Windows Vista Vista x64 cloned drive follow-up - to remove OEM partition

Mattman,

Further testing revealed:

Windows will not boot with the Seagate drive. The system reaches the Gateway logo screen, goes black, then continually loops to the logo screen. Cannot access safe mode using the F8 key.

I can access the bios with the F10 key or the boot menu with the F2 key, but am limited to changing the date/time and boot order only.

It does show in the bios that the boot device is the Seagate 320 Gb HDD.

When windows does not boot, the only other option gateway gives the user is the Alt+F10 key which is to recover the system to the factory original disk.

Booting with the original WD 320 Gb HDD gives you the same limited options, plus you can make recovery disks and/or application & drivers disks. There is not an option available to make any recovery console or startup repair disks.

Placing both disks in the machine with The WD drive as master I can access the data on both disks with windows explorer. I was able to run the pinball game from the seagate drive by double-clicking the "exe" file.

Examining both disks with disk manager reveals that they appear to be identical (299.08 Gb active, healthy NTFS partitions). When I right click on the primary partitions of both disks, I get an explorer type window which shows their file structure.

When I right click on the recovery partition, disk manager is unable to access the data. There isn't any drive letter for this partition. Just that it is a healthy (EISA) configuration.

I want to remove the cloned data from the Seagate drive, how would I be able to gain access to the the recovery partition, so that I can format it?

I will probably use this disk as a secondary drive and move the large programs to it. More work than I originally envisioned.

When the time comes, I will just upgrade to a full blown version of windows. No more OEM "BS "

Thank you for your kind assistance.

 

Steve,

Yes, I did. I made the clone, verified I could read the data with win explorer, shut the machine down, then replaced the primary drive with the clone.

It just keeps looping to the Gateway logo screen on bootup. I have to do a hard shutdown to be able to do anything further with the machine.

All I want to do now is erase the protected OEM partition from the drive.

 

Matt & Steve,

All is well.

Thank you for your time and effort, it is well appreciated

I used the old adage, if you cannot fix it in windows, do it in DOS.

What I did was plug in the cloned drive as a secondary drive.

Disk manager would not access the OEM partition under windows, but I used it to remove the cloned primary partition on this secondary drive.

I then opened a command prompt window & typed in the command DISKPART.

Then the command LIST DISK. This revealed Disk 0 with the OEM partition & the C: partition ( primary, active) plus Disk 1 with only the "OEM partition 1" that I wanted to remove.

I used the command SELECT Disk 1, then used the same command SELECT Partition 1 to gain access to the OEM partition to work on it.

And finally used the command DELETE PARTITION OVERRIDE to remove the OEM partition. It is this little known "override parameter" that defeats the OEM protection.

Diskpart responded with the message that the partition was successfully removed.

I now have a blank hard drive as it came from the mfg without any wasted space.

So that this might benefit others could you have the admin append to the title to remove OEM partition plus correct the typo x62 to x64.

This whole issue has been resolved.