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Issues with 1TB USB 3 HDDs


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#1 drazhar

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Posted 22 October 2013 - 07:37 PM

Hi Alll

 

I have multiple 1TB drives, Western Digital, Toshiba, etc

 

I have no success with Xboot 1.0 beta 14 on these

 

I have tried the following

 

1TB volume formatted in Fat32 by Easus Partition Master, using SysLinux boot loade

 

7GB Volume formated in Fat32 by windows, using SysLinux

 

1Tb NTFS formatted, using Grub4Dos

 

None of these work

 

Image here

http://postimg.org/image/h9q4ri90l/

 

Any ideas? going to  USB Flash drive works fine, no problem



#2 steve6375

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Posted 22 October 2013 - 09:11 PM

Did you mark the partition as Active (bootable)?


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#3 drazhar

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Posted 22 October 2013 - 09:25 PM

Steve, thats a good point, i assumed that XBOOT did as such.

 

How would you recommend i do so? I have windows 7.



#4 steve6375

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Posted 22 October 2013 - 09:36 PM

EAseus Home Partition Master perhaps?



#5 drazhar

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Posted 23 October 2013 - 09:52 AM

I was poking around in DISKPART, but im too afraid of messing with my windows 7 BCD! :)

 

I have the free version of Easeus, but i will have a quick poke and see. If should just be a matter of making it "active"



#6 drazhar

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Posted 23 October 2013 - 10:31 AM

I did the steps here and it worked fine

http://msmvps.com/bl...-windows-7.aspx

 

However, i did NOT format in windows. I used EaseUS to create the partition as windows 7 would not. And now Syslinux is working fine and i will be creating loads of ISO's to put on it! :)

 

Thank you steve!



#7 steve6375

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Posted 23 October 2013 - 10:33 AM

You could also try RMPrepUSB and Easy2Boot instead of XBOOT...



#8 drazhar

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Posted 23 October 2013 - 11:32 AM

I had a quick look at your products last night, but i found your website difficult to navigate, however i will be coming back to them when i have more time to create my multiboot HDD for installing various operating systems



#9 Wonko the Sane

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Posted 23 October 2013 - 11:50 AM

I had a quick look at your products last night, but i found your website difficult to navigate, however i will be coming back to them when i have more time to create my multiboot HDD for installing various operating systems

Since you are from Ireland, you may want to also try a thingy written by a fellow countryman, Akeo (the Author) Rufus (the tool):

http://reboot.pro/to...-been-released/

http://reboot.pro/fi...file/145-rufus/

http://rufus.akeo.ie/

 

:cheers:

Wonko



#10 Rootman

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Posted 25 October 2013 - 02:10 PM

I have a number of 1TB USB 3 WD Passport drives.  I found that earlier versions of them will NOT boot off a solid 1TB primary partition.  I had to repartition and add a smallish primary partition of a few gigs and then IT would boot.  I created an additional partition on the drive for data.  This worked OK for most things but could be a PITA for some.  Later versions of WD Passports WOULD allow a single large partition and boot from it.

 

I happen to use Disk Parted for my partitioning needs, and use it to make partitions active. And DO check out Steve's RMPrepUSB, it's a superb utility to handle USB stuff.

 

And while you're at it see if Steve375's Easy2Boot will work for you, it is a wonderful set of scripts that leverage GRUB4DOS and can boot damn near any ISO you throw at it by simply copying the ISO to the correct folder.  I have it on a bunch of drives I use.



#11 Rootman

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Posted 05 November 2013 - 02:21 PM

I am posting here again with new info on this subject.

 

We recently got some new Dell Laptops designed for Windows 8, Latitude E7240's.  These units would NOT boot off my 1TB USB Passport drives, despite everything else booting off them just fine.  It came up with an "Invalid Partition Table" error.  My 500GB drives (and smaller) all worked OK.  I shuffled some data around to another drive then used Parted Magic to shrink the boot partition down to 50GB, just enough to store Easy2Boot and it's ISOs with enough room to stash some other files.  I then filled the remainder with another NTFS partition and moved the data back to this parition.

 

Well, the same units that refused to boot with the single ~1TB partition now boot just fine off the same Passport drives with this smaller boot partition and the rest for data on a secondary partition.  For some odd reason these newer units are not able to boot the 1TB drives with a single partitions where the older laptops and desktops could.  I am not sure why but it was an easy enough fix, although it took considerable time to copy the data off somewhere else, shrink the partition, create a second and then move the data back.



#12 steve6375

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Posted 05 November 2013 - 03:02 PM

So is it that a single partition drive (NTFS?) won't boot (to what and what format was it in originally?) and that a 2-partition drive would boot?

I think you need to try some more tests...

 

e.g. re-format as single NTFS ptn and try, re-format as NTFS+small ptn (in RMPrepUSB 'Boot as HDD') and try again.



#13 Rootman

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Posted 05 November 2013 - 09:30 PM

So is it that a single partition drive (NTFS?) won't boot (to what and what format was it in originally?) and that a 2-partition drive would boot?

I think you need to try some more tests...

 

e.g. re-format as single NTFS ptn and try, re-format as NTFS+small ptn (in RMPrepUSB 'Boot as HDD') and try again.

 

These were 3 Passport 1TB USB 3 drives, all formatted with a single NTFS volume of just under 1TB in size , previous to the Dell E7240 laptop that I had boot issues with yesterday it booted on damn near anything I put it on.  I am using your Easy2Boot and a scad of ISOs.  I mainly booted to Windows 7PE and applied a ghost image to new PCs.

 

Putting it on this laptop and pecking F12 and choosing USB produced an INVALID PARTITION error first thing before it even tried to boot anything, it just ground to a halt and threw this error.  I whipped out my trusty USB 3 JumpDrive128GB NTFS formatted thumb drive and it booted fine, so the issue was not NTFS nor seems to be USB 3.  I have a few 500GB NTFS formatted USB 2 PassPort drives and they boot just fine. As did any lower capacity drives I tried (all with single NTFS primary boot partitions the full size of the drive).  I also had an older 1TB NTFS USB 3 Passport drive that is maybe 1 year old.  When I first set it up I had issues with it booting but it simply was a Grub4DOS issue, for some odd reason it would not find the grldr file and would bomb out.  Way back when I messed with it for a few days and then gave up and set up a FAT32 formatted primary partition with an NTFS second partition, reinstalled Grb4DOS and copied the files to it, it booted fine from then on.  This is what made me thing of the single NTFS primary partition being the issue.

 

One of the newer 1TB drives had just a small amount of data on it, so I booted to Parted Magic and shrank the 1st primary partition to 50GB, made sure the boot flag was enabled and tried it on the screwy laptop.  it booted fine.  So I created a second NTFS partition in Windows and tried it again.  And again success. I juggled the data on the other drives, shrank the first NTFS partition and created the second, all now boot fine.

 

So I am not sure if it's this funky laptops USB controller or what.  Yesterday I also had a few Dell E5430 laptops which booted just fine with the single large NTFS partition scheme, as well as the new smaller scheme.



#14 steve6375

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Posted 05 November 2013 - 09:59 PM

It is interesting. It would be good to repeat the test by formatting one as a single NTFS partitition and then add grub4dos and see if it boots.

Then repeat but format with two ptns (you can use Easeus Home Partition Master or Windows Disk Mgr or Pmagic to see if they all work in each case).



#15 Rootman

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Posted 06 November 2013 - 02:11 AM

It is interesting. It would be good to repeat the test by formatting one as a single NTFS partitition and then add grub4dos and see if it boots.

Then repeat but format with two ptns (you can use Easeus Home Partition Master or Windows Disk Mgr or Pmagic to see if they all work in each case).

 

Unfortunately I can't as the lone laptop that had the issues was given to the user, everything else booted just fine with the single NTFS partitions before so I don't have anything to test on.  It works fine with the dual partitions so I'll just keep them that way.  I'll just have to remember when I get my next drop of drives, they'll be 2TB or more by then.

 

This is the first computer I've gotten in that was designed "for" Windows 8, that is designed more recently that it had a Windows 8 license sticker on it.  Everything else has been older models from the Windows 7 time frame.  So I suspect it represents a new chipset and USB controller, which means everything else I get in the future has the potential to have the same issue.  So, it's a minor issue with the dual partitions so I'll just stick with them to assure the drives will all boot on the new stuff.



#16 drazhar

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Posted 06 November 2013 - 07:58 PM

Hi Guys

 

I had some issue with the drive i made on a lenovo ThinkEdge 72. To boot it there is an option for UEFI Boot, and Legacy boot. UEFI Failed, Legacy was fine!






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