Clonezilla does not work with Windows 8.1 in cloning disk(disk-to-disk clone)

On 2014-10-28, Paul wrote:
lew wrote:
On 2014-10-28, Paul wrote:
RayLopez99 wrote:

I might at some point switch from a HDD to an SSD, since I do
a lot of compiling of code that takes forever sometimes, but I've
read SSD's are 'only' about twice as fast in terms of average
speed than HDDs (sequential is another matter). 2x is better
than 33% to be sure, but it's not 10x as you might think listening
to people talk about how fast their SSD drives are.

RL
Maybe some day, they'll remove the throttle in the file system.

As near as I can determine, by using a RAM Disk, there seems
to be a command rate limit or an event limit, when working on
disks. The RAM Disk should be very fast, and it's not. There's
a bottleneck in there somewhere.

The OS has various schemes for "fairness", and they must have
some implementation cost. For example, hardware interrupts
might be capped at the 10,000 to 20,000 per second region.
But I can't turn up a CPU clock high enough, to determine
if this limit ever changes (scales) with CPU clock or not.

If I load the 60,000+ files from the Firefox source tarball,
it takes forever to do a search on them. With the RAM Disk,
it only seems to handle hundreds of files per second. Instead
of thousands.

Another data point, my current system with DDR2-800 RAM,
using a RAMDisk gives ~4GB/sec read bandwidth. I have a new
computer with DDR3-2400 RAM, and the same RAMDisk software
gives ~4GB/sec read bandwidth (the new system has absolutely
HUGE ram bandwidth and has four channels). That should tell you
something. "Where's my scaling ?" There isn't any. Sad.
Needs to be adjusted.

That's why, I like the concept of the SSD, but I don't
like how the OS handles disks in general. It seems the
OS is stuck in 1990 or so.

Keep your eyes open.

Paul

Isn't the "security" apps doing some slowdown of any access to a
SSD as well as a HDD? I had problems with m$'s security stuff that
impacted any access to any directory that I do for the 1st time in
a computer session; note that I do shutdown the computer when
not in use, "just because".

Even running m$'s software like "autoruns" appear to elicit a
security check before the program runs; often just doing a right
click to get the context menu so I can select something like
a graphics viewer (irfanview), there is a slowdown before the menu
appears. Since one of the win7's security updates, there is an
intrusion into just about everything.

Now, with win8.1, some security intrusion is there even if it
is much less; perhaps the win7 security slowdown is a way for
msft to "force" people to go with win8?

I don't have any 3rd party security/anti-anything installed.

Let's ignore the file system results for a moment and
just consider the HDTune results. HDTune works at the
block level. Once you open a handle to the device and
the security test passes, all subsequent operations
are like "reading a file you just opened". There are
no more security gates. And on the two machines, one
with more RAM bandwidth, there was no additional
performance. Something limited the performance,
and it wasn't hardware. And it wasn't security either.
Not on a block level test.

The FAT32 used in the file search test, isn't a particular
security demon. It's pretty open. Not nearly as nasty
as NTFS. And the thing is, if there *wasn't* a throttle,
even security calls could be resolved in a blink of
an eye. It's a RAM Disk, with zero seek time and
4GB/sec bandwidth. Even if you checked the security attributes
of all 60,000 files at 10 microseconds a piece, that doesn't
account for the minutes of search time. There's just no excuse
for going that slow. With a 4GB disk and a 4GB/sec bandwidth,
the entire disk should be readable in 1 second. Even
allowing for the file search code topping out at
300MB/sec or so (the kind of speeds I get when I write
C code here), the search for strings of text should
complete in ~13 seconds. It takes a *lot* longer than that.
Some other limitation is present. I'm surprised SSD
users aren't more disappointed. Your SSD drive has
close to zero seek time, and at 300-500MB/sec bandwidth,
it should absolutely scream, rather than "feel 2x faster".
I feel we're not getting everything we could from
the hardware. Just a gut feel (using my calibrated eyeball).

Paul

Still think security has something to do with file access on a HDD,
not a ram disk.

When I had win7 installed, I had to check/change the security settings
each time as I was denied access! I had 2 HDD with 1 of the HDD as
a boot drive; when I tried win8 the 1st time, I just installed a 3rd
HDD for use as the boot drive & still had to do some security access
changes. Back to win7 & still had to do security changes for
permissions & sometimes ownership. as the "3rd" hdd is now the
"C:\"; nothing was done by me for the HDDs except for re-installing
the apps as the data stayed in the same places.

After trying win8.1, same problems; then back to win7, etc. Now
in win8.1, no delays, mostly, as the apps were re-installed into the
same places & the data remained at their respective partitions,
D thru I. After reading your posting, I decided to check on the
permissions & ownership; found that the security settings are very
different for each partition from what I had done when in win7!

I do know that at one point I had to change a few "ownerships" to
myself as the user so that I can have access & full control for that
partition & hdd; my user name is no longer in any of the partitions'
security settings. The ownerships has been changed to the
administrator of the computer name except for a couple of partitions
where it is a long string of numerics. Looks like that the "security"
properties are not on the hdd itself? Or win8.1 changed the security
properties or windows really have the hdd security properties as part
of the OS......or win8.1 did a "better" job of redoing the security
properties of the hdd somehow since I definitely didn't reformat or
change my app & data partitions or the HDD.

It seems like everything wants to check security of all files, the
browser, the Intel chipsets' plugin id protection that got installed
as part of the chipset or the ME install(?); sometimes even doing
a "dir" hesitates for an unknown reason..

lew wrote:
On 2014-10-28, Paul wrote:
lew wrote:
On 2014-10-28, Paul wrote:
RayLopez99 wrote:

I might at some point switch from a HDD to an SSD, since I do
a lot of compiling of code that takes forever sometimes, but I've
read SSD's are 'only' about twice as fast in terms of average
speed than HDDs (sequential is another matter). 2x is better
than 33% to be sure, but it's not 10x as you might think listening
to people talk about how fast their SSD drives are.

RL
Maybe some day, they'll remove the throttle in the file system.

As near as I can determine, by using a RAM Disk, there seems
to be a command rate limit or an event limit, when working on
disks. The RAM Disk should be very fast, and it's not. There's
a bottleneck in there somewhere.

The OS has various schemes for "fairness", and they must have
some implementation cost. For example, hardware interrupts
might be capped at the 10,000 to 20,000 per second region.
But I can't turn up a CPU clock high enough, to determine
if this limit ever changes (scales) with CPU clock or not.

If I load the 60,000+ files from the Firefox source tarball,
it takes forever to do a search on them. With the RAM Disk,
it only seems to handle hundreds of files per second. Instead
of thousands.

Another data point, my current system with DDR2-800 RAM,
using a RAMDisk gives ~4GB/sec read bandwidth. I have a new
computer with DDR3-2400 RAM, and the same RAMDisk software
gives ~4GB/sec read bandwidth (the new system has absolutely
HUGE ram bandwidth and has four channels). That should tell you
something. "Where's my scaling ?" There isn't any. Sad.
Needs to be adjusted.

That's why, I like the concept of the SSD, but I don't
like how the OS handles disks in general. It seems the
OS is stuck in 1990 or so.

Keep your eyes open.

Paul
Isn't the "security" apps doing some slowdown of any access to a
SSD as well as a HDD? I had problems with m$'s security stuff that
impacted any access to any directory that I do for the 1st time in
a computer session; note that I do shutdown the computer when
not in use, "just because".

Even running m$'s software like "autoruns" appear to elicit a
security check before the program runs; often just doing a right
click to get the context menu so I can select something like
a graphics viewer (irfanview), there is a slowdown before the menu
appears. Since one of the win7's security updates, there is an
intrusion into just about everything.

Now, with win8.1, some security intrusion is there even if it
is much less; perhaps the win7 security slowdown is a way for
msft to "force" people to go with win8?

I don't have any 3rd party security/anti-anything installed.
Let's ignore the file system results for a moment and
just consider the HDTune results. HDTune works at the
block level. Once you open a handle to the device and
the security test passes, all subsequent operations
are like "reading a file you just opened". There are
no more security gates. And on the two machines, one
with more RAM bandwidth, there was no additional
performance. Something limited the performance,
and it wasn't hardware. And it wasn't security either.
Not on a block level test.

The FAT32 used in the file search test, isn't a particular
security demon. It's pretty open. Not nearly as nasty
as NTFS. And the thing is, if there *wasn't* a throttle,
even security calls could be resolved in a blink of
an eye. It's a RAM Disk, with zero seek time and
4GB/sec bandwidth. Even if you checked the security attributes
of all 60,000 files at 10 microseconds a piece, that doesn't
account for the minutes of search time. There's just no excuse
for going that slow. With a 4GB disk and a 4GB/sec bandwidth,
the entire disk should be readable in 1 second. Even
allowing for the file search code topping out at
300MB/sec or so (the kind of speeds I get when I write
C code here), the search for strings of text should
complete in ~13 seconds. It takes a *lot* longer than that.
Some other limitation is present. I'm surprised SSD
users aren't more disappointed. Your SSD drive has
close to zero seek time, and at 300-500MB/sec bandwidth,
it should absolutely scream, rather than "feel 2x faster".
I feel we're not getting everything we could from
the hardware. Just a gut feel (using my calibrated eyeball).

Paul

Still think security has something to do with file access on a HDD,
not a ram disk.

When I had win7 installed, I had to check/change the security settings
each time as I was denied access! I had 2 HDD with 1 of the HDD as
a boot drive; when I tried win8 the 1st time, I just installed a 3rd
HDD for use as the boot drive & still had to do some security access
changes. Back to win7 & still had to do security changes for
permissions & sometimes ownership. as the "3rd" hdd is now the
"C:\"; nothing was done by me for the HDDs except for re-installing
the apps as the data stayed in the same places.

After trying win8.1, same problems; then back to win7, etc. Now
in win8.1, no delays, mostly, as the apps were re-installed into the
same places & the data remained at their respective partitions,
D thru I. After reading your posting, I decided to check on the
permissions & ownership; found that the security settings are very
different for each partition from what I had done when in win7!

I do know that at one point I had to change a few "ownerships" to
myself as the user so that I can have access & full control for that
partition & hdd; my user name is no longer in any of the partitions'
security settings. The ownerships has been changed to the
administrator of the computer name except for a couple of partitions
where it is a long string of numerics. Looks like that the "security"
properties are not on the hdd itself? Or win8.1 changed the security
properties or windows really have the hdd security properties as part
of the OS......or win8.1 did a "better" job of redoing the security
properties of the hdd somehow since I definitely didn't reformat or
change my app & data partitions or the HDD.

It seems like everything wants to check security of all files, the
browser, the Intel chipsets' plugin id protection that got installed
as part of the chipset or the ME install(?); sometimes even doing
a "dir" hesitates for an unknown reason..

This article hints at the improvements in Vista or later.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/m...07.06.acl.aspx

It's too bad the article doesn't discuss the storage locations
for that stuff.

Some of it should be in the file system. (Since Linux claims to
not handle the security information present in the OS, that means
something is in the file system itself.) That means
some level of security is part of the file system.

When you look at this article, the ACL is in the file system.

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

$Secure Access control list database that reduces overhead
having many identical ACLs stored with each file, by
uniquely storing these ACLs in this database only
(contains two indices: $SII (Standard_Information ID)
and $SDH (Security Descriptor Hash), which index the
stream named $SDS containing actual ACL table).

And this article, tells you of the file names of the Registry files.
The registry entries themselves have security settings, and in
Vista+ you may occasionally notice you're denied access to certain
registry keys (even as administrator). Forcing you to check the
ownership. While there is a SECURITY file as part of the file set,
when I look in WinXP Regedit here, that area is empty.

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

I don't have a good enough view from 60,000 feet, to be giving
a lecture on this stuff. You only occasionally get an article
that tries to tie the stuff together. You would probably need
some course notes from somewhere, to treat the subject properly.

*******

Takeown and icacls can be used to do battle with Vista+.
And Takeown is also available, as a right-click Context Menu
(shellex) command.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tims/archive...deletable.aspx

http://serverfault.com/questions/154...to-new-machine

Those are a couple of bookmarks on the subject.

And this site has a whole bunch of tutorials. The same guy owns
ghacks, vistax64, sevenforums, eightforums.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...cut.html?ltr=T

If I had a question about Windows 7, in a search engine I might try

site:sevenforums.com tutorial takeown

to find something topical. You can do searches against
each of the respective sites. Obviously, some of the
tutorials on eightforums, are just copied from sevenforums.
And some tutorials may contain info for more than one OS.
But overall, that's a great resource and beats random
articles on some of the other sites. And many of the
articles may contain .zip or .reg, for "doing and undoing"
stuff. I usually study those pretty carefully, before
merging them.

Paul

On Tue, 28 Oct 2014 11:28:04 -0400, Paul wrote:

Mark F wrote:
What RAMdisk?

RAMDISK Lite
(up to 4GB, may be allocated from PAE or AWE space.
Buy a copy if you have a really large RAM machine,
as it will handle as much as 64GB)

http://memory.dataram.com/products-a...ftware/ramdisk
I bought a Personal License with 64GB support, but I was afraid to
try using it on my Windows XP Professional system since I didn't
see how to configure XP to use the extra memory.

I looked around for configuration instructions and found information
about two similar products (Ramdisk and PrimoCache)at:
http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/index.html
Perhaps the original poster can get a trial of one
of them and see if he get the same performance
bottleneck.

I've bought a license for
Primo Ramdisk Ultimate Edition
and will read the instructions and try it if they are
complete and I get brave.


That's one of the first really large software RAMDisks that
works worth a damn. I've used other RAMDisks which were based
on the Microsoft sample code of years ago. But those had
relatively low size limits. I used to use those, when doing
file transfer tests and wanting to eliminate a hard drive
as a transfer limitation.

I have WinXP x32 8GB, with 4GB for OS, 4GB (PAE space) for RAMDisk.
WinXP x32 *can* access more than 4GB, but it's only allowed to
do so from Ring0, as a driver. And the RAMDisk runs at driver
level, in order to do that.

You can even stick the pagefile on the 4GB RAMDisk, as a
means of extending the total RAM that WinXP can effectively
use. But I don't recommend that. In a couple of days testing,
I could see the odd glitch, so I no longer have it
configured that way. Now, the RAMDisk is purely discretionary,
can be turned on or off at any time. And is formatted FAT32,
since the entire disk cannot be more than 4GB. This is plenty
for quick unzipping of files, attempts to search, and so on.

And when you run that RAMDisk on a faster machine, it doesn't
scale up like it should.

HDTune does block level access to the disks it tests. I haven't
bothered to test what block size it uses, but it's supposed to
be a large block size. It doesn't matter what file system is
on the hard drive you're testing, since it does no file
system access, and instead works at the block level (on
something like \\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0 - a block
device kind of reference).

Paul

On 2014-10-29, Paul wrote:

........................................


This article hints at the improvements in Vista or later.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/m...07.06.acl.aspx

It's too bad the article doesn't discuss the storage locations
for that stuff.

Some of it should be in the file system. (Since Linux claims to
not handle the security information present in the OS, that means
something is in the file system itself.) That means
some level of security is part of the file system.

When you look at this article, the ACL is in the file system.

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

$Secure Access control list database that reduces overhead
having many identical ACLs stored with each file, by
uniquely storing these ACLs in this database only
(contains two indices: $SII (Standard_Information ID)
and $SDH (Security Descriptor Hash), which index the
stream named $SDS containing actual ACL table).

And this article, tells you of the file names of the Registry files.
The registry entries themselves have security settings, and in
Vista+ you may occasionally notice you're denied access to certain
registry keys (even as administrator). Forcing you to check the
ownership. While there is a SECURITY file as part of the file set,
when I look in WinXP Regedit here, that area is empty.

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

I don't have a good enough view from 60,000 feet, to be giving
a lecture on this stuff. You only occasionally get an article
that tries to tie the stuff together. You would probably need
some course notes from somewhere, to treat the subject properly.

*******

Takeown and icacls can be used to do battle with Vista+.
And Takeown is also available, as a right-click Context Menu
(shellex) command.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tims/archive...deletable.aspx

http://serverfault.com/questions/154...to-new-machine

Those are a couple of bookmarks on the subject.

And this site has a whole bunch of tutorials. The same guy owns
ghacks, vistax64, sevenforums, eightforums.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...cut.html?ltr=T

If I had a question about Windows 7, in a search engine I might try

site:sevenforums.com tutorial takeown

to find something topical. You can do searches against
each of the respective sites. Obviously, some of the
tutorials on eightforums, are just copied from sevenforums.
And some tutorials may contain info for more than one OS.
But overall, that's a great resource and beats random
articles on some of the other sites. And many of the
articles may contain .zip or .reg, for "doing and undoing"
stuff. I usually study those pretty carefully, before
merging them.

Paul

Thanks Paul, I've made a text file with the stated sites.

Will pursue more when win 10 arrives. I believe that I forgot to
state that the installs/re-installs were done as clean installs; no
idea if I would have encountered same security problems if I had
just did an install with first formatting the to be system partition.

At least I know what to do even if a lot of work when I am told that
I cannot write a file to a partition because I don't have permission.
There are administrators & ADMINISTRATORS & both are different!

On Tuesday, October 28, 2014 6:48:43 AM UTC+8, RayLopez99 wrote:
I downloaded the latest version of Clonezilla, in an attempt to do a '

However Clonezilla works fine to do not a clone but a disk image, and I use it all the time for this purpose, even for Windows 8.1. You have to work from a bootable CD however, and be careful with what you select for the prompts, as explained elsewhere on the net, but it works fine. Never had to do a restore but the disk image is verified and I assume it would work.

RL

On Wed, 26 Nov 2014 04:06:42 -0800 (PST), RayLopez99 wrote:

| On Tuesday, October 28, 2014 6:48:43 AM UTC+8, RayLopez99 wrote:
| I downloaded the latest version of Clonezilla, in an attempt to do a '
|
| However Clonezilla works fine to do not a clone but a disk image, and I use it all the time for this purpose, even for Windows 8.1. You have to work from a bootable CD however, and be careful with what you select for the prompts, as explained elsewhere on the net, but it works fine. Never had to do a restore but the disk image is verified and I assume it would work.

Anytime I make a bootable disk I try it. If it won't boot for some reason, I'd
rather learn that when I don't need it than when I do.

Larc

On Wed, 26 Nov 2014 09:40:06 -0500, Larc
wrote:

Anytime I make a bootable disk I try it. If it won't boot for some reason, I'd
rather learn that when I don't need it than when I do.

Yep. And stay offline when tweaking it in, installing, adding or
modifying programs. Unplug or disconnect that modem -- especially
with anything newer in a MS OS, even after engaging "advanced" options
for -not- connecting back to MS.

Boot or rewrite a partition from your newly constructed image that's
then ready to rock and roll - then engage the modem. After some days,
weeks online, the things that will happen and changes that occur to it
-- sure is nice, best way to be sure, going back to that image for a
fresh, new install that no interim test trail program install or
browser site incident can modify in unwelcome ways.

A binary image that good is worth protecting once all your programs
and setting preferentials are tweaked and installed -- and, in my
case, linked to other partitions. I don't as a rule "install programs"
onto that C: partition - besides being a collection of ancillary
programs, seldom capable of degrees of self-modification, unlike
Windows, and far less likely to need such stringent oversight, such as
binary OS images -- where a fast if not rather large USB flashstick
(64/128G - I use 32G) and the freeware program SynchBack or similar
might suffice.

On Wednesday, November 26, 2014 10:40:06 PM UTC+8, Larc wrote:

Anytime I make a bootable disk I try it. If it won't boot for some reason, I'd
rather learn that when I don't need it than when I do.

You are braver than I. Because trying would imply rewriting back to your C: drive, which, if it fails, will mess up your day. I rather not 'break the glass' to test the 'fire alarm', but simply trust it will work when there's a real emergency.

BTW, and Flasherly tell me if I'm wrong, I will do a clean install but of Windows 8.1 x64 bit rather than my present 32 bit. That way I can run some 64bit programs like a certain chess engine more efficiently. Researching this, the only thing that can go wrong is drivers, I think, and hopefully my USB 3.0 and CD/DVD reader/writer will not need updating, since the BIOS claims (the PC is from 2011) it is x64 compatible and presumably Microsoft has generic drivers for x64 for CD/DVD and for USB 3.0 the mobo/BIOS should handle it, I think. I'll let this group know if it fails.

PS--today I took the case cover off, un-dusted, wow, as Starbu cks Fl ying would say, there was so much dust it was incredible, how the fans even had room to rotate was surprising, and I keep the PC in a room I vacuum and rarely open the windows--and I noticed the clip that holds one of the RAM chips was a bit off the notch of the RAM module, so I gently snapped it back in.. Turned on the power...nothing. So after fiddling for a while, I realized it must be the RAM, so I gently unsnapped the clip--counter-intuitive--and immediately the PC worked again. Let sleeping dogs lie!

RL

On Wed, 26 Nov 2014 09:50:15 -0800 (PST), RayLopez99
wrote:

BTW, and Flasherly
tell me if I'm wrong, I will do a clean install but of Windows 8.1 x64
bit rather than my present 32 bit. That way I can run some 64bit
programs like a certain chess engine more efficiently. Researching
this, the only thing that can go wrong is drivers, I think, and
hopefully my USB 3.0 and CD/DVD reader/writer will not need updating,
since the BIOS claims (the PC is from 2011) it is x64 compatible and
presumably Microsoft has generic drivers for x64 for CD/DVD and for
USB 3.0 the mobo/BIOS should handle it, I think. I'll let this group
know if it fails.

-
I won't tell you anything, because I'm pretty clueless about W8.1 and,
for that matter, W7 (64-bit) I installed fairly recently to use for
more a matter of discrepancies or occasions when needed. I treat it,
as best for intents, no differently than XP - which included a binary
backup for no small focus on the initial install (3 operating systems,
over 2 solidstate drives, with a 3rd-party boot arbitrator *not* on
the W7 drive and least to conflict with Microsoft's employment of *Nix
GRUB). Knock on wood, so far so good.


PS--today I took the case cover off,
un-dusted, wow, as Starbu cks Fl ying would say, there was so much
dust it was incredible, how the fans even had room to rotate was
surprising, and I keep the PC in a room I vacuum and rarely open the
windows--and I noticed the clip that holds one of the RAM chips was a
bit off the notch of the RAM module, so I gently snapped it back in.
Turned on the power...nothing. So after fiddling for a while, I
realized it must be the RAM, so I gently unsnapped the
clip--counter-intuitive--and immediately the PC worked again. Let
sleeping dogs lie!

-
Pull the memory modules and take a hard rubber Ink-Eraser to the lower
row contacts, both sides, then brush well after for any miniscule
residue before applying with fast-drying electrical contact cleaner
and reseating (hit the slots with a quick shot of cleaner, also). I've
disassembled PCs entirely, leaned them sideways on newspapers, going
over all the boards with a bottle of alcohol, washing down everything
clean with soft trim brush, before using a 60gal. air compressor to
dry things out and reassemble. Just as easy, I suppose, to keep case
sides opposite the MB plane off, and periodically go in with a vacuum
cleaner crevice tool. Might not be a pretty case, but at least
there's nothing accumulating that's hidden.

On Thursday, November 27, 2014 1:50:17 AM UTC+8, RayLopez99 wrote:
!

RL

I did a clean reinstall today...I decided to stick to 32 bit Windows 8 since I only have 4 GB RAM and more margin for error with 32 vs x64 bit Windows..

After the clean reinstall, chkdsk found no errors, even on reboot.

I think I figured out why the original installation went bad. It is hinted in various forums. It is because with my SATA drives the "Disk 0" was originally the smaller Western Digital HDD, that I cloned into a larger Seagate drive that was "Disk 1". However, I did not switch the SATA cables, hence Disk 1 (the Seagate drive) was the bootable drive yet it showed up in Windows as "Disk 1" not Disk 0. This is NOT a problem EXCEPT if you have a cold power off or some sort of problem (my speculation, but that was a hint from another poster who said 'log' information is automatically stored in Disk 0 by Windows 7 or 8). So, the first time I had some small hickup, like a hard power shutdown (which is rare since I use UPS but it happens once every few months due to a variety of factors, typically programs that hang and I can't terminate them),Windows wrote something on "drive disk 0" which was in fact the old, now non-bootable, "Drive D". So the problems began.

Solution: clean reinstall, then switch the SATA cables so "drive disk 0" is in fact on the bootable drive (the Seagate) while the Sata cable for disk 1 is on the old, formerly bootable, but now just used for data and backup Western Digital drive.

BTW, in all of this I decided--at the spur of the moment, and there were some hairy moments--to update my BIOS by downloading the latest BIOS and from inside the BIOS reading the file. Supposedly this AMI MegaTrends BIOS had a stability issue involving 4096? byte file size for NTFS and hard drives, so perhaps this was also a contributing factor.

So at the moment my system is back to being stable, and all's well except for the two days I will waste reinstalling all the programs I use...but maybe it is good since I can avoid installing out some of the old programs I never used.

RL