Database Users

I dual booted with gag. When I run W8 it thinks its the C drive

This has probably been addressed but here goes....
I partitioned a drive for W8, called it drive P. Loaded W8 and ran it, worked nicely and wanted to go install gag. Once I installed gag I ran W8 again and it worked ok again. Then I wanted to use my W7 and tried to get to it, and for some reason I have to go through the Windows bootloader. Where you get a dos style screen and have to choose between W7 or W8 (keep in mind this is after you make your selection using gag), I choose W7. It got stuck on the loading screen (the one where it ways "windows 7" below the windows icon. Had to turn off my comp cause it wouldn't get past that screen.
Then I went into W8, which loaded fine and opened the disk management. It said that my main hard drive partition which has W7 and all of my files on it was completely empty and no longer named the "C" drive. Now my drive with W8 was called the "C" drive.
So I ran uninstalled/reinstalled GAG and somehow I got back to W7 with all of my files there.
But im afraid to run W8 again since I feel like W8 needs to run on the C drive, and im worried I might actually lose my real C drive.
Can someone explain what is going on with my comp, and a safe way to boot between the two OS'?

Its built into windows 8.
This is what I did.
Used disk management within windows 7 to shrink the partition its currently on. Shrunk it 50g.
Now you will have an unformatted partition. Use mini partition tool to format to ntfs. Also assign the partition a drive letter. I used W.
Now use magic disc to mount the windows 8 ISO to the virtual drive.
Don't run setup. Open the drive so you can see the contents of the ISO.
Now in the sources folder run the setup.exe, Not the one on the root of the ISO.
Setup will start. Install windows 8 to the partition you just made.
Let windows 8 complete setup and get all the way to the desktop or metro UI.
Restart your computer.
During the loading you will come across a screen that allows you to choose the OS. Now by default it times out at 5 seconds. At the bottom of the screen you'll see choose default OS and other settings. Click that within 5 seconds.
Change that to whatever you want. I changed mine to 30 seconds to give me enough time.
I had a similar issue when cloning my drive to an external to take with me using pwboot. Windows 8 would load fine but windows 7 wouldn't. But worked just fine on my internal drive. Mostly just use my external to use my old gateway with a broken internal hdd. Seriously hard to find an old school 2.5" IDE hdd. But windows 8 couldn't install my video card driver for s-video out so I stuck with just windows 7 on my external and never figured out the problem. Dual booting on my aspire one works like a champ though.
Sent from my HD7 using XDA Windows Phone 7 App

[Q] 1st time SSD upgrade- Is it possible to avoid a reinstall?

So I'm considering throwing in my first SSD. I'm looking at nothing too fancy (OCZ Vertex 4 128GB SATA3 6GB/s, Read: 560MB/s, Write: 430MB/s).
I already have Windows 8 Pro installed and activated on a 500 Sata HD. I'd ideally like to throw in the SSD and have Windows running off of that. Now I've already seen a lot of posts recommended a clean install. Which I'd like to avoid if possible. I'm wondering if I could say, create a back up image of my C: from my SATA drive, wipe everything, install the SSD and do a fresh Win 8 install. Then once I'm up and running restore that image.
Or use some other Windows 8 recovery feature to back up files, settings and apps.
Anyone know if this is possible within Windows 8? I'm ultimately trying to avoid as much reinstalling of apps and programs as possible.

It doesn't hurt to find out. Do your image backup, pull out the HDD, plug in the SSD, and restore. If it works, great. If not, plug the HDD back in and figure out an alternative.
I don't see why that wouldn't work, other than Win8 installing any needed driver for the SSD, and perhaps a re-auth, since a HDD change qualifies as a "major" config change.
I'm assuming you already have a good image backup program handy.

So I guess I'd lose my activation key?

Try reading some articles about it? I have no experience with it so i have no idea:
http://lifehacker.com/5837543/how-to-migrate-to-a-solid+state-drive-without-reinstalling-windows

why don't you just ghost the drive this is what I do. I forget the name of the software I use but it is free and really easy and you can ghost the drive you on as it runs before windows boots. I will update once I have found the software as its been a while since I needed to do this.
edit: I don't have it on my laptop and I wont be back to work till Monday but if you google clone hard drive there are many options. You want one that will clone the running partition.
http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/home-edition/

pistol44 said:
So I guess I'd lose my activation key?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Although I have never tried it, you can backup your windows activation activation following this:
http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/35737-GUIDE-How-to-backup-and-restore-Windows-8-activation

or just clone the harddrive like I said then its all just as if it was on the old you just plug new one in and off you go, then format the old one once tested. 2 points on this your going back into same hardware so that does not matter and windows 8 you can take the hdd out of a pc plug it into diff hardware and off you go after a slightly longer boot. I have swapped from an amd fx based desktop and put into an intel Centrino laptop and worked. I did this after cloning the drive so both desktop and laptop have activated windows 8 from same cloned hard drive (bit odd though as seems to avoid the need for keys and could be a work around to distro win 8)

pistol44 said:
So I'm considering throwing in my first SSD. I'm looking at nothing too fancy (OCZ Vertex 4 128GB SATA3 6GB/s, Read: 560MB/s, Write: 430MB/s).
I already have Windows 8 Pro installed and activated on a 500 Sata HD. I'd ideally like to throw in the SSD and have Windows running off of that. Now I've already seen a lot of posts recommended a clean install. Which I'd like to avoid if possible. I'm wondering if I could say, create a back up image of my C: from my SATA drive, wipe everything, install the SSD and do a fresh Win 8 install. Then once I'm up and running restore that image.
Or use some other Windows 8 recovery feature to back up files, settings and apps.
Anyone know if this is possible within Windows 8? I'm ultimately trying to avoid as much reinstalling of apps and programs as possible.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Are you more worried about your desktop apps or your RT apps? If you have signed in with a Microsoft account and you are on your Trusted PC, your RT app settings will transfer to the new installs and you already know most RT apps install super fast.
If you are worried about your desktop apps, they will install much faster on an SSD drive and just make a backup copy of your "AppData" folder. That's what I did when refreshing my PC caused a bunch of errors and I re-installed.
Windows 8 uses different algorithms for SSDs than for HDDs so ghosting your drive is a bad idea.

dragon_76 said:
Are you more worried about your desktop apps or your RT apps? If you have signed in with a Microsoft account and you are on your Trusted PC, your RT app settings will transfer to the new installs and you already know most RT apps install super fast.
If you are worried about your desktop apps, they will install much faster on an SSD drive and just make a backup copy of your "AppData" folder. That's what I did when refreshing my PC caused a bunch of errors and I re-installed.
Windows 8 uses different algorithms for SSDs than for HDDs so ghosting your drive is a bad idea.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
True, the RT apps will come back after the install.. I guess I was more concerned for the 15 to 20 games I had installed. I'm looking at a good 4-6 hours of re-install time to get it back to the same state I'm at now. All personal items are backed up externally so I'm ok there.
I guess I've considered just re-installing from scratch now. But last question is will I need to re-activate Windows 8 if I'm adding an SSD? Since I'll be formatting my current HDD, installing an SSD which I'll want the OS running off of I guess there's no way to do a fresh install and keep activation since I'll be formatting the drive the OS is on.
Can I hypothetically, install the SSD initiate a Windows "reset" and hope that it gives me the choice to format my old HDD and install to the new SSD. For some reason I think not. Or do I need to image my C: drive, install the SSD then copy the image over then do a reset? I'm so confused..

pistol44 said:
True, the RT apps will come back after the install.. I guess I was more concerned for the 15 to 20 games I had installed. I'm looking at a good 4-6 hours of re-install time to get it back to the same state I'm at now. All personal items are backed up externally so I'm ok there.
I guess I've considered just re-installing from scratch now. But last question is will I need to re-activate Windows 8 if I'm adding an SSD? Since I'll be formatting my current HDD, installing an SSD which I'll want the OS running off of I guess there's no way to do a fresh install and keep activation since I'll be formatting the drive the OS is on.
Can I hypothetically, install the SSD initiate a Windows "reset" and hope that it gives me the choice to format my old HDD and install to the new SSD. For some reason I think not. Or do I need to image my C: drive, install the SSD then copy the image over then do a reset? I'm so confused..
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You can type in your serial and it will fail to activate by internet. Select to activate by phone and it should work, deactivating your old, erased installation.
Sent from my SCH-I510 using Tapatalk 2

Windows 8 and Asus takes HALF of SSD Space?!

I just got an Asus Zenbook UX31A.
It has a 128 GB of SSD. but when I went to Desktop > File Explorer > Desktop > Computer.
Where it says Hard Disk Drives (1), it says that I have 65.5 GB free of 93.9 GB. WHAT THE HELL?!
I bought this laptop cause it has a 128 GB SSD, and I know that I won't get all 128 GB of space, but the fact that HALF is already taking space?!
How can I find out what it is, and how do I remove it?!
Thank you.

There is a windows 8 recovery partition using about 10gb (this can be moved to USB).
ASUS may also have a recovery partition.
Normally on a 128gb drive you would only expect about 110 to be usable.
Of what is used on the C drive. Windows 8 alone takes up a good 10-15gb. Apps add more onto that. Anything asus preinstall adds onto that again.

Ok, so how can I remove these recovery partitions? or should I not remove them at all?
I'm thinking of installing this: http://download.cnet.com/Advanced-U...9986.html?tag=dropDownForm;productListing;pop
to uninstall some stuff. Probably all asus apps.

xMoKax said:
Ok, so how can I remove these recovery partitions? or should I not remove them at all?
I'm thinking of installing this: http://download.cnet.com/Advanced-U...9986.html?tag=dropDownForm;productListing;pop
to uninstall some stuff. Probably all asus apps.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
i would open up disk manager (type disk under settings in start and click on create and format disk partitions), and see what is there. if you post a screen shot of the program open, ill look at it and tell you

Is this what you wanted to see?

Here is another screenshot, after I opened OS (C:

So, five partitions. The first one is the boot partition (it's usually only 200MB and can happily fit in less, but that doesn't matter much). Don't mess with it. Technically it's only required that you use a separate boot partition when using BitLocker, but it's a pretty good setup.
The second is nearly a gig of some kind of recovery data. It's too small to be the Win8 recovery installer, so I'm guessing it's some pile of Asus-specific crap that probably isn't even useful enough to be something like a bunch of drivers that you could download newer versions of from their website; more likely its useless garbage like that wallpaper it comes with and other pointless stuff. Check before deleting it, I guess, but it should be safe to kill.
The third is your OS volume. It is, as you noted, less than 80% of the SSD's size.
The fourth is probably the standard Win8 recovery image. It's basically a Win8 install DVD, and its purpose is to allow the use of the "Reset" functionality to wipe the OS clean - essentially just automating the "format and reinstall" process. It also can be used to repair a system that becomes damaged or to manually reinstall Windows if you manage to nuke the OS partition so hard you can't use the Reset feature. This partition can usually be safely removed after writing it to a DVD or Flashdrive; there are steps and utilities for doing so.
The fifth is the real hog that's using up your space, being almost four times as large as all the other non-OS volumes put together and taking up about 18% of the total capacity of the drive. My guess is that this is the image used to restore the OS to exactly the state it was in when you bought it (Asus pre-installed-crapware and all). It's almost certainly a complete waste of space, unless you paid for a copy of Office or something when you bought the computer and the re-installer is on there. Anyhow, that partition as a whole is too big to copy off to anything except a large flashdrive/SD card/etc., an external HD, or a blu-ray disk, but it *might* be possible to mount it and find any parts that are actually of any real value and blow the rest.
If you're interested, here's what I would do (it's what I do, and recommend doing, with *any* new PC): now that you've verified that the OS boots up, the hardware works, etc, prepare a bootable flashdrive, put the Windows installer on it (should be possible to get it from the 4GB recovery volume; as I said, there are steps and utilities to do this), download all the drivers for the hardware from the OEM's site (Asus.com in this case) and put them on the flashdrive too, then reboot from the flashdrive. Choose to do a custom install of Windows, delete every single partition from the existing scheme, select the resulting unpartitioned space, and tell Windows to install there (it will set up a sane partition scheme for you). This process removes unwanted partitions, removes OEM garbage (which can be a pain to remove otherwise), gives you a clean Windows install without the horriffic tampering the OEMs like to do (interesting fact: I ran Vista, and found it just fine and far better than XP, with no crashes since RTM on my clean-installed copy... until I tried using an OEM copy on somebody else's machine - more powerful than mine, mind you - and discovered what all the complaints about slowness and crashing came from; the difference between an OEM and a clean retail copy of the OS were astonishing and painful), and puts you in control of the disk usage.

Follow this

GoodDayToDie said:
So, five partitions. The first one is the boot partition (it's usually only 200MB and can happily fit in less, but that doesn't matter much). Don't mess with it. Technically it's only required that you use a separate boot partition when using BitLocker, but it's a pretty good setup.
The second is nearly a gig of some kind of recovery data. It's too small to be the Win8 recovery installer, so I'm guessing it's some pile of Asus-specific crap that probably isn't even useful enough to be something like a bunch of drivers that you could download newer versions of from their website; more likely its useless garbage like that wallpaper it comes with and other pointless stuff. Check before deleting it, I guess, but it should be safe to kill.
The third is your OS volume. It is, as you noted, less than 80% of the SSD's size.
The fourth is probably the standard Win8 recovery image. It's basically a Win8 install DVD, and its purpose is to allow the use of the "Reset" functionality to wipe the OS clean - essentially just automating the "format and reinstall" process. It also can be used to repair a system that becomes damaged or to manually reinstall Windows if you manage to nuke the OS partition so hard you can't use the Reset feature. This partition can usually be safely removed after writing it to a DVD or Flashdrive; there are steps and utilities for doing so.
The fifth is the real hog that's using up your space, being almost four times as large as all the other non-OS volumes put together and taking up about 18% of the total capacity of the drive. My guess is that this is the image used to restore the OS to exactly the state it was in when you bought it (Asus pre-installed-crapware and all). It's almost certainly a complete waste of space, unless you paid for a copy of Office or something when you bought the computer and the re-installer is on there. Anyhow, that partition as a whole is too big to copy off to anything except a large flashdrive/SD card/etc., an external HD, or a blu-ray disk, but it *might* be possible to mount it and find any parts that are actually of any real value and blow the rest.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you for your response! So..
Partition 1: Don't Touch.
Partition 2: Asus bull****. Check first. OK to delete.
Partition 3: Volume. Don't Touch.
Partition 4: Win8 Recovery. OK to delete, after backup. Do I have to back it up to thumb drive? Can I back it up to an External Hard drive? DynamicRam told me to follow this: http://lifehacker.com/5991431/how-t...r-windows-8-and-free-up-some-hard-drive-space <Will that work?
Partition 5: I didn't buy a copy of Office, so I'm guessing that it is a complete waste of space. I'll try to mount it and see if there is anything that I would actually need [probably show you a screenshot], and delete the rest. If for some reason I'm not able to mount it, will I still be able to delete the contents inside?
GoodDayToDie said:
If you're interested, here's what I would do (it's what I do, and recommend doing, with *any* new PC): now that you've verified that the OS boots up, the hardware works, etc, prepare a bootable flashdrive, put the Windows installer on it (should be possible to get it from the 4GB recovery volume; as I said, there are steps and utilities to do this), download all the drivers for the hardware from the OEM's site (Asus.com in this case) and put them on the flashdrive too, then reboot from the flashdrive. Choose to do a custom install of Windows, delete every single partition from the existing scheme, select the resulting unpartitioned space, and tell Windows to install there (it will set up a sane partition scheme for you). This process removes unwanted partitions, removes OEM garbage (which can be a pain to remove otherwise), gives you a clean Windows install without the horriffic tampering the OEMs like to do (interesting fact: I ran Vista, and found it just fine and far better than XP, with no crashes since RTM on my clean-installed copy... until I tried using an OEM copy on somebody else's machine - more powerful than mine, mind you - and discovered what all the complaints about slowness and crashing came from; the difference between an OEM and a clean retail copy of the OS were astonishing and painful), and puts you in control of the disk usage.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This right here, you said to put the Windows installer in a flashdrive, and to get it from a 4gb recovery volume? So, you're saying that inside Partition 4, the Win8 Recovery, there will be the Windows installer inside, and the file will be 4gb in size?
I'm really wanting to use Ubuntu instead of Windows 8. Will my best bet be, to backup the Windows installer in a flashdrive, completely delete everything (except partition 1 and 3?), and install Ubuntu?

Also, according to this person:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HU_jEWT6w8
It's best for me to install Ubuntu 13.04, instead of 12.04, since 13.04 has Windows 8 UEFI Secure Boot BIOS support, whatever that means.
To sum up what I pretty much want to do, is to remove all bloatware and pretty much delete Windows 8 (but back it up, for warranty purposes, if something happens to my laptop), and have only Ubuntu on my laptop.
Is this possible?

Been doing research all night, came across this:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Installing-Ubuntu-13-04-348582.shtml
In the "Installation Type" section, it says you have a couple of options, and option 2 says:
"2. Erase OS and reinstall/Erase disk and install Ubuntu (if there's no OS on it)
- Choose this option ONLY if you have another OS and you want to install Ubuntu 13.04 on a fresh drive, replacing the existing OS. This option will completely wipe the target disk drive."
So, can I just select Partition 5, and will it completely wipe everything inside, and install only Ubuntu 13.04? Just wanting to know if this is possible or not. Instead of having to go through the 5th partition and deleting/backing up whatever I need, and then installing Ubuntu.

Windows 8 to SSD Installation

I've been having an absolutely horrendous time installing Window 8 onto an SSD i bought. Let me give you a rundown of what's going on.
I bought a 120gb SSD off of my friend for a new laptop I was getting. My intentions were to replace the 1TB HDD in this laptop with the SSD and use the HDD as an external, so I can have massive speed increases in everyday computing activity. Originally, I thought the laptop had 2 hard drive bays, making it simple to install Windows onto it. However, due to my negligence to pay attention, it turns out that this laptop only has 1 hard drive bay. So next, I say, "oh simple, I'll just get an external HDD enclosure and install windows that way." Nope, cockblocked by Microsoft on this one; I figure out the hard way that one cannot install Windows onto a device via usb. I then researched some more and found "Windows 7 USB DVD Download Tool". I tried installing Windows onto a flash drive, but then accidentally formatted my camera's 16gb memory card losing hundreds of pictures. In vain, I should add, since it didn't even work in the end. Currently, I am stuck on how to install windows 8 onto my external SSD to later swap with the internal HDD. Hopefully this paragraph made sense lol. Any help here is greatly appreciated.

You've got the enclosure you need for the 1TB drive, right? What's stopping you from swapping the drives now, and installing the OS on the SSD when it's mounted internally? Alternatively, create a new partition on the current drive that is the same size or smaller as the SSD, and then install Win8 there. You can then copy that partition (the whole thing, using something like dd on linux) to the SSD, although getting the bootloader to come along for the ride would be tricky.
Also, with all due respect, if you managed to lose hundreds of pictures that weren't yet copied off the camera card while attempting (and failing) to install Win8 on a flashdrive, this might be a "don't try this at home" moment. I'm sorry for your loss, and I realize it was probably a very simple accident - confusion of which drive you were targeting, perhaps - but messing around with disk partitioning and advanced installation techniques without somebody who knows what they're doing guiding you is a dangerous idea.

Windows 2 Go locks down a number of system features, which limit its usefulness as a day-to-day OS. There's some configuration in the registry that controls this, so you might be able to use the W2G installation and then "fix" it, but you may want to do some research into W2G before attempting this.

I guess one could call me a noob when it comes to Windows lol... my expertise is Android
So I can swap the ssd and hdd while the computer is running? Wouldn't that cause all sorts of errors? Because when I tried swapping them, I couldn't get windows to boot from the hdd (which was in the external enclosure)
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Take the HDD out. Put SSD in. Put windows install disk in (not upgrade disk, most disks sold are upgrade only, you need install). Boot from instrall disk, follow instructions.
The hard disk replacement can only be dome when powered off. SATA devices do not support hit swapping and may even be damaged by it.
We ignore the HDD completely. Once win8 is on the SSD then you can put the HDD in the USB enclosure, plug it into your laptop now running win 8 and retrieve your files.
Copying wijndiws between different hard disks rarely works in my experience.
Oh, for the SD thing. Partitioning SD cards is not recommended, not all laptops can boot from SD either so it may have been completely futile.

If you don't have an install disk (only upgrade), you can copy the contents of your current Windows OS volume onto the SSD and then do the swap, which should cause the installer to think you already have Windows installed (if perhaps in a corrupted form). If you can do a full partition clone, then it needn't even be a corrupted copy; you could simply clone Windows onto the SSD (it may demand to be reactivated if you do this; ignore that) and then use an upgrade install.
Contrary to the name, upgrade installs do not need to be in-place upgrades; you can in fact wipe the entire SSD (and I recommend you do so) using the advanced install options once the installer has verified that these is (or was) a Windows install there.

I've done it on my HP DV6, the process was with a samsung ssd to clone the hard drive on the ssd with the program furnished by samsung. I expect there are other programs doing the same. I used a second external HD to take the files that didn't enter the SSD (256 GB).
Then I swap the disks (SSD internal) and I replace the DVD reader by the old HD repartition and format it (Now I use an external DVD Writer.
Then I upraded with win 8.
Take a bit of time but works
I hope it helps
François
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Windows won't detect extSD card from Galaxy Tab A T380 since last firmware update

This might be the stupidest question ever, but has anyone else had total difficulty getting Windows to read the external SD card in their device when directly connecting their Tab A device to their PC via USB?
My device is new...it worked once registering my storage partition in Windows and hasn't again. Things that have happened since then: I updated to latest firmware with March 2018 painful security updates. May be no correlation but I thought I'd mention it.
As I was waiting for OEM unlock, I hadn't activated my ext4 partition but it still wouldn't work in Windows via USB....the card works FINE in Windows directly - I've taken it out of Samsung and put it directly into to my PC and Surface Pro and it reads storage fine. My partition software detects the app partition as well.
Then, I rooted with SuperSU/TWRPed and modded.....app partition activated successfully with Apps2SD and linked some data to it fine with Link2SD. No problems..... can't remember if I was getting the "corrupted" message I am now getting from Samsung then... I think maybe? Regardless, internally, both partitions were/are working just fine. On Windows it works fine as a stand alone card. But when I plug it in via USB inside my Tablet, I only get "Tablet" storage. This is driving me nuts. What's the point of that?
Then I switched to Magisk and the fun really started. Now, it shows what I appears to be my ext4 app partition as "corrupted" in Settings > Storage. It isn't by the way - it still works with my apps fine and the whole card is working fine (and I've run diagnostics on the card too). I have to add though, whether this was doing it between mount scripts and switching to Magisk I'm not 100% sure, it might have been.....but it's definitely there now. It's almost like it just doesn't like ext4 and doesn't really doesn't like those Mount Scripts.
Today I also reformat/repartitioned the card and did another slow error scan. So from scratch... the card is FINE as far as I can tell. This time it wouldn't mount at all since switching to Magisk. I've got it to mount through TWRP... so we're back working again. My ext4 app partition is working again with Link2SD but I'm still getting that annoying "corrupted" message in Settings > Storage WHEN IT ISN'T.
Is there some hidden settings somewhere in the stock ROM of 7.1.1 to change on the T380? Usually my devices let me pick from MTP, USB mass storage etc.... this one doesn't. It just connects to either Windows or my Surface and internal storage only.
I don't know what I'm really talking about... but it's almost like the system doesn't like that app partition... once it activated and had the Mount Scripts on it.... it was worse saying it was "corrupted" (when it isn't). Then we get back to my original problem which is getting the damn Fat32 to show up in Windows in the first place without having to take the card out of my tablet and plug it directly into Windows.
Any ideas? Thanks.
P.S. I even uninstalled and reinstalled all Samsung drivers.....dunno what to do
P.P.S. Could be an unrelated thing, but since masking everything from Samsung, when I do go to Settings now at some point between opening Settings and getting to the Storage section, I get a popup "SysScope has stopped" (or something similar). I'm not sure what that is.... but it's obviously trying to sniff around what I'm doing but I've blocked it. I doubt that's related to Fat32 and Windows, but wondering if its related to its dislike of my ext4 partition?