[jbullard]

Howard,

Could you explain in a little more detail the problems you are experiencing? DualBootPRO is not a boot manager; rather a boot editor. It has no effect on the master boot record/table. If you are experiencing delayed boot-up, then the best option is to insert the Win Vista/7 DVD and do a startup repair. If you need more information on how to do this then please let me know.

Jason

[jbullard]

I've just installed DualBootPro 1.0 on my Win7 64-bit machine and am stuck with this problem. When I fire up the software I get the Missing or Corrupt message in a dialog box 3 times, then 1 about not having a backup, then one more about Missing or Corrupt before I even get a program window. Once in it I can't use it to repair the drives. It reports success then immediately pops the same Missing or Corrupt dialog box.

My system drives consist of 3 drives total with 2 RAIDed into one via motherboard chipset. They appear as drive C: which is bootable. Total RAID size is 1TB.

The 3rd drive is a 750GB Serial ATA drive that is chopped into 3 partitions of which none have a drive letter assigned.
Lastly I have 2 DVDs of which one uses a SATA interface.

The 3rd hard drive with no drive letters consists of some raid data (overhead), and 2 partitions for Fedora 12. I installed it after Windows 7 was up and it put Grub down on the RAID drive and chainloads to Windows when it is selected to run. All of this boot control works fine now. I can get to Fedora and/or Win7. The problem is that I can't use BCDEdit to alter any of my boot configuration. When I try to run it, it complains about the boot config data store not being able to open because the file cannot be found.

Got any ideas how to find my way out of this mess?

This problem has been fixed. After further discussion it was identified that Fedora was installed after Windows 7. Because of this, Grub was the default boot loader and jwileyr wanted Windows 7 to manage it. Unfortunately, Grub (or Fedora) moved partitions around which caused a nightmare for Windows 7 bootloader. He was finally able to deactivate a partition and have Windows 7 manage the boot record.

If anyone else runs in to this problem use the Recovery Console in the Repair Computer option from the Windows Vista/7 DVD. Once inside the console environment type in bootrec.exe -FixMbr. This will fix the master boot record so you can use DualBootPRO and BcdEdit to manage your boot environment.

[jwileyr]

Looks like my "missing or corrupt" error is solved.

As the DBP guys like to (and need to) point out this program is a UI layer on top of BCDedit. It does not fix underlying problems on the windows machine. This is what my problem was that yielded a DBP issue.

I could not run the built-in BCDEdit utility that Windows provides. It would always complain about an unavailable boot store, file not found. I dug into it and found the problem was caused by my adding a second OS to an existing Win7 installation. The new unix OS replaced Windows bootloader with its own (grub) that allowed me to select either OS to launch from. This is what introduced the problem. I created my own problem because I did not think about my dual OS and shared drive layout before install and just used defaults. Because the unix install was targeted at a different drive than the previous windows boot disk the new bootloader was written to the new disk behind windows back. The BIOS boot order was also changed to the other disk. Sooo, it now boots to grub (on the "wrong" disk according to windows) which points back to drive C if I choose windows. BCD edit only knows how to read and use filse on the principle boot disk. This was changed behind its back. As far as windows was concerned it was still booting from drive c (which it was not) and BCD edit still tried to access the boot file there. They would not be found any longer. My solution was to remove the unix install (which was experimental anyway), restore the proper BIOS boot order, then use my Win7 source DVD and ran the repair/recovery stuff. It detected a "problem" right away it offered to fix for me. When I made the selection it fixed the bootloader and pointed back to drive c. BCDEdit now works which means DBP works fine too.

Lesson learned - DualBootPro is a UI on top of windows stuff. It provides a nice UI alternative to command-line tools. It does not REPLACE normal windows operations though, the underlying systems must be functional. As long as windows is working you can use it to add dual boot functionality but once windows is already hosed this is not the right tool to use to fix things.

If I was to do this all again I'd pay better attention to the UNIX installer and its choices about how it was laying it's volumes out and if it should implement grub or not.

[jbullard]

Wiley,

Thanks for posting the solutions and your feedback. It is always good to hear from customers and their experience with DBP. Every little bit of information helps us provide a better experience to our users.

Jason