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[SOLVED] Boot problem/s
Shades:
The new kids on the block are not nearly as stable as good old MBR...that's for sure. Faster, yes. Less limited about partition sizes, yes. But not nearly as stable...and when the proverbial sh.t hits the fan, you have way(!) bigger problems. As MilesAhead already said: Don't expect software that worked flawlessly with MBR, to work with GPT in a similar fashion.
Personally, I try to avoid 2+ TByte hard disks for as long as I can. You can get GPT on smaller disks if you want, but it is obligatory for disks of 2+ GByte in size. And given the very bad experiences I had with 1,5 TByte and 2 TByte hard disks (I have a total of 8 of those "doorstops", none of these lasted a year and were all brand new), I'll keep to 1 TByte disks.
Besides that those disks soldier on without problems whatsoever (anecdotal, I know), the size limit does require you to think about backup strategies that you have to execute.
The lure of 3+ TByte disks is certainly there, but common sense dictates that it is never a good idea to "keep all your eggs in one basket".
Vurbal:
Congratulations. I have pretty good experience messing with MBR. But with W8 they changed to this UEFI and GPT jazz. I understand it had to be changed to accommodate huge storage. But I don't dare to do anything without a lot of reading in preparation and expendable machines to experiment with. :)
Plus a lot of bootable utilities that worked for sure on MBR are now suspect. Can't take anything as a given.
-MilesAhead (July 26, 2015, 07:28 AM)
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As I learned last year, Dell's recovery process was already suspect on MBR systems - and that's being generous. Throw in those additional variables and it's clearly a train wreck waiting to happen - at least for the average user.
app103:
The lure of 3+ TByte disks is certainly there, but common sense dictates that it is never a good idea to "keep all your eggs in one basket".
-Shades (July 26, 2015, 10:10 AM)
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My data loss related anxiety is in direct proportion to the capacity of the individual hard drives in a machine. 1TB is my limit. Anything above that is way out of my comfort zone and would likely keep me awake at night, until I downgrade to lower capacity drives.
And I am really glad I have never owned a consumer grade Dell that comes with any type of restore crap. All of my Dell machines have been business grade and came with real OS installation and driver disks. (no restore partitions or restore disks that wipe away all your data) An added benefit of that is no crapware bundle, or restoration of any of the original crapware the machine came with, pre-installed. In fact, it can't even restore the Dell branded wallpapers the machines originally had. :)
tomos:
All of my Dell machines have been business grade and came with real OS installation and driver disks. (no restore partitions or restore disks that wipe away all your data) An added benefit of that is no crapware bundle, or restoration of any of the original crapware the machine came with, pre-installed.
-app103 (July 26, 2015, 07:36 PM)
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this is a business grade machine :-(
Came with Windows 7 on it, and a Windows 8 CD (and no optical drive lol).
There is an option to make a factory recovery disc/usb - I'd be curious how that one installs...
No crapware is fairly true - although McAfee was included without choice in the offer, it was not actually installed. (There's an installer wizard to install the junk and/or any software purchased with the machine.) I have read though, that this Dell backup & recovery is supposed to break Windows image restore - unless you upgrade to the paid version (cnet - that is from a year ago, so dont know if still the case).
app103:
(cnet - that is from a year ago, so dont know if still the case).
-tomos (July 26, 2015, 11:02 PM)
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Anyone who purchased a Dell computer after the first of May and has Dell's "Basic" version will not be able to recover their computer with an Image if they have a major failure.
I wonder if Microsoft knows what Dell did to their Windows 7 Operating System?-cnet
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Some OEM's have done so much worse to some previous versions of Windows, including installing their own utilities that deleted both the copy of the original setup that was copied to disk during install, as well as backups of updated files from WinME, effectively disabling a feature that would have given the user a completely updated set of installation files, after every Windows update. That naturally forced users to use the OEM's "restore" disk, which by default wiped the drive and all the user's data before reinstalling Windows and all the crapware again, essentially restoring it to whatever it was when new, and forcing them to go through the process of a gazillion Windows updates all over again. They could never do a repair install from within Windows, from a special system folder, that would have preserved their data and prevented them from having to visit Windows Update, over and over again.
This is one of the reasons why when you purchase a machine that includes an OEM version of Windows (not a retail install disk), the agreement is that the OEM will provide support for the OS and not Microsoft. Microsoft has no idea what OEMs do to their OS, specifically (although they do have some clue), and they are not willing to support the OEM's bastardized versions.
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