Database Users

Is it possible to backup the hidden vista partition onto dvd?

Shift is not shipped with any cd/dvd for system recovery
In case of hard drive crash, how are we gonna restore the system?
Is it possible to make system recovery disks by ourselves, just like what sony has been asking their nb buyers to do (to burn recovery disks by themselves)?

I think you could backup the restore partition to a DVD using something like Acronis Trueimage and then use Partition Magic or similar to delete the partition and extend the primary partition into this space increasing its size.
To be honest you may be as well do a full image onto another harddisk as a backup and have a suitable Acronis or similar bootdisk to allow a full image restore if the worst happens.

Recovery Partition
I have used BartPE to boot off an external USB DVD Writer.
From within BartPE you can then use Ghost to capture the ENTIRE drive.
The ***Hidden*** restore partition cannot be see by anything, not ghost, not partition magic, not acronis, it simply is not there.
My belief is that this is due to a BIOS restriction and the FN+F3 boot that does allow the restore is either.....
1. A special mode where the bios can see the hidden partition
2. The actual recovery image is on a separate flash area that we can't see.
Either way having the ghost will recover the hard drive.
I have installed both XP and Linux on the Shift and still been able to reboot, press FN+F3 and do a vista re-installation.
This makes me believe the image is on a separate flash device that only the BIOS section can see.
Hope this helps.
Blitz

[Q] CM7 boot partition Size

Hello,
Complete noob here and I am not ashamed to admit it. I did create a bootable sd card with CM7 stable on it and the card is partitioned into 4 spaces. The boot space only has a capacity of 117.63 MB, while the 4th partition named CM7 SDCARD has a whopping 28.21GB available.... 112.14MB used..... Im guessing for application. Anyways, I am trying to put books and videos on my NC and there is not enough space that is accessible. Any way to make that boot partition spave larger? Maybe move some of the extra space from the 4th partition? I have EASEUS Partition Master but I have been unable to get it to work..... Any help is greatly appreciated.
I did search for a post like this but did not find any answers which I understood.
Thanks in advance,

What is it that you are trying to do?
Homer

I am trying to put books on my sdcard that I downloaded on my computer for school. When I copy to the directory boot/myfiles/books it says that there is not enough space. So I want to enlarge the size of the boot partition

After you burn the partition image using Win32Image, the size of the boot partition is roughly 117mb. At this point use EASEUS partition to expand the boot partition to the size you want. In my 32gb SD card, I created a 16gb partition. Then I copied CM7.1 and Gapps to the partition, booted NC and CM7.1 was set up in the remaining space, with /data at 5gb and /media at 9gb.

Would you then access the files while booting from the SDcard or internal memory (eMMC)?
If you want to see them when booting from SDcard, don't put them on /boot as you have found out there is not much room. You want them on partition 4. Remember that Windows will not mount partition 4 without some heroic efforts. I use either NookColor UMS (free, see here) or WiFi Explorer Pro (paid, check either Android or Amazon Market).
If you want to see them when booting from eMMC, that is slightly more advanced. You don't have to root, but there is a file on the system on eMMC that needs to be edited to mount partition 4 rather than partition 1. It would take some time to search for it, but someone posted a guide a while back. Search for something like sharing SDcard and/or editing vold.
Homer

Ok...... So I got the boot partition resized to around 20gb and I have copied the books from my hd to the sd card E:\My Files\Books...... Problem is I now cannot acess them when I boot CM7..... Any fix to this or will I have to boot from the eMMC?

Ok....
You're making the easy stuff hard...
You want a large partition that is accessible by CM7 running off the SD and your windows PC. Like Homer said, it is nigh impossible to get windows to mount secondary partitions off of an SD card reader. What he forgot is that CM7 allows you to access partitions 3 and 4 over USB. CM7 can access the boot partition but most apps won't look there and it won't be accessible over USB.
I would recommend that you restart from scratch. Allow verygreens installer to set up the default partitions. Plug your device into your PC and transfer your pdfs to partition 4 that-a-ways. That way you won't have to remove the sd card anytime you want to access your pdf folder.

Even when you plug the CM7 booted NC into your PC, you still need to mount the /sdcard partition to Windows. I find it is easiest to use NookColorUMS on the NC to mount that partition, see above. Otherwise, when you plug into the Windows machine you only get /boot mounted.
Homer

Homer_S_xda said:
Even when you plug the CM7 booted NC into your PC, you still need to mount the /sdcard partition to Windows. I find it is easiest to use NookColorUMS on the NC to mount that partition, see above. Otherwise, when you plug into the Windows machine you only get /boot mounted.
Homer
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hmm, when I plugged a nook running CM7 from SD card, I get access to /media and /sdcard. I had to move the gapps.zip from /sdcard to /boot manually using a file explorer.

I'm offering an apology to gall and Homer first so pls don't jump on me.
You guys harden a simple issue and confusing the OP.
To OP,
I assume you got a 32GB uSD card, using verygreen's image. You got 117MB on boot.
LEAVE the boot partition ALONE. The only thing you should put there are the ROM (CM7 zip file) and the GApp zip file. NOTHING ELSE. Your music/ebook/video, etc. should NEVER go there. You will place them in the left-over storage created by CM7, normally called CM7SDCARD.
How do you access CM7SDCARD so that you can transfer files over?
The only way is
+ NC on
+ connecting NC to PC (windows)
+ look at the NC notification bar, usb icon should be displayed
+ tap on it, enable usb mass storage (connect to PC for file transferring....)
+ Windows PC should by now recognized the CM7SDCARD and ready for use.
That's the ONLY WAY and the correct way.
If you use that bootable CM7 uSD and plug directly into PC, you only see the boot partition which only 117MB. Again, the boot partition is NOT meant for personal stuff.

What may confuse some people is that when they plug the device into PC then it does not by default auto-mount so you don't get a drive in the PC until you use the USB notification and turn on USB storage.
For non-techie users I normally install the automount USB app from JRTStudio so the drive pops up straight away on the PC and there is no confusion over this point.
The other good reason for using the USB (or alternatively wireless connections like ES File Explorer) is that it reduces taking the SD card in and out and any risk of damaging the socket.

My apologies, I never checked out the USB notification. I sort of ignored it. It seems a handy implementation of the basic functionality of NooKColorUMS.
What is MyNOOKColor though? CM7 SDcard is the one I typically use. Nevermind: it is the eMMC. I never bothered with that one since going to SDcard boot.
Homer

i need a bit of help in partitioning.

sorry if in the wrong section but i need a bit of help in partitioning a hard drive.
see attachment
i have shrunk a partition and i want to put it back but has somehow been separated from it's host (C: drive) and the efi drive is now in the way so now i cant merge the D: partition back to the C: partition because there no longer neighbors. how can i move the EFI partition over or the D: partition so that i can merge them back together?

xdarkmario said:
sorry if in the wrong section but i need a bit of help in partitioning a hard drive.
see attachment
i have shrunk a partition and i want to put it back but has somehow been separated from it's host (C: drive) and the efi drive is now in the way so now i cant merge the D: partition back to the C: partition because there no longer neighbors. how can i move the EFI partition over or the D: partition so that i can merge them back together?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I do not believe you can merge partitions while the system is running. If i remember correctly, you have to reformat the entire hard drive in order to do that. Taking away from one partition is an operation which usually has no way of undoing without losing data.

You need a couple of utils.
MiniTool Partition Wizard (freeware) http://partitionwizard.com
Acronis True Image 2014 (trialware) http://acronis.com/homecomputing/trueimage
Make a bootable USB from each of the provided tools. The TrueImage boot USB will work w/o limitation (trialware only affects the Windows app). You only need the boot images; once that's done, you can uninstall the tools.
Am assuming that D: is empty. Boot to USB and use TrueImg to back up the ESP (EFI system partition). If C: has user data, back it up as well (onto a separate storage device). Use PartWiz to nuke the D: and ESP partitions, recreate a 200MB partition at the end of the drive, and expand C: to fill the rest. Use TrueImg to restore the ESP to the 200MB partition.

This kind of thing can also be done from any Linux liveCD worth mentioning; they all include parted and usually a graphical front-end to it (either gparted or qtparted, sometimes something else too). Parted is capable of moving partitions and of resizing them.

Help restoring system image

Hello, I recently had to send in my laptop to get a speaker fixed and was told to make a backup, as the laptop would be reset, I made a system image tested it before I sent it in, it restored fine, but now that I got it back I was no longer able to restore it, it gave me the message "To restore this computer. Windows needs to format the drive that the Windows recovery Environment is currently running on. To continue with the restore, shut down this computer and boot it from a windows installation disk or a system repair disc and then try to restore again." Now the problem is I have tried this, I got hp to send me a recovery disk, but there is no option to restore the system image, it goes straight to resetting the computer it does not have the advance startup options. I have made my own recovery disk using the windows 8 tool and tried, that has the advanced startup options but gives me the same message when in try to restore it. I also have a system image of when i first got the laptop back from them, but i could not restore that either. I have tired near everything ( I just don't want to type out everything I did) any help would be appreciated, If you need anymore details just ask.

Is there at least some way to make a better recovery media, or a windows 8 installation usb? Theres gotta be a way because I know when I tested my image it restored before i sent it in perfectly

What device did you put the recovery image on?
By the way, it's very common and easy to put the recovery tools on a bootable flashdrive; it's included on the install media, so just follow the steps for making a bootable install image on a flashdrive.

GoodDayToDie said:
What device did you put the recovery image on?
By the way, it's very common and easy to put the recovery tools on a bootable flashdrive; it's included on the install media, so just follow the steps for making a bootable install image on a flashdrive.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Its on one partition of an external hard drive I have, and is what you are talking about above available for win 8.1? Lately I've tried looking for a windows 8.1 iso to make a bootable drive from but cant seem to find one that works. Also thank you for your help

... Huh. If it's on an external drive, then the error you're getting doesn't make a lot of sense anyhow. (But then, I guess you knew that.)
Creating a bootable flash drive is easy. You can either use one of a handful of tools, or just do it manually using diskpart on the command line. Wipe the drive, make sure it's using MBR, create one partition, mark that partition Active, format it FAT32. Then just copy (literally, you can use Explorer for this step if you want) the entire contents of the boot media, such as the DVD, onto your flashdrive. If you don't have a DVD drive to boot from for this part, you can mount the ISO or use 7-Zip to extract the contents of the .ISO file system.
If you *do* have a DVD drive or other bootable media, it should certainly be possible to enter the recovery environment for your OS. The actual steps to restore your backup from there, though, are less clear to me; I've never used the Win8 recovery tools.

I can't find a working iso for windows 8.1, but I noticed that the recovery media I have has the bootx64.efi set up in a weird way which is probably why its not booting into the options I need to restore the image. I tried to make one on a separate USB combining the two I have with the factores image but the boot and efi folders from the other that gives me the options but that would not show up at all to boot into

Thanks for your help, should I mark this as solved

Install from USB to hard drive (without OS)

Hi,
I was able to install it in USB, and it is booting from USB. But I want to install it on the hard drive. There is no option in the grub menu to install on hard drive...
Can I edit the grub to make it possible to install on the hard drive?
Any tutorial to make it work from HD?
I believe the option to install on hard drive was there with older versions... As I can see on the screenshots here: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/android-pc-phoenix-os/

P.O.S as main OS
Create two partitions, 8gb FAT32 for GRUB thingy and the rest is EXT4. Boot from USB, make sure the whole Phoenix OS is installed on the EXT4 partition, GRUB will automatically installs on the FAT32 one..