Some utils may destroy volumes due to PE power management

[baarod]

I just found out today, the hard way, that power management is active in the pre-execution environment that Windows 7 uses to run utilities that must have exclusive access to the boot disk. These utilities include, but are not limited to, virus scanners (particularly in repair mode), disk scanners/checkers (like Windows 7 scandisk), offline defrag utils (particularly in MFT mode) and the one that killed me -- Paragon Partition Manager. It recovered thanks to it's great design, but beware!

 

[SIW2]

Hi baarod,

That's interesting. Can you be more specific as to what happened?

Thanks

SIW2

 

[baarod]

Hi baarod,

That's interesting. Can you be more specific as to what happened?

Thanks

SIW2

I wanted to rebuild my data partition as I was getting weird errors when adding a folder on it to a library -- it was telling me that it could not add it because it was on a removable drive. I'd had similar errors before with partitions created with "unofficial" partitioning software and Windows 7. I'd solved them by resizing the problematic partition and creating a new partition in the resulting free space using Windows 7 Disk Management. I'd then copy as much of the data from the problem partition to the partition newly created by Windows 7 as would fit. Then I'd resize the problem partition again to it's new minimum and add it's free space to the partition created by Windows 7. After that I'd copy the rest of the data from the problem partition to the partition created by Windows 7, delete the problem partition and add the resulting free space to the partition created by Windows 7.

I was using Paragon Partition Manager 9.0 -- my choice for this type of utility for a variety of reasons. It needed to restart in pre-execution mode to resize the partition. It was in the middle of doing that when Windows power management kicked in and hibernated the machine. Thankfully, Paragon has failsafes built into it's algorithms so their operations are restartable if you boot off their recovery disk. That's where I'm at now. Booting off their recovery disk does NOT allow power management to kick in so the operation completed successfully.

 

[SIW2]

Hi,

I use PM9 too, It's excellent.

Thanks for elaborating - any app. could run into that problem in a similar situation - something we should all be aware of.

SIW2

 

[baarod]

That's why I posted it -- I'd never had this issue with previous versions of Windows.