New Toshiba laptop with Windows 7

[Yousuf Khan]

I bought a new Toshiba Satellite laptop with Windows 7 installed. The
moment I opened it up, it went into its automatic setup procedure and
installed Windows 7 from a recovery partition. There weren't many
options available during setup (choose 32-bit or 64-bit Windows 7,
choose your language, and that's about it). It ended up creating the
following disk structure on the drive:

http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/759/capturediskman.jpg

Well, I was about to go and repartition it to my own preferences, when I
discovered that all 4 primary partitions were taken up by the Toshiba
setup. The first partition is 1.46GB is listed as the recovery
partition, but it's probably a boot manager partition. Then there is the
last partition, 527.65GB, which is the actual Windows partition. Then
there are two mysterious hidden partitions, 24.44GB & 13.19GB,
respectively. I called up Toshiba support to ask them what these were.
They said that the 13.19GB partition is the place where they actually
store the recovery data. The 24.44GB partition according to them is
reserved for the volume shadow copy service (VSS), I think.

Now, I have another machine running Windows 7, a desktop PC, and it
doesn't have this separate partition for volume shadow copies. It has a
retail version of Windows 7 Ultimate installed. I believe it stores the
shadow copies directly within the same volume it's shadowing.

I'm trying to reduce the size of the boot partition and free up space to
add a Linux partition for dual-boot. But with the first 4 entries
already used up in the primary partition table, I can't even add an
extended partition for Linux to reside in. Thinking what the
consequences of removing the VSS partition will be? I think VSS should
work fine with or without the separate partition. Toshiba obviously said
that they suggest leaving everything alone the way it is now, but of
course they would say that. What's the opinion here?

Yousuf Khan

 

[Tony]

So just format that 24.44GB partition and throw another operating system on
it.

I bought a new Toshiba Satellite laptop with Windows 7 installed. The
moment I opened it up, it went into its automatic setup procedure and
installed Windows 7 from a recovery partition. There weren't many
options available during setup (choose 32-bit or 64-bit Windows 7,
choose your language, and that's about it). It ended up creating the
following disk structure on the drive:

http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/759/capturediskman.jpg

Well, I was about to go and repartition it to my own preferences, when I
discovered that all 4 primary partitions were taken up by the Toshiba
setup. The first partition is 1.46GB is listed as the recovery
partition, but it's probably a boot manager partition. Then there is the
last partition, 527.65GB, which is the actual Windows partition. Then
there are two mysterious hidden partitions, 24.44GB & 13.19GB,
respectively. I called up Toshiba support to ask them what these were.
They said that the 13.19GB partition is the place where they actually
store the recovery data. The 24.44GB partition according to them is
reserved for the volume shadow copy service (VSS), I think.

Now, I have another machine running Windows 7, a desktop PC, and it
doesn't have this separate partition for volume shadow copies. It has a
retail version of Windows 7 Ultimate installed. I believe it stores the
shadow copies directly within the same volume it's shadowing.

I'm trying to reduce the size of the boot partition and free up space to
add a Linux partition for dual-boot. But with the first 4 entries
already used up in the primary partition table, I can't even add an
extended partition for Linux to reside in. Thinking what the
consequences of removing the VSS partition will be? I think VSS should
work fine with or without the separate partition. Toshiba obviously said
that they suggest leaving everything alone the way it is now, but of
course they would say that. What's the opinion here?

Yousuf Khan

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[Ed Cryer]

I bought a new Toshiba Satellite laptop with Windows 7 installed. The
moment I opened it up, it went into its automatic setup procedure and
installed Windows 7 from a recovery partition. There weren't many
options available during setup (choose 32-bit or 64-bit Windows 7,
choose your language, and that's about it). It ended up creating the
following disk structure on the drive:

http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/759/capturediskman.jpg

Well, I was about to go and repartition it to my own preferences, when I
discovered that all 4 primary partitions were taken up by the Toshiba
setup. The first partition is 1.46GB is listed as the recovery
partition, but it's probably a boot manager partition. Then there is the
last partition, 527.65GB, which is the actual Windows partition. Then
there are two mysterious hidden partitions, 24.44GB & 13.19GB,
respectively. I called up Toshiba support to ask them what these were.
They said that the 13.19GB partition is the place where they actually
store the recovery data. The 24.44GB partition according to them is
reserved for the volume shadow copy service (VSS), I think.

Now, I have another machine running Windows 7, a desktop PC, and it
doesn't have this separate partition for volume shadow copies. It has a
retail version of Windows 7 Ultimate installed. I believe it stores the
shadow copies directly within the same volume it's shadowing.

I'm trying to reduce the size of the boot partition and free up space to
add a Linux partition for dual-boot. But with the first 4 entries
already used up in the primary partition table, I can't even add an
extended partition for Linux to reside in. Thinking what the
consequences of removing the VSS partition will be? I think VSS should
work fine with or without the separate partition. Toshiba obviously said
that they suggest leaving everything alone the way it is now, but of
course they would say that. What's the opinion here?

Yousuf Khan

My new Acer doesn't have the VSS partition; Win7 HP 64-bit.

Give it a letter, take a look inside it. If there's nothing there make a
note of the exact size in case you need to recreate it, then remove it.
Reduce the C partition by as much as you need, create your Linux one,
and install.

Ed

 

[Ed Light]

With Bootit Bare Metal partition & boot manager, you can have lots of
primary partitions, but of course, only 4 active for one boot choice.

I think you can only have one active extended partition, but of course
with lots of volumes, any of which you can hide for a boot choice.

It comes with an imaging program built in.

PS Once you don't limit primary partitions, you must use only Bootit to
alter partitions.
--
Ed Light

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Thanks, robots.

 

[Ed Light]

PS re Bootit.

The way I use it on my netbook is, I have an extended partition with
various data volumes, then of course there's the factory restore
partition, and the Bootit partition. I shrunk the original C: partition
way down to 30 Gigs, and I have a copy of it as an alternate. I have
images of C: in a volume that I update when changes are made to C:, so I
can pull out of any difficulties by restoring, and the data is
untouched, being on the volumes.

Ta da!

On the bootit site there are faq's about linux, plus there's a great
newsgroup where you get really quick answers.

It's a very geeky program.

bootitng.com

--
Ed Light

Better World News TV Channel:
http://realnews.com

Iraq Veterans Against the War and Related:
http://ivaw.org
http://couragetoresist.org
http://antiwar.com

Send spam to the FTC at
(e-mail address removed)
Thanks, robots.

 

[a1pcfixer]

Ed,

With Bootit Bare Metal partition & boot manager

Might help to give a link<g>

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/index.htm

 

[Yousuf Khan]

My new Acer doesn't have the VSS partition; Win7 HP 64-bit.

Give it a letter, take a look inside it. If there's nothing there make a
note of the exact size in case you need to recreate it, then remove it.
Reduce the C partition by as much as you need, create your Linux one,
and install.

Neither of the two mystery partitions seem to be NTFS or FAT-formatted.
They seem to be proprietary.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Rod Speed]

Neither of the two mystery partitions seem to be NTFS or
FAT-formatted. They seem to be proprietary.

Have a look at the recent posts in the *.storage group,
Andy goes into quite a bit of detail with his Toshiba Satellite
and its likely using the same setup as yours.

With his, those two partitions are for the diskless
restore and what creates the restore CDs,

I thought he might reply to you but then I remember that
his Toshiba Satellite has just gone back to Toshiba for
hard drive replacement and thats the only real PC he has.

 

[Paul]

Neither of the two mystery partitions seem to be NTFS or FAT-formatted.
They seem to be proprietary.

Yousuf Khan

Use PTEDIT32 and get the partition type fields ?
If run in Win7, use Run As Administrator, or you might see an "Error 5".

ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/tools/pq/utilities/PTEDIT32.zip

Another way to attempt to identify a partition like that, is with "Disktype".

http://disktype.sourceforge.net/

To get that, you can boot a Ubuntu CD, open Synaptic Package manager,
enable all the repositories, reload the repository info (lots of downloads,
takes a minute or so), then in Synaptic package manager you can install
the "disktype" package. Once in there, open a Terminal window and type

sudo disktype /dev/sda2

That would check the second partition of hard drive "sda". It will
then attempt to identify the partition type. The tool will even
accept a file which holds a file system (like if you "dd" dump a
partition into a file, if you feed it the file, it can also say
what the file system is).

As far as I know, there isn't a Windows version of "disktype". I see
on the info page, it mentions Cygwin, but I don't have that here.

HTH,
Paul

 

[Yousuf Khan]

Have a look at the recent posts in the *.storage group,
Andy goes into quite a bit of detail with his Toshiba Satellite
and its likely using the same setup as yours.

With his, those two partitions are for the diskless
restore and what creates the restore CDs,

I thought he might reply to you but then I remember that
his Toshiba Satellite has just gone back to Toshiba for
hard drive replacement and thats the only real PC he has.

Oh wow, so this discussion has already happened, and not that long ago
either? I see the other thread in *.storage now. Looks like Andy Hancock
had an almost identical sized hard disk as mine, it was setup in the
same way.

Anyways, it looks like I may have gotten my answer from Toshiba. When I
called them, I expected to get the run-around from them, and they did
for a while. They told me what the two mystery partitions are for: (1)
recovery, and (2) Volume Shadow Service. But according to the other
thread, they are for recovery, and language packs. I think the language
packs makes more sense to me than the Volume Shadow Service. I then
called them back and asked them to send me to their second-line
engineers. And I told the second-line guy, point blank that I needed to
install Linux on the box, and that he needed to tell me which of the
partitions can be removed after backing up. So he figured I knew what I
was doing, and so he told me that the 13 GB parition is the recovery
partition, and that it can be backed up to DVD's and removed later.

Toshiba furnishes an utility called the Toshiba Recovery Media Creator,
which does the imaging for you. When the utility first starts, it asks
you which language pack you want to back up (the choices are English and
French in Canada, of course). You have to back up each language in
separate actions, so you can do that, or just backup the one that's most
relevant to you.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Yousuf Khan]

Use PTEDIT32 and get the partition type fields ?
If run in Win7, use Run As Administrator, or you might see an "Error 5".

ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/tools/pq/utilities/PTEDIT32.zip

Ah great, this worked thanks! The 4 partitions were type respectively:
27, 07, 17, and 17.

Type 27 is listed as a PQservice partition, which is either FAT32 or
NTFS (it is NTFS in this case). It's apparently used by Acer and other
OEMs as a hidden rescue partition.

Type 07 is standard NTFS (it can also be HPFS, and exFAT).

Type 17 is listed as a Hidden IFS, e.g. possibly HPFS.

http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partitions/partition_types-1.html

Another way to attempt to identify a partition like that, is with
"Disktype".

http://disktype.sourceforge.net/

To get that, you can boot a Ubuntu CD, open Synaptic Package manager,
enable all the repositories, reload the repository info (lots of downloads,
takes a minute or so), then in Synaptic package manager you can install
the "disktype" package. Once in there, open a Terminal window and type

sudo disktype /dev/sda2

That would check the second partition of hard drive "sda". It will
then attempt to identify the partition type. The tool will even
accept a file which holds a file system (like if you "dd" dump a
partition into a file, if you feed it the file, it can also say
what the file system is).

As far as I know, there isn't a Windows version of "disktype". I see
on the info page, it mentions Cygwin, but I don't have that here.

Well, the whole problem started as a result of trying to install Linux
on this machine.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Paul]

Ah great, this worked thanks! The 4 partitions were type respectively:
27, 07, 17, and 17.

Type 27 is listed as a PQservice partition, which is either FAT32 or
NTFS (it is NTFS in this case). It's apparently used by Acer and other
OEMs as a hidden rescue partition.

Type 07 is standard NTFS (it can also be HPFS, and exFAT).

Type 17 is listed as a Hidden IFS, e.g. possibly HPFS.

http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partitions/partition_types-1.html

I'd bet they were all NTFS, given the situation.

Well, the whole problem started as a result of trying to install Linux
on this machine.

Yousuf Khan

You can "install" packages when using the LiveCD - it's just wasteful
(not persistent). The files end up on the ram based file system, while
you're using them. (There are some persistent options as well, but
that's another story, and more of a nuisance.)

I'm kinda curious, whether you could make an Extended partition (leaving
room for three primaries), then shift some of that stuff into logical
partitions ? If the small 1.4GB partition is what Windows 7 boots from,
perhaps C: can actually be a logical. Then, it's a question of whether
one of those hidden partitions can be moved into a logical as well. Perhaps
you can free up enough primaries, to end up with a spare you can use for
Linux. (The Toshiba software might not be too happy about that though, if
you ever need to restore to factory config - some restore packages insist
on the same partition scheme as was there originally, before they'll run.)

As for the idea of a separate VSS Cache partition, I thought that was only
supported on server OSes. I wanted to do that (move the VSS Cache stuff
off C, but when I read up on it, I got the impression Windows 7 desktop
didn't include code to do it.

Paul

 

[Yousuf Khan]

I'd bet they were all NTFS, given the situation.

It's probable, but when I used the command-line based Windows util,
diskpart.exe (which I assume is more powerful than the graphical Disk
Management utility), it couldn't recognize the filesystem on the Type 17
partitions. I did recognize the filesystem on the type 27 partition,
even though that's also considered a hidden NTFS. And of course, it
recognized the filesystem on the type 07 partition, which is a
completely unhidden standard partition.

I'm kinda curious, whether you could make an Extended partition (leaving
room for three primaries), then shift some of that stuff into logical
partitions ? If the small 1.4GB partition is what Windows 7 boots from,
perhaps C: can actually be a logical. Then, it's a question of whether
one of those hidden partitions can be moved into a logical as well. Perhaps
you can free up enough primaries, to end up with a spare you can use for
Linux. (The Toshiba software might not be too happy about that though, if
you ever need to restore to factory config - some restore packages insist
on the same partition scheme as was there originally, before they'll run.)

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing, but the only thing that seems to be
able to read that partition is Toshiba`s own disk imaging utility. I
suppose I could read it raw with the Unix/Linux-based DD utility, but
then I need to clear off this partition to even get Unix on this
machine. Lotsa catch-22's.

As for the idea of a separate VSS Cache partition, I thought that was only
supported on server OSes. I wanted to do that (move the VSS Cache stuff
off C, but when I read up on it, I got the impression Windows 7 desktop
didn't include code to do it.

Which just goes to show how ludicrous the Toshiba tech's claim that this
is a VSS partition is. Besides, a 24GB partition seems awfully large for
a VSS partition, doesn't it? The only thing I've seen that uses the VSS
system regularly is my backup/imaging program (in my case it's Macrium
Reflect, but it could be Acronis TrueImage, or whatever). During the
time that the imager is working I doubt you're going to get 1GB of
changes happening in the background, let alone 24GB!

Yousuf Khan

 

[Mike Tomlinson]

It's probable, but when I used the command-line based Windows util,
diskpart.exe (which I assume is more powerful than the graphical Disk
Management utility), it couldn't recognize the filesystem on the Type 17
partitions. I did recognize the filesystem on the type 27 partition,
even though that's also considered a hidden NTFS.

What does TestDisk say?

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

I
suppose I could read it raw with the Unix/Linux-based DD utility, but
then I need to clear off this partition to even get Unix on this
machine. Lotsa catch-22's.

use a live CD.

 

[Yousuf Khan]

What does TestDisk say?

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

It says both are "hid HPFS/NTFS"

use a live CD.

You'd still need to be able to store the image file on a large enough
file system, which usually means the internal hard disk.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Paul]

It says both are "hid HPFS/NTFS"


You'd still need to be able to store the image file on a large enough
file system, which usually means the internal hard disk.

Yousuf Khan

The "disktype" program will tell you for sure what it is.

http://disktype.sourceforge.net/

Available from Synaptic Package Manager, if you have all
repositories turned on.

Paul

 

[Mike Tomlinson]

It says both are "hid HPFS/NTFS"

there's your answer then.

TestDisk has a 'file browser' built-in. If those partitions are NTFS,
it should be able to produce a list of files for you. That'll confirm
that they are NTFS format and not some Toshiba proprietary format.

You'd still need to be able to store the image file on a large enough
file system, which usually means the internal hard disk.

What's wrong with using an external USB disk?

 

[Rod Speed]

Yousuf Khan wrote

Mike Tomlinson wrote

It says both are "hid HPFS/NTFS"

You'd still need to be able to store the image file on a large enough
file system, which usually means the internal hard disk.

Nope, the better live CDs can store on an external drive fine.

 

[Yousuf Khan]

there's your answer then.

TestDisk has a 'file browser' built-in. If those partitions are NTFS,
it should be able to produce a list of files for you. That'll confirm
that they are NTFS format and not some Toshiba proprietary format.

I wonder if I can just change the partition type from 17 to 07, then
it'll become a standard NTFS. I should then be able to just back it up
with my imaging program.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Arno]

I wonder if I can just change the partition type from 17 to 07, then
it'll become a standard NTFS. I should then be able to just back it up
with my imaging program.

Yousuf Khan

If you do a sector-image, the partition type should not matter.

Arno