Salient Soft

Update 3/2/2012

One note to be aware of when doing this is that depending what other upgrades have been done, it may also be necessary to reset the boot order in the bios. Failure to do this may mean that the Windows boot manager on an old hard drive may still be presented at boot time even though bcdboot has run correctly as per the process below.

In my case, resetting the boot order solved the issue and boots were then done entirely from the SSD. I still had the option to boot from the other system by using the bios boot manager to pick the other hard drive to boot from.

Original Post

I needed to do this after installing Windows 7 64bit on an SSD, when I already had A Windows 7 installation on another HD.
I wanted the SSD to be the active partition/primary boot device – perhaps I should have made it the active partition in disk manager before installing but anyway I did not.

The install therefore kept the HD as the boot dev and installed a boot menu on it. The boot files were missing from the SSD. These can be added via the bcdboot  utility as follows :-

>bcdboot c:\windows /s c:

This had to be done from an elevated privilege command prompt (right click command prompt option or icon, run as administrator).

Microsoft information on bcdboot may be found here.

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This situation is confusing as I now have 3 cards all using Silicon Image drivers.
Also, it appears to be notoriously difficult to find the drivers online – Silicon Image say that they are card vendor specific and don’t offer them. Re the unbadged card below from Tranquil, Tranquil do not offer any drivers for download, and therefore as it is unbadged and Silicon Image don’t offer any either, you are stuck if you lose the driver CD!

Do as follows :-
1/ Startech SATA Express PCI Express 2 port PEXESATA2
For Windows 7, Windows appears to find and install the correct driver, so I did not update it. It appears to be the same as the PEXESATA2 driver below.
Otherwise, use the PEXESATA2.zip driver. The “SATA Express_2Port” driver on the Silicon Image 3-ALL-34A drivers CD appears to be the same version so should work as well. This appears to be a non-RAID device. To allow safe device removal, also install HOTSWAP! for this device, as the driver does not enable windows safe removal. (32 or 64 bit version as appropriate). With the device connected, check the properties pages for both the disk device and the storage controller, and ensure that write caching is turned on.

2/ Startech 2 Port Cardbus eSATA – CBESAT2
Use the driver under “Startech 2 port Cardbus Card” – this folder contains a copy of the CD sent with the card. The driver required is under subdirectory:-
 NON-RAID\3512. This driver supports windows safe removal so you do not need to install HOTSWAP!. With the device connected to a disk, check the “Policies” tab on the device manager properties page for the disk, and check that ‘optimised for performance’ is selected to enable write caching.

3/ Tranquil unbadged 4 port PCI card.
This card appears to support RAID (although I don’t use it)
The driver used is the “SATA RAID_4Port” driver under the 3-ALL-34A driver CD
To allow safe device removal, also install HOTSWAP! for this device, as the driver does not enable windows safe removal. (32 or 64 bit version as appropriate). With the device connected, check the properties pages for both the disk device and the storage controller, and ensure that write caching is turned on. As I installed this a while back, I can’t recall if I had to change the setting manually after I installed the driver.

Note that the 3-ALL-34A driver CD seems to be a point upgrade on the 3-ALL-33A one. These CDs came with the “Startech SATA Express PCI Express 2 Port” card and the unbadged Tranquil “SATA RAID_4Port” card. I cannot remember which came with which, but using the later one in all cases should be correct.

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Update 7/10/2010

I had some further issues when trying to realign the boot partition of an OCZ Vertex 30GB SSD on an Intel D510 dual core atom ‘always on’ silent pc running Windows XP Pro.
I tried the technique used before below, using diskpar to create the partition and then using Acronis True Image 2010 to restore first the NTFS partition, then restoring the MBR and track 0 as a second subsequent operation. In order run diskpar standalone, I created a bootable CD containing diskpar using Bart PE, as I found that booting a Windows XP CD into recovery mode does not give you full command prompt capabilities – you cannot run an arbitrary .EXE utility at all (a real surprise to learn) – you can only use the commands listed. All this was done as below (see here) so as to force Acronis to re-use the partition created by diskpar. Unfortunately allthough the process went smoothly the resulting system would not boot, citing NTLDR/boot loader problems.

I then upgraded to Acronis True Image Home 2011 and also Acronis Disk Director 11, as these were both supposed to be SSD friendly and handle the alignment correctly. I deleted the partition and restored the original backup with the incorrect alignment, allowing Acronis to create the partition itself, and the system booted fine as before. I then used Disk Director to slightly shrink the partition to ensure that there was space to allow it to realign – there should have been a few MB on the end anyway, but I shrank it by 100MB to be really sure.

I then did a full standalone backup of the system disk with the shrunken partition. I found that just restoring that backup (shrunken but with the wrong alignment) with True Image 2011 was not enough – the incorrect alignment was still present on the SSD, i.e. it appeared that True Image always gives priority to the partition details in the backup. In hindsight it may have been possible to override the partition settings during the restore to cause Acronis to fix the alignment by using ‘new’ partition settings but I did not try – if so, this might have fixed the alignment problem in one go.

However, Disk Director 11 was able to delete and then recreate the partition correctly, i.e. when it created a new partition on the SSD it automatically used the correct alignment (1048576 bytes or 1MB), as confirmed afterwards by diskpar. I created a partition to fill the disk, as I knew that True Image would happily restore the slightly smaller shrunken one to a larger one. I then used the same technique as above with True Image Home 2011, i.e. restore the NTFS partition first without the MBR and track 0, then restore MBR and track 0 as a second operation after the restore.

This time, it all worked fine and I ended up with a bootable system with the correct partition alignment. I’m not sure what the issue was – perhaps the shrinking first fixed it. I do know that this technique has worked fine for me previously as below, when I backed up a 2.5" laptop hard drive via Acronis True Image, created an aligned partition on a new SSD with diskpar, and then restored the backup to the SSD with the same trick.

The resulting lessons learned seem to be as follows:-

1. Use Disk Director 11 with SSDs, alignment will be correct, and you can easily do it standalone by creating a Disk Director boot CD.
2. Using True Image 2011 is also recommended – it is stated to be SSD friendly and is better all around.
3. However, care is needed when restoring an SSD backup with the wrong alignment, as by default even True Image 2011 keeps the wrong alignment. Either the technique above is needed or it may be possible to get Acronis to use ‘new’ partition settings to override the ones in the backup, in which case the restore can all be done in a single step.
4. to be safe, when correcting wrong SSD alignment, shrink partition first by say a few 10s of MB to be sure (I used 100MB) to ensure there is no funny truncation when it is restored and realigned.

I have not done any performance comparisons before and after the realignment, but have confirmed that the alignment is now correct. Whilst I have seen posts on the internet that suggest lower alignment values than 1MB, both Windows 7 when it installs to an SSD, and Disk Director 11 use 1MB (1048576 bytes), so I am sticking with this value.

Original Post

Partition alignment is important for SSD performance to avoid unnecessary read/write cycles. Windows 7 appears to handle this but Windows XP does not. The partition alignment must be set manually when creating it (with diskpar or diskpart – diskpar seems to be preferred as it displays the partition offset in bytes so that the resulting offset can be accurately seen, even though diskpart is newer and has more features)

When restoring or cloning disks with Acronis True Image Home 2010, the original partition alignment is kept providing the operation does not recreate the partitions. See the Acronis forums here for details.

The OCZ forums have some articles on how to create correctly aligned partitions here and here.

Another step by step guide to cloning to an SSD with Acronis may be found here. When doing this, do not (as I did) forget the step which says to set the restore partition as primary and active in Acronis! In my case, Acronis made the wrong partition active so the SSD would not boot. It was simple enough to change – boot a system which can see the disk, then use disk management, right click the correct boot partition and select set as active. It is not necessary to repartition the SSD and re-restore the Acronis backup.

A good balanced article about optimising Windows XP for SSD use is here. There is a lot of misinformation around for example about the performance effects of swap files, which is based on misunderstandings about windows swap file usage, and also based on older SSDs with short service lives. The more informed wisdom appears to say that you should not disable the swap file as it will not make a significant difference.

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Update 4/4/2010

Whilst hot detection has been working, I was unable to run a backup as Acronis gave errors. A disk check with windows failed to complete intermittently on one of my drives. When I disk checked the same drive afterwards via USB, it checked out with no problem.

I’ve finally taken the decision to dump the internal eSATA on the P6T. Whilst my PC is an Arbico one under return to base warranty, I will not be returning it. I may have a hardware fault, but so many other people are reporting problems with the P6T and eSATA that it is impossible to be sure. I do not wish to be without my PC for a week or 2 only to have it returned with the problem still present.

I have disabled the JMicron controller in the Bios, and installed a StarTech 2 Port PCI Express eSATA card (Silicon Image 3132 chip).  I bough mine from CCL Computers for £20-78 including VAT and postage, so not much more than it would have cost me to courier my PC back to have it looked at under warranty, and it took me 10 minutes to install. So far this is performing flawlessly. When installing on Windows 7, Windows Update found the driver and auto installed it – the bios on the card was 7.4.05, and Windows installed version 1.0.15.3 of the driver. This version did not appear to be available when I searched the Silicon Image Site – the CD with the card, and Startech’s site, both had version 1.0.15.0 of the driver, so I stuck with what Windows did and had no issues with it.

Having already used a card with a Silicon Image Chip, I immediately installed HotSwap! as this allows safe removal of the drive. As installed, the driver does not enable safe removal in windows, but does enable write caching on the drive, so HotSwap! is recommended. After installing HotSwap!, remember to ctrl/click the systray icon – this will allow you to specify those devices which are to be excluded from hotswapping, such as your fixed hard drives. HotSwap! is designed for Silicon Image chipsets and is able to optionally spin down an eSATA drive on removal. It can also scan for hardware changes if you have hot detection problems (I did not). The only slight issue with it is that it will not autostart in the tray under Windows 7 as it gets a UAC prompt to continue when it starts. You can get around this by making it start as a scheduled task with high privilege, but I just leave it on the quick launch bar or superbar and start it manually when I need it, and put up with the extra click.

Update 10/3/2010

After reverting the Bios back to 1004 as at the end of this post, a couple of reboots later the pc failed to detect a hot insertion again. I reverted the JMicron driver back to 1.17.53.0, the version used by the poster referred to below, as this was cited as stable, but still no joy. I tweaked the Bios to disable the floppy drive (on by default) as I don’t have one, resaved and booted, and then it all worked again. After 5-10 more warm and cold boots, it is still hot detecting fine. I don’t think the floppy controller was the issue, but the fact that I went in and changed and resaved the Bios settings, as this has kicked it into life in the past.

My final conclusion – it does run stable now, but I wouldn’t call it rock solid – it still won’t detect an eSATA drive present at boot time, and I’ll need to keep an eye on things to see if the detection problem resurfaces. If it does, I suspect just entering Bios setup and resaving the Bios settings after a small change (or even no change) will sort it!

Original Post 9/3/2010

My P6T was delivered with bios revision 0904, and as delivered would not hot-recognise or safely remove an eSATA drive (safe removal was off, and write caching was off which obviously impacted performance).  I installed the latest JMicron jmb36x Controller driver (1.17.55.0, 27/01/2010) , and this enabled write caching and safe removal via the system tray. Note that whilst the P6T has both jmb363 and jmb322 controllers listed in the spec, the controller under windows lists as a jmb363, and this driver appears to handle both the above chips, therefore the jmb36x driver is the correct one. Upgrading the driver in my case affected eSATA hotswapping/safe removal etc. using both the rear eSATA port on the P6T (jmb363), and my front port connected to SATA_E1 (jmb322).  However, hot recognition was very intermittent (even with a device rescan) and the only way to consistently recognise the drive was to have it plugged in at boot time, enter the bios, exit the bios and boot. It would then recognise the drive at boot time once only, and could be safely removed (but would need booting to recognise it again).

This post states that bios version 1004, plus the JMicron driver I was using, sorted the problem. As there was now also a later bios version, 1201, I reflashed the P6T to this version. I used the flash utility in the Bios itself as this was convenient, and it would recognise USB flash drives to read the new bios. There is also a recovery process if it crashes during flashing, which involves booting with the target Bios in the root of  a usb flash drive in which case it auto flashes (see manual).  However, this recovery process only  works with small FAT32/FAT16 flash drives of less than 8GB, so I prepared a 2GB flash drive especially in case this was needed. Note also that the Bios flash utility does not do long filenames and so converts them to DOS 8.3 format – if you have multiple Bios file versions on the drive this may mean you won’t be able to tell which is which, so rename the files to sensible short names before you start, and save yourself another reboot! Also be sure to unzip them.

It turned out that version 1201 did not work at all with eSATA, so it appears that Asus fixed this in version 1004 and then broke it again in 1201 – doh! I even tried a CMOS reset with 1201 just to be sure, but it still did not work. With the drive present at boot time, it just froze during the JMicron controller drive recognition phase, just prior to starting windows.

I reflashed back to 1004 and hotswapping all worked fined, both recognition and safe removal, including multiple times. However, the drive would not be recognised at boot time if present, and would still freeze as before. As my real goal was true hotswapping, I was happy to live with this issue as hotwapping was fine – I just plugged the drive in later after booting.

Prior to clearing the CMOS, I took shots of all the Bios screens with the old settings in, to be sure I did not miss any custom settings, as the PC had been built by a custom builder, Arbico. Whilst there is a Bios feature to allow saving and restoring of CMOS settings to a flash drive, there was the concern that reloading old settings could introduce old data which did not match the new Bios, so I wanted to be sure to load default settings and tweak from there.

The screen shots of my old settings may be downloaded in this zip file. Afterwards, I manually made the following changes after clearing the CMOS and loading new defaults :-

Menu: AI Tweaker, Setting: Ai Overclock Tuner, Value: X.M.P.

Menu: Power options, Setting: boot via keyboard, Value: set to Ctrl/esc

Menu: Power options, Setting: Power On via PCIE devices, Value: enabled
(This setting was needed to allow Wake On Lan to work correctly)

Menu: Boot/Boot Device Priority :-
1 SATA: PM-SAMSUNG HD
2 CDROM:SM-Optiarc D]
3 DISABLED

Menu: Boot/Boot Configuration settings, Setting: Full Screen Logo, Value: disabled

Menu: Advanced/On Board Devices Configuration, Setting: High Definition Audio: Value: disabled
(Onboard audio was disabled as I was using a separate sound card)

Menu: Advanced/USB Configuration, Setting: Legacy USB Support, Value: Enabled

Menu: Tools, Setting: Asus Express Gate, Value: Disabled

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According to Microsoft here you can do this if you install them in increasing order, i.e. you must install the earliest first.

In my case, Office 2000 would not play ball at all, as Word 2000 froze on startup.

Office XP ran ok, and does seem to coexist with Office 2007, but there are some issues.
I had to mess around with compatibility mode for XP, but ended up taking it off as it appeared to try to run Word XP in administrator mode even though this was not enabled – strange. I ended up not needing it and Word XP started OK but was initially a bit flakey as said.

Two issues remain outstanding, but they are possible to live with:-

1/ Double clicking a .doc document always opens Word 2007, even if you try to change the file association. I had it working correctly for a little while (loading up Word XP for .docs and Word 2007 for .docx, but Word 2007 ended up taking over. This may have had something to do with the next point – ‘re-registering’

2/ Both versions wanted to reconfigure themselves each time you switched from running one version to the other one. Even on a fast PC this takes 10-20 seconds of thrashing with a conifiguration dialog displayed – not nice, although Microsoft say that this is normal behaviour if you have multiple versions (Word XP did its configuration a lot quicker). This post  describes the way around this by telling both versions of Word not to ‘rereg’ themselves, by setting the following registry keys :-

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Options\NoReReg = 1 (DWord) – for Word 2007
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Word\Options\NoReReg = 1 (DWord) – for Word XP

This fixed the problem, although it is not entirely recommended as it may cause issues during fixes/updates that may need the ReReg to be run. I would imagine that removing the keys temporarily and re-adding them would solve this.

If I was in this situation again, I would certainly try to avoid installing multiple versions on the same OS – it is clearly not supported well. It would be best to use another machine or a VM.

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This problem affected a laptop running Windows XP Home on our workgroup. It could browse shares by IP address e.g. \\10.0.0.2, but could not see computers by name. Removing it from the workgroup/rerunning the network setup wizard to rejoin the workgroup and rebooting had no effect.

This fix from Microsoft solved the problem, details of the manual version of the fix are as follows:-

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\NetBt\Parameters
3. In the right pane of Registry Editor, delete the following values if they are present:
     –  NodeType
     –  DhcpNodeType
   Note If the NodeType value is present, this value will override the DhcpNodeType value. If neither subkey is present and if no WINS servers are configured for the client, the computer uses b-node mode. If at least one WINS server is configured, the computer uses h-node mode.
4. Quit Registry Editor.
5. Restart the computer.
6. Try to view workgroup computers on the network again.

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I tried using Acronis TIH 2010 to backup to 2 different removable drives, to rotate them. Initially I mounted each drive as R: when used, which requires changing the drive letter each time. As a consequence of this, I was also using a single TIH backup task and a single TIH validate task for both removable drives. However, when I came to do a separate validation of the backup on the 2nd drive, having already done the first, I received the error “The operation failed” with no other detailed information. This was strange, as the backup process had just done its own validation successfully. I suspected that Acronis was confused between the 2 backups, as both had the same name (as they were done on the same date during testing) and were on the same drive letter, even though they were different volumes. Acronis keeps an internal database of its backups as detailed here, and as the post indicates, it needs to keep track of the renaming/moving of backups. The confusion on this was compounded by this post concerning Acronis Backup & Recovery 10, which states that when using multiple usb drives as rotating backups, the same drive letter should always be used. However, this is clearly not correct in my scenario. In another test, I performed a second incremental backup on each removable drive, and Acronis asked me to browse for the correct full backup when doing the validation phase of the backup – it had clearly become confused.

I switched to using a different drive letter for each volume, R: and S:. As a consequence I also created separate backup and validate tasks for each volume, as each would point to a different drive letter – this also improved clarity as  a side effect – it separated the activiy/logs for each volume which gave a clear view of what had been done. Having done this, I did a full backup with each volume in turn of the same PC, and did an additional validation as well. All of these worked correctly. Crucially, in addition I re-did a validation of the first again at the end, having backed up and validated the second. This still worked correctly – Acronis was now able to track the backups correctly.

The other advantage of separate drive letters is that Windows will try to reuse the same letter for a volume as it used previously, meaning that mostly you will only need to set them once with Disk Manager (this can get messed up if you have additional removable drives in at the time you mount one of the backup ones, as Windows may have already re-used the ‘reserved’ drive letter, but mostly it works fine).

Although I did not test it, I suspect that another solution would be to uniquely label each backup file on each volume, perhaps by incorporating the volume name (e.g. “Backup1”, “Backup2”) as part of the file name. I suspect that this also would remove the ambiguity which was tripping up Acronis. In my case, I was happy to use the same folder and file naming convention on each backup volume, and just keep the drive letters different. You should use drive letters consistently in acronis – if you do not, it will be unable to find the backups it has in its database and will end up prompting for the location of backups when asked to run tasks.

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This post is to collate any info in that area, particularly the difference between onboard chipsets like the Realtek 8111DL on the Intel D510MO and cards like the Intel PRO/1000

Interesting post thread here

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While running the setup wizard, it auto discovers the print servers on the LAN.
They all have to be on to be seen.

Sometimes, the wizard does not discover one even if the server is on.
This is a problem as you cannot do the discovery manually by entering settings.

In my case, either the Windows Firewall or Kaspersky Antivirus was blocking the auto discovery.
I temporarily disabled both, and discovery worked ok.
Afterwards, I re-enabled them, and was still able to print a test page successfully.
Therefore, this appears to be only a setup issue.

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e.g. Moved the Public Music and Videos folders correctly using the move button. To do this I had to temporarily disable User Account Control via control panel, as per Microsoft Instructions.
The old folders under c:\Users\Public remained there and were inaccessible even as administrator – could not list the owner, could not delete etc.

This  forum post describes the problem, but their solution did not work for me.

In the end, after a logout/reboot they seemed to be ‘magically’ accessible again – I managed to rename one of the old ones, then found I could delete them all, even after having restored UAC back to default.

This is a bit of a weird area – needed some tinkering to sort it, info on the net not fully clear. Only some of the public folders were affected, documents were not. The user folders were not affected. All very strange!

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