Cloning question: mysterious partitions on source drive

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RamJacCorp

RamJacCorp

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I'm about to attempt a clone of my system's 3 TB WD drive to a Toshiba 3TB, using EaseUS - for a backup drive. When I view the source drive, it's got a large number of partitions that I can't explain, ranging in size from a few KB to 128 MB. They're listed as Unallocated. The system is a Dell XPS 8500, and a few of those partitions were Dell-installed, while some others are a mystery. How can I tell which can be deleted, or should I just try and clone everything? Also, the clone sw wants to rename the partitions on the new drive - is that normal? The new drive shows a 128MB, Unformatted partition (I'm assuming that's GPT info - the clone sw wants to delete that, is that ok?) Any help is greatly appreciated!
 
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Is there any chance you can get your hands on another drive temporarily? That way you could image your drive, pop it out, pop the backup in, boot from a recovery disk, then restore the image to it. The intermediary drive doesn't have to be 3 TB, it only has to have enough free space to hold the contents of your source drive plus a tiny bit for the extra partitions. Like the System Reserved which is probably what's holding you up. Win 8.1 hid its imaging utility. According to Google, File History Control Panel (non-metro), System Image Backup.

Technically, you could just format the backup drive and save an image to that, then use it to restore your current system drive if the upgrade goes sideways. While it absolutely should work, I'm a...
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ArtPog

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Probably the safest & simplest process to undertake at this point is just carry out a disk-to-disk cloning operation allowing the disk-cloning program to create the partition scheme. I presume you're working with Win 10. There shouldn't be any problem with the cloned disk booting & properly functioning.

If worse comes to worse and things go awry in that the destination drive is not properly functioning, no harm done. You will still have your source disk intact and we can go on from there. Just make sure not to make ANY changes in your source drive until you're absolutely assured you have a properly functioning clone.
 
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RamJacCorp

RamJacCorp

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Thanks, ArtPog. I'm actually on Win 8.1 (one reason I'm backing up the drive is that the XPS 8500 is iffy for an upgrade to Win 10). I agree with you that the safest bet is just letting it clone everything. It looks like the software wants to copy 8 of the 12 existing partitions, though, and it wants to rename everything with different lettering. (Current C: becomes F:, etc.) That should drive my card reader slots crazy, for sure. I figured the cloned drive would be identical to the original, but apparently I was wrong about that.

 
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TMTOWTSAC

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Is there any chance you can get your hands on another drive temporarily? That way you could image your drive, pop it out, pop the backup in, boot from a recovery disk, then restore the image to it. The intermediary drive doesn't have to be 3 TB, it only has to have enough free space to hold the contents of your source drive plus a tiny bit for the extra partitions. Like the System Reserved which is probably what's holding you up. Win 8.1 hid its imaging utility. According to Google, File History Control Panel (non-metro), System Image Backup.

Technically, you could just format the backup drive and save an image to that, then use it to restore your current system drive if the upgrade goes sideways. While it absolutely should work, I'm a little leary of not testing the backup first.
 
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ArtPog

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First of all, do not be concerned with the assignment of different drive letters on the destination drive following the disk-cloning operation. It is completely natural as a result of the disk-cloning operation as well as irrelevant because at that point the system is treating the destination drive as a secondary drive. When you subsequently boot to the destination drive and it becomes your primary system drive the drive letters will be appropriately assigned.

I really don't think you should run into any difficulty with your card reader slots as a result of the disk-cloning operation.

Presumably those partitions contain only a trifling amount of data so that should have negligible effect on reducing the disk-space capacity of the disk.

I'm apprehensive about advising you to delete any of those partitions because I'm not absolutely certain it won't have any negative effect on the system. The likelihood is that if the partition contains 0 amount of data there should be no reason why the partition should NOT be deleted, but because Win 10 is very new to us and strongly interwoven with the UEFI interface I'm loathe to recommend any of these changes (deletions) until we gain more experience with this OS. And as I've indicated there doesn't seem these "extraneous" partitions are causing any mischief.

One other comment...you are quite wise to clone the contents of your present boot drive to another drive and work with the clone as you gain experience with the Win 10 OS. (Naturally I'm assuming your source disk boots & functions properly). More users should follow your example.
 
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RamJacCorp

RamJacCorp

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Great suggestions, thanks TMTOWTSAC. Don't know if I want to fiddle with option #1 right now, but if I decide to format the backup drive and save an image to it, it's okay to blast the existing 128MB unformatted partition that the drive came with, correct?



 
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RamJacCorp

RamJacCorp

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Thanks for the followup info and advice, ArtPog. Four of the Unallocated partitions have 0 bytes used, so it's really tempting to delete them, but I'm going to refrain for now. My main concern is having a working replacement drive for emergencies. Already had one major loss when a drive died and the backup failed on me.

I'm going to hold off on the Win 10 upgrade as long as possible, since Dell kindly decided not to test the XPS 8500's to verify compatibility.

 
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ArtPog

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Frankly, I'm quite confused with your situation based upon the Disk Management schematic you sent some minutes ago which you described as your current system. It seems to totally contradict the info you previously supplied.

According to DM your "cloned" destination drive is no clone at all. DM showed virtually the total disk-space of that destination HDD as unallocated. Am I missing something here?
 
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RamJacCorp

RamJacCorp

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Sorry for the confusion. I haven't performed the clone yet! Just wanted to share the list of partitions on the source drive, and show the unallocated 128 MB partition on the destination drive. Hope that clarifies things.

 
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TMTOWTSAC

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It's ok. When you format a drive you build a new GPT anyway. If the drive is already formatted you can skip that part. Images save themselves as a standard folder with a couple files in them. They often look weird in explorer, reporting things like 0 files/0 bytes. And require admin privs to delete. But you can save them to anything Windows can read with enough free space. Just check disk free space before and after to verify it saved.

It's your source drive's partitions that need to be preserved, which imaging would do. I think Dell's have at least one "oem partition" which stores some proprietary drivers and ID's and whatnot. Not sure why you've got 12, but if they're not taking up significant space and it's working I wouldn't mess with them.
 
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RamJacCorp

RamJacCorp

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I cloned the drive yesterday, and the results were interesting. The partition count rose from 12 to 14. The 3 partitions containing actual data all changed sizes, the most dramatic change being the "Diags" (FAT 32) one (Dell diagnostics, I believe), which went from 40 MB to a whopping 422 GB! The word "clone" hardly seems appropriate to describe that process. It looks like your idea of creating an image on that drive is a wiser one at this point.

 
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