Windows to go

danger_mouse_tm · 06-10-2014 03:21PM #1

Hi,
I just unboxed a new lenovo carbon x1 with 256ssd and had problems accessing the store to do bring it from 8 to 8.1 It said that the store is not available on windows to go devices. I had to enable it in Group policy editor. So i'm a little confused, am i going to be missing any other features? All the usual lenovo bloatware is there and the windows 8 logo is under the base.

danger_mouse_tm · 07-10-2014 03:41PM

There was more messing about to get windows 8.1 to install. The install would stop and I would get an error saying that It couldn't install to a USB drive. A trip into the registry was used to resolve this. Now I'm getting an error saying that one of my partitions has less than 15% space. I've included a snapshot of the partition table. The mind boggles. I also can't find any way of creating a recovery drive on 8.1 pro enterprise, I don't really want to take an image of the drive using norton ghost. But it would be nice if there was a way to create some sort of bootable media that would just restore the system to the way I have it now in case of a complete hard drive failure. What's the procedure now if this drive just dies a death?

Fysh · 11-10-2014 09:54AM

danger_mouse_tm wrote: »

There was more messing about to get windows 8.1 to install. The install would stop and I would get an error saying that It couldn't install to a USB drive. A trip into the registry was used to resolve this. Now I'm getting an error saying that one of my partitions has less than 15% space. I've included a snapshot of the partition table. The mind boggles. I also can't find any way of creating a recovery drive on 8.1 pro enterprise, I don't really want to take an image of the drive using norton ghost. But it would be nice if there was a way to create some sort of bootable media that would just restore the system to the way I have it now in case of a complete hard drive failure. What's the procedure now if this drive just dies a death?

The Windows 8.1 upgrade was restricted for Windows 8 Enterprise as it was assumed by Microsoft that Enterprise customers would want centralised control over the upgrade process. To my knowledge no 8.1 Enterprise Upgrade media has been made available so far; in my last workplace I had to do a clean install to move up to 8.1 Enterprise on my workstation.

If you've used a non-standard method to get to where you are now there's really no telling what's going on internally. The disk layout you've posted looks OK but I'd be checking what driver is being used for the disk controller your SSD is connected to; if it's been detected as a USB interface during the installation then it may have been set up as a Windows To Go install.

As for taking a backup, I've got some good news - you should be able to use the wbadmin command with the -allCritical switch to create a bare-metal-restorable backup of your system's current state. I've used this to back up and restore Windows Server systems and it works very nicely as long as you have it configured correctly. Take a look at the command reference on technet for more details.

danger_mouse_tm · 11-10-2014 02:04PM

Fysh wrote: »

If you've used a non-standard method to get to where you are now there's really no telling what's going on internally. The disk layout you've posted looks OK but I'd be checking what driver is being used for the disk controller your SSD is connected to; if it's been detected as a USB interface during the installation then it may have been set up as a Windows To Go install.

That's probably exactly what has happened. The good folks at Lenovo, upon configuring the laptop may have gone down the easy route of setting it up as WTG if there was no current windows 8 driver available for the controller. It's a shame the windows to go feature is only available to enterprise customers. It's something I would probably like to experiment with. They only concern I had was the amount of partitions on the drive. I didn't want to start messing around with any of them as one or more could be related to a system restore. Having no experience of SSD drives until now a fresh install using my own media was out of the question. (I purchased windows 8 pro when it was released). I didn't see any sign of Lenovo's "one key recovery" as per their consumer line. I think the factory restore may be initiated by the "Think Vantage" button.

As far as backup, I kind of half suggested to the new owner of the laptop that he might bring it back in a few weeks and we could use clonzilla just to clone the drive onto a 320gb spinning disk and hopefully with MBR's intact that could be used to boot off in the event of a total drive failure. I'm not even too sure if that's a real concern with SSD drives or are they more fragile than spinning?

Fysh · 13-10-2014 10:19AM

I've just had a look at the Lenovo support site for the Carbon X1 - there appear to be two types and for both the chipset driver is different depending on whether you're using win8 or Win8.1, so that's almost certainly a part of the problem you're having. Link for type 34xx, link for types 20A7 and 20A8

If it's shipped with Enterprise, you're kind of stuck as to fixing it because a clean install would be the best approach, but full install media's only available for Software Assurance customers or partners with similar-level agreements. My suggestion would be to create a full disk backup, test it (whether by restoring from it or by mounting the image on another system) and once you've verified that you can restore fromit, wipe the drive and do a cleam install of 8.1 Pro. Couldn't hurt to contact Lenovo support and ask how they advise doing the upgrade given the different chipset drivers available.

Windows to go

Comments