Partition restore operation is very slow

March 8, 2008

Question1:

Why is the partition restore operation so slow in Windows (is it WinHEX's

fault)?

Question2:

Tell me of a good way to restore partitions and disks from Windows.

Windows 2003 SP2 ent. in testing environment; no programs or services

accessing the disks in background. 1 GB of RAM, 1.83 GHz Athlon XP.

Write cache + advanced performance is enabled for disk 1.

(hda) disk 1: Segate 320 GiB, primary master single on mainboard IDE, UDMA5

(hda1) partition 1: linux swap=2GB

(hda2) partition 2: linux, ReiserFS, 32GB

(hda3) partition 3: NTFS, programs, pagefile=1GB

(sda) disk 2: Segate 320 GiB, primary master single on ITE IT8212 ATA RAID,

UDMA5

(sda1) partition1: NTFS, Windows 2003, boot, pagefile=1GB

(sda2) partition2: NTFS, large partition to store image backups

Copying large files between disk 2 and disk 1 is fast, however:

If I try to restore the linux partition (hda2) from image on (sda2) using

WinHEX 14.3, I hear noise from random access on disk 1, it takes about 40

minutes to complete; average speed is: 13.69MB/s. In Task Manager,

Performance:

Physical Memory:Available - drops to almost zero

Physical Memory:System Cache - goes to about 830MB

Windows pages-out everything to the page files and even scrolling up and

down in an already open web page may take 30 seconds. The system is

completely unusable during the restore operation.

The same restore operation from a live Ubuntu 7.1 CD:

mount /dev/sda2 /mnt

cp /mnt/backup-image.img /dev/hda2

takes about 15 minutes; average speed: 36.5MB/s, I can browse the web and

listen to some music at the same time.

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