). Again this is not a problem with a SATA drive.

In my case I formatted a 160 gb seagate SATA drive as a single primary FAT-32 partiion with 4kb cluster size (resulting in 40 million clusters) and then filled the drive with 1-gb VOB files (140 of them by repetitive copying a direcory containing 10 1-gb files).

Using Ghost to clone that drive (drive-to-drive clone) resulted in an error (I forget what it was but I'll try it again and post the error).

My point of using ghost is (in the future) to be able to clone the entire drive, not just the OS partition (if indeed I were to create multiple partitions in the first place).

I looked at your guide about partitioning but it doesn't address my specific situation of keeping entirely to Fat-32 and not being limited to a fixed number of allocation units (as Fdisk tries to do for no documented reason other than compatability with scandisk and defrag). Fat-32 is more flexible than you give it credit for, and I'm exploring just how flexible and efficient it can be.

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Re: Ghost (any version) and cloning large FAT32 dr
Reply #11 - Feb 1^st, 2007 at 8:40pm

re: "

Item 2: I'm pretty sure that even if you partition a large P-ATA drive (say, 160 gb) into 2 partitions (say, 40 gb and 120 gb) that you will have problems crossing the 137 gb boundary on the drive

"

well, i'm pretty sure you wouldn't .. long as your mobo bios supported the larger drive .. which it sounds like it does.

re: "

My point of using ghost is (in the future) to be able to clone the entire drive, not just the OS partition

"

there might be good reasons for this, but i can't think of any. (why you wouldn't simply back-up non-OS partitions/data using non-imaging methods)

yes, the error would be nice to see. out of curiosity, if nothing else.

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El_Pescador

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Re: Ghost (any version) and cloning large FAT32 dr
Reply #12 - Feb 2^nd, 2007 at 9:21am

98-Guy wrote on Feb 1^st, 2007 at 6:48pm:

"... I don't know why you re-posted such convoluted and complicated instructions on how to use Disc Wizard..."

Forgive me for my posting behavior, but I was trying to illustrate that there were two separate and distinct issues evolving from my trials: (1) regaining the lost ability to use Norton Ghost 2003 with the stock Norton/Iomega USB drivers after altering the sole factory-stock FAT32 partition of the Iomega 80GB external HDD; and (2) realizing a significant gain in performance with the FAT32 file sytem format when compared with NTFS.

98-Guy wrote on Feb 1^st, 2007 at 6:48pm:

"... I simply created the 2-floppy Disc Wizard boot-set and used it to format a 160 gb Seagate Barracuda SATA drive as a single Fat-32 partition with 4kb cluster size. I don't know why someone thought it had to be done in a more complicated way..."

I am ashamed to admit that I am unfamiliar with using DiscWizard in DOS.

98-Guy wrote on Feb 1^st, 2007 at 6:48pm:

"... I don't know how you (or someone) used Disc Wizard on a non-seagate drive (I tried to do the same thing with a 160 gb Samsung SATA drive and Disc Wizard said it only works for Seagate drives)..."

I used the "cut-and-try" approach with non-Seagate HDDs, and it worked for some but not others.
When it did work, it was for specific models within brands

but not necessarily brand-wide

. I suspect that the internal geometry/architecture of any given model of HDD is the determining factor and not merely the brand name.

EP

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Re: Ghost (any version) and cloning large FAT32 dr
Reply #13 - Feb 2^nd, 2007 at 5:43pm

Ok, here's an update.

It turns out that the 160 gb SATA drive (fat-32, win-98) had been a little screwed up during the install of win-98. The computer was unstable with the old PCI video card I had in it during install, and I guess the many crashes and lockups took a toll on the FAT. When I started in DOS mode and ran scandisk, it found many problems which I'm not sure are all fixed yet.

(I'm surprised that Scandisk ran, as it's not supposed to be able to handle a large drive, let alone one with 40 million clusters. Scandisk did, however, ask that himem.sys be used because I guess it needed more memory to run.)

This is from the Ghost error file before I ran scandisk:

*********************************

Error Number: (15175)
Message: Invalid cluster

Running Scandisk should correct this problem
cluster = fcdd5ae
Version: 2003.789 (May 28 2003, Build=789)
*********************************

After running scandisk several times, I think there are still some files with long file names, but here's what I get now:

************

Error 19080
An internal inconsistency has been detected.

Abort: 19080, Xtrace: A_HSRV and other attributes
************

I'm going to re-format the drive and start again with a fresh win-98 install and then see if ghost can clone the drive.

I've got a couple of WD 500-gig drives (the real quiet ones) on order and should get them next week, and will be testing a new motherboard (ASROCK with VIA chipset and AGP) with socket 775 3.46 ghz Celeron that should make for a rock'n 98 system.

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	Re: Ghost (any version) and cloning large FAT32 dr Reply #14 - Feb 2^nd, 2007 at 5:50pm looking fwd to hearing what you find. if you're gonna wipe the drive, maybe consider really "wiping" it. http://www.digitalissues.co.uk/html/os/misc/ibm-wipe-zap.html?seenIEPage=1 which writes zero to the first 8 gigs.. to be sure no hidden nasty's get left behind. is the drive fairly new?
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