win 8.1 backup and disk questions

Hello all,

MIL poured coffee over her laptop and purchased a refurbished Asus. i3
processor with 6gig ram and 500 gig HD. I have not had any prior
experience with win 8 machines, except for having tried to keep up
reading here in anticipation of upgrading at some time.

That said, I knew there was a chance the restore partition would be
removed in the refurbishing process. The only thing that came with the
laptop was one sheet of paper describing how the HD was wiped to remove
any possible personal information of the previous owner, and that in
fact the restore partition was removed, making the Asus restore disk
program unusable.

Once I fired it up, explorer showed two drives. C with 186 gig and D
with 258 gig. Right off the bat, I could not see why this was done if
the drive was formatted. Why wasn't it now a single drive?

I'm not 100% sure if I am correct in my conclusion that my best bet to
get them some kind of recovery solution would be to image the drive or
not? But since the recovery partition was supposedly removed, I thought
I didn't have any choice as they wouldn't have the necessary backup
media even if I did create the windows boot disc. So I set up to make
an image.

It was only loaded with win 8, so not wanting to have to do all the
updates again, I rolled the dice and installed around 100 updates, and
then installed the 8.1 upgrade. I loaded Macrium to make a boot disc
and create an image. This is where it gets funny. I took a screenshot
of what it came up with for partitions.

http://webpages.charter.net/wolverine01/Misc/disk.jpg

I hoping someone can shed some light here as to what the first three
partitions are, why they are not all NTFS, and why one is unformatted?
It also appears that the 7th partition is the restore partition and is
actually still there? Can this be recovered? Should I use a disk
utility and get rid of the D partition?

The imaging process is also confusing to me. I did an image for it in
two ways to be safe, and am now doing the additional 45 or so windows
updates since 8.1 upgrade was done. First I did the right click in
explorer and told Macrium to make an image of the C drive. But I'm not
sure exactly what that all included if you look at the image above, so I
also made an image of all 7 partitions after actually opening Macrium
and going through it's dialogue boxes.

I've found this group pretty knowledgeable and helpful and appreciate
any help you folks can give me here.
Thanks.

sticks

On 12/26/2014 11:38 AM, sticks wrote:
Hello all,

MIL poured coffee over her laptop and purchased a refurbished Asus. i3
processor with 6gig ram and 500 gig HD. I have not had any prior
experience with win 8 machines, except for having tried to keep up
reading here in anticipation of upgrading at some time.

That said, I knew there was a chance the restore partition would be
removed in the refurbishing process. The only thing that came with the
laptop was one sheet of paper describing how the HD was wiped to remove
any possible personal information of the previous owner, and that in
fact the restore partition was removed, making the Asus restore disk
program unusable.

Once I fired it up, explorer showed two drives. C with 186 gig and D
with 258 gig. Right off the bat, I could not see why this was done if
the drive was formatted. Why wasn't it now a single drive?

I'm not 100% sure if I am correct in my conclusion that my best bet to
get them some kind of recovery solution would be to image the drive or
not? But since the recovery partition was supposedly removed, I thought
I didn't have any choice as they wouldn't have the necessary backup
media even if I did create the windows boot disc. So I set up to make
an image.

It was only loaded with win 8, so not wanting to have to do all the
updates again, I rolled the dice and installed around 100 updates, and
then installed the 8.1 upgrade. I loaded Macrium to make a boot disc
and create an image. This is where it gets funny. I took a screenshot
of what it came up with for partitions.

http://webpages.charter.net/wolverine01/Misc/disk.jpg



That's the most "messed up" partitioning scheme I've ever seen.

Have them return the laptop and get one from some place that knows what
they are doing. It can be fixed but that should not be your responsibility.

sticks wrote:
Hello all,

MIL poured coffee over her laptop and purchased a refurbished Asus. i3
processor with 6gig ram and 500 gig HD. I have not had any prior
experience with win 8 machines, except for having tried to keep up
reading here in anticipation of upgrading at some time.

That said, I knew there was a chance the restore partition would be
removed in the refurbishing process. The only thing that came with the
laptop was one sheet of paper describing how the HD was wiped to remove
any possible personal information of the previous owner, and that in
fact the restore partition was removed, making the Asus restore disk
program unusable.

Once I fired it up, explorer showed two drives. C with 186 gig and D
with 258 gig. Right off the bat, I could not see why this was done if
the drive was formatted. Why wasn't it now a single drive?

I'm not 100% sure if I am correct in my conclusion that my best bet to
get them some kind of recovery solution would be to image the drive or
not? But since the recovery partition was supposedly removed, I thought
I didn't have any choice as they wouldn't have the necessary backup
media even if I did create the windows boot disc. So I set up to make
an image.

It was only loaded with win 8, so not wanting to have to do all the
updates again, I rolled the dice and installed around 100 updates, and
then installed the 8.1 upgrade. I loaded Macrium to make a boot disc
and create an image. This is where it gets funny. I took a screenshot
of what it came up with for partitions.

http://webpages.charter.net/wolverine01/Misc/disk.jpg

I hoping someone can shed some light here as to what the first three
partitions are, why they are not all NTFS, and why one is unformatted?
It also appears that the 7th partition is the restore partition and is
actually still there? Can this be recovered? Should I use a disk
utility and get rid of the D partition?

The imaging process is also confusing to me. I did an image for it in
two ways to be safe, and am now doing the additional 45 or so windows
updates since 8.1 upgrade was done. First I did the right click in
explorer and told Macrium to make an image of the C drive. But I'm not
sure exactly what that all included if you look at the image above, so I
also made an image of all 7 partitions after actually opening Macrium
and going through it's dialogue boxes.

I've found this group pretty knowledgeable and helpful and appreciate
any help you folks can give me here.
Thanks.

sticks


The disk is GPT and not MBR.

An MBR disk is also known as "MSDOS", referring to its ancient
and venerable design. It supports four primary partitions, and
has a 2.2TB limitation (32 bit LBA BIOS boot limitation, 512 byte sectors).

Since bigger disks have been invented, a newer "GUID partition table"
means of preparing the disks was found. Such a GPT disk, still has
an MBR for sector 0, but like the Apple method, the MBR is "protective"
and if older MBR-only partition management software is used, it basically
sees a partition type that warns it is GPT. That's so you don't
trash the disk, using Partition Magic. GPT needs a newer
partition management software (and there are some free ones).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table

In GPT, *everything* looks like a partition, and the
result is a bewildering set of partitions seen in
Disk Management.

I'm not going to attempt to parse your setup. Simply use
Macrium to backup the whole thing. And you can worry about
what to restore, some other day :-)

*******

To my way of thinking, the single most important item, is
the license key. If the machine is a real OEM Windows 8 machine,
the license key is stored in the BIOS. On older OSes,
we relied as well, on a license key on a COA sticker.
That was the "proof of purchase" in a sense.

Now, would a refurbisher blow away the key in the BIOS ?
Or is it still there ? The neat thing about the Windows 8
key in the BIOS, is it will activate either the OEM Win8,
or it will activate the Retail Win8 if you install a
comparable version.

So if you ever need to reinstall with a Torrent-transferred
MSDN subscription DVD, the key in the BIOS should do it
for you.

On the other hand, if the machine was originally Windows 7,
and has Windows 8 loaded on it, you would really want a
COA sticker on the outside of the PC. Windows 7 OEM (or older)
machines, they have a SLIC table in the BIOS (which is not
a license key, and basically declares "it's a Dell" kinda thing).
A SLIC table activates an OEM OS installation (where the
OS says "it's a Dell" as well). The Windows 8 OSes are not
SLIC activated. Windows 8 can use a COA key in a retail box
(or equivalent, which someone will undoubtedly argue about),
or if the machine is an OEM Win8 machine with the actual
key in the BIOS, it'll do the right thing for you, and
provide the key with no fuss.

Some tools for product keys (with the emphasis on Windows 8)

http://www.technize.net/windows-8-product-key-bios/

Belarc Advisor
"extract the product key from Windows Registry"
ProduKey (Nirsoft)
produkey.exe /WindowsKeys
KeyFinder (The Magical Jelly Bean)
[likely registry based...]

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/product_cd_key_viewer.html

"Version 1.70 - Added support for BIOS OEM Key (Windows 8)."

So it looks like the Nirsoft one, goes right to the source.
Give it a try and see what it says. I'd rather start with
the keyfinders I haven't used before, on the off-chance
they don't use the Registry. As verifying the machine
is Win8 era (and has a key in the BIOS) is important to
future installations.

Paul

On 12/26/2014 1:30 PM, philo wrote:
On 12/26/2014 11:38 AM, sticks wrote:
Hello all,

MIL poured coffee over her laptop and purchased a refurbished Asus. i3
processor with 6gig ram and 500 gig HD. I have not had any prior
experience with win 8 machines, except for having tried to keep up
reading here in anticipation of upgrading at some time.

That said, I knew there was a chance the restore partition would be
removed in the refurbishing process. The only thing that came with the
laptop was one sheet of paper describing how the HD was wiped to remove
any possible personal information of the previous owner, and that in
fact the restore partition was removed, making the Asus restore disk
program unusable.

Once I fired it up, explorer showed two drives. C with 186 gig and D
with 258 gig. Right off the bat, I could not see why this was done if
the drive was formatted. Why wasn't it now a single drive?

I'm not 100% sure if I am correct in my conclusion that my best bet to
get them some kind of recovery solution would be to image the drive or
not? But since the recovery partition was supposedly removed, I thought
I didn't have any choice as they wouldn't have the necessary backup
media even if I did create the windows boot disc. So I set up to make
an image.

It was only loaded with win 8, so not wanting to have to do all the
updates again, I rolled the dice and installed around 100 updates, and
then installed the 8.1 upgrade. I loaded Macrium to make a boot disc
and create an image. This is where it gets funny. I took a screenshot
of what it came up with for partitions.

http://webpages.charter.net/wolverine01/Misc/disk.jpg



That's the most "messed up" partitioning scheme I've ever seen.

Have them return the laptop and get one from some place that knows what
they are doing. It can be fixed but that should not be your responsibility.


In windows 8, the restore partition does not show up in the File
Explorer, you must go to the Disk Management function to see if it is
still there. On my 500 GB drive, there are two partitions one 260 MG
called Healthy EFI System Partition and the other 350 MB Healthy
Recovery Partition.

As I understand Windows 8.1 does not create a new recover partition, so
once you have updated to Windows 8.1, if you do have to restore from the
disk you would have to go thorough ALL of the updates including Windows
8.1 again.

I would recommend that the first thing you do is to go to the Desktop
tool bar Properties and set it to open to the desktop. Then in the same
place as the old Start Button you will see an MS Icon. Right clicking
on this icon will give you access to all of the computer functions.
Having set up a couple of computers, I know when you can not find
something it cause a lot of frustration. Setting it to the desktop
remove the frustration in trying to do it by chasing the Metro/Modern Icons

On Fri, 26 Dec 2014 12:30:36 -0600, philo* wrote:

On 12/26/2014 11:38 AM, sticks wrote:

It was only loaded with win 8, so not wanting to have to do all the
updates again, I rolled the dice and installed around 100 updates, and
then installed the 8.1 upgrade. I loaded Macrium to make a boot disc
and create an image. This is where it gets funny. I took a screenshot
of what it came up with for partitions.

http://webpages.charter.net/wolverine01/Misc/disk.jpg



That's the most "messed up" partitioning scheme I've ever seen.

Have them return the laptop and get one from some place that knows what
they are doing. It can be fixed but that should not be your responsibility.

It looks quite normal (for Win 8.x) to me. My Dell laptop is the same way.

On 12/26/2014 02:04 PM, Char Jackson wrote:
On Fri, 26 Dec 2014 12:30:36 -0600, philo wrote:

On 12/26/2014 11:38 AM, sticks wrote:

It was only loaded with win 8, so not wanting to have to do all the
updates again, I rolled the dice and installed around 100 updates, and
then installed the 8.1 upgrade. I loaded Macrium to make a boot disc
and create an image. This is where it gets funny. I took a screenshot
of what it came up with for partitions.

http://webpages.charter.net/wolverine01/Misc/disk.jpg



That's the most "messed up" partitioning scheme I've ever seen.

Have them return the laptop and get one from some place that knows what
they are doing. It can be fixed but that should not be your responsibility.

It looks quite normal (for Win 8.x) to me. My Dell laptop is the same way.




I made my comment before I saw Paul's mention of GPT

On 12/26/2014 12:37 PM, Paul wrote:
sticks wrote:
Hello all,

MIL poured coffee over her laptop and purchased a refurbished Asus.
i3 processor with 6gig ram and 500 gig HD. I have not had any prior
experience with win 8 machines, except for having tried to keep up
reading here in anticipation of upgrading at some time.

That said, I knew there was a chance the restore partition would be
removed in the refurbishing process. The only thing that came with
the laptop was one sheet of paper describing how the HD was wiped to
remove any possible personal information of the previous owner, and
that in fact the restore partition was removed, making the Asus
restore disk program unusable.

Once I fired it up, explorer showed two drives. C with 186 gig and D
with 258 gig. Right off the bat, I could not see why this was done if
the drive was formatted. Why wasn't it now a single drive?

I'm not 100% sure if I am correct in my conclusion that my best bet to
get them some kind of recovery solution would be to image the drive or
not? But since the recovery partition was supposedly removed, I
thought I didn't have any choice as they wouldn't have the necessary
backup media even if I did create the windows boot disc. So I set up
to make an image.

It was only loaded with win 8, so not wanting to have to do all the
updates again, I rolled the dice and installed around 100 updates, and
then installed the 8.1 upgrade. I loaded Macrium to make a boot disc
and create an image. This is where it gets funny. I took a
screenshot of what it came up with for partitions.

http://webpages.charter.net/wolverine01/Misc/disk.jpg

I hoping someone can shed some light here as to what the first three
partitions are, why they are not all NTFS, and why one is unformatted?
It also appears that the 7th partition is the restore partition and is
actually still there? Can this be recovered? Should I use a disk
utility and get rid of the D partition?

The imaging process is also confusing to me. I did an image for it in
two ways to be safe, and am now doing the additional 45 or so windows
updates since 8.1 upgrade was done. First I did the right click in
explorer and told Macrium to make an image of the C drive. But I'm
not sure exactly what that all included if you look at the image
above, so I also made an image of all 7 partitions after actually
opening Macrium and going through it's dialogue boxes.

I've found this group pretty knowledgeable and helpful and appreciate
any help you folks can give me here.
Thanks.

sticks


The disk is GPT and not MBR.

An MBR disk is also known as "MSDOS", referring to its ancient
and venerable design. It supports four primary partitions, and
has a 2.2TB limitation (32 bit LBA BIOS boot limitation, 512 byte sectors).

Since bigger disks have been invented, a newer "GUID partition table"
means of preparing the disks was found. Such a GPT disk, still has
an MBR for sector 0, but like the Apple method, the MBR is "protective"
and if older MBR-only partition management software is used, it basically
sees a partition type that warns it is GPT. That's so you don't
trash the disk, using Partition Magic. GPT needs a newer
partition management software (and there are some free ones).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table

In GPT, *everything* looks like a partition, and the
result is a bewildering set of partitions seen in
Disk Management.

I'm not going to attempt to parse your setup. Simply use
Macrium to backup the whole thing. And you can worry about
what to restore, some other day :-)

*******

To my way of thinking, the single most important item, is
the license key. If the machine is a real OEM Windows 8 machine,
the license key is stored in the BIOS. On older OSes,
we relied as well, on a license key on a COA sticker.
That was the "proof of purchase" in a sense.

Now, would a refurbisher blow away the key in the BIOS ?
Or is it still there ? The neat thing about the Windows 8
key in the BIOS, is it will activate either the OEM Win8,
or it will activate the Retail Win8 if you install a
comparable version.

So if you ever need to reinstall with a Torrent-transferred
MSDN subscription DVD, the key in the BIOS should do it
for you.

On the other hand, if the machine was originally Windows 7,
and has Windows 8 loaded on it, you would really want a
COA sticker on the outside of the PC. Windows 7 OEM (or older)
machines, they have a SLIC table in the BIOS (which is not
a license key, and basically declares "it's a Dell" kinda thing).
A SLIC table activates an OEM OS installation (where the
OS says "it's a Dell" as well). The Windows 8 OSes are not
SLIC activated. Windows 8 can use a COA key in a retail box
(or equivalent, which someone will undoubtedly argue about),
or if the machine is an OEM Win8 machine with the actual
key in the BIOS, it'll do the right thing for you, and
provide the key with no fuss.

Some tools for product keys (with the emphasis on Windows 8)

http://www.technize.net/windows-8-product-key-bios/

Belarc Advisor
"extract the product key from Windows Registry"
ProduKey (Nirsoft)
produkey.exe /WindowsKeys
KeyFinder (The Magical Jelly Bean)
[likely registry based...]

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/product_cd_key_viewer.html

"Version 1.70 - Added support for BIOS OEM Key (Windows 8)."

So it looks like the Nirsoft one, goes right to the source.
Give it a try and see what it says. I'd rather start with
the keyfinders I haven't used before, on the off-chance
they don't use the Registry. As verifying the machine
is Win8 era (and has a key in the BIOS) is important to
future installations.

Paul

Thank you for the help and great explanation. I figured it was
something I was behind the curve on, and will continue trying to catch up.

I used the Nirsoft utility and it easily extracted the key. FWIW, the
report showed three keys extracted. Internet explorer, Windows 8 bios,
and windows 8. All three used the same key.

I should also add, though I was worried about the new win 8 interface, I
believe the MIL will be very happy with this computer. Initial startup
was rough and took me some time to figure out what was what. It also
did not seem stable, and couldn't even shut down using a variety of
methods. After getting it to 8.1 and fully updated, it seems completely
stable, and very fast. Start up and shut down is incredibly quick
compared to what I'm used to with Win 7. I had intended to install
something to put the start menu back, but the way it is now I don't
think she'll even miss it. The only thing flaky I've seen so far is not
always hooking back up to the wireless after shutdown and even dropping
it for some reason once connected. I give it to her tomorrow, so I'll
spend the rest of the day just looking around.

Thanks for the help.

sticks

On 12/26/2014 1:19 PM, Keith Nuttle wrote:

In windows 8, the restore partition does not show up in the File
Explorer, you must go to the Disk Management function to see if it is
still there. On my 500 GB drive, there are two partitions one 260 MG
called Healthy EFI System Partition and the other 350 MB Healthy
Recovery Partition.

This was interesting as I went to Disk Management and only the C
partition showed used space. The 20 gig recovery partition was visible,
but showed it as having 100% free space?

As I understand Windows 8.1 does not create a new recover partition, so
once you have updated to Windows 8.1, if you do have to restore from the
disk you would have to go thorough ALL of the updates including Windows
8.1 again.

I guess it would be nice to have it as original, but with all it takes
to get it from 8 to fully updated 8.1 I can't see doing anything but an
image backup. Also interesting was that the Asus bios appears to give
the option of backing up an image on it's own, apparently without the
necessity of a Macrium boot disk. I know the disk works, so I'd
probably just use that.

I would recommend that the first thing you do is to go to the Desktop
tool bar Properties and set it to open to the desktop. Then in the same
place as the old Start Button you will see an MS Icon. Right clicking
on this icon will give you access to all of the computer functions.
Having set up a couple of computers, I know when you can not find
something it cause a lot of frustration. Setting it to the desktop
remove the frustration in trying to do it by chasing the Metro/Modern Icons

Agreed. I like it going to the desktop, too.

Thanks

sticks