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Abandon first drive and boot direct to Vista

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Re: Abandon first drive and boot direct to Vista

Postby Codger » Fri Apr 24, 2009 4:50 pm

With hindsight you are clearly absolutely right about disconnecting other drives when installing an OS; I will certainly never bother with dual boot again. However, I am not changing "continuously" as you suggest; this is the first time I have ever done it and I only disconnect the C: drive to try to establish if I can boot without it.

I am nervous about changing disk(0) because your colleague NT50 in another thread said:
"The major components of the boot.ini are rdisk(#) and partition(#). Do not change disk(#) unless you are running SCSI drives."
Are you absolutely sure that is what you mean?

Thanks again for your help.
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Re: Abandon first drive and boot direct to Vista

Postby Grav!ty » Fri Apr 24, 2009 5:19 pm

Yes, try it on the entry that's not working and if it still doesn't work change it back to (0) again. As far as I know the entry there for a SCSI drive is scsi(0)

Something else you can try is to type msconfig into the run dialog box which is on the start menu, go to the Boot.ini tab and click on Check All Boot Paths.
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Re: Abandon first drive and boot direct to Vista

Postby Codger » Fri Apr 24, 2009 6:20 pm

Right, let's see if I can remember all this . . .
Firstly, the boot.ini mod on the C: drive gave something like " Windows could not start because of a disk hardware problem . . . "
I then changed it back again.
The same mod for the D: drive added a third option to the boot menu "Windows (default)" which worked OK taking me to D: .
When I disconnected C: it reverted to "NTLDR is missing".

Clearly, it is still looking to drive C: for boot system files.
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Re: Abandon first drive and boot direct to Vista

Postby Codger » Fri Apr 24, 2009 6:23 pm

OH! I forgot say, the Check All Boot Paths gave an OK result.
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Re: Abandon first drive and boot direct to Vista

Postby Grav!ty » Fri Apr 24, 2009 7:09 pm

I'm fresh out of ideas now codger. I'm just surprised that something as seemingly simple as the boot.ini can cause such a hassle. I'll post for other support staff to see what they think. At this stage I don't want to suggest a repair install of the XP installation you can't boot to. That's a last resort, but it should auto sort whatever the reason is you can't boot.
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Re: Abandon first drive and boot direct to Vista

Postby Codger » Fri Apr 24, 2009 7:34 pm

Trouble is, it might wreck the only way that I can boot atm.

Grav!ty, I am seriously very grateful to you for your support. There is going to be a solution to this and we will all learn a thing or two from the excercise. I have been looking at customers' suggestions for development of VistaBootPRO and I am sure that PROnetworks will get something out of this too. If any of your colleagues can make a contribution that would be great. I will be patient and defer my plans to install a local test server until it is resolved.
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Re: Abandon first drive and boot direct to Vista

Postby augie » Fri Apr 24, 2009 7:51 pm

All I can say is I've had a couple of XP's in a dual boot on two separate drives while both are connected but it seems that's not what you want to do Codger. I can't think of any way to keep them totally separate unless you install XP into one drive while the other is physically disabled and vice versa. That way they will be totally isolated from each other.

I remember a few years ago that someone mentioned a hardware drive switch though I don't remember much more. I do remember removing power from drives when I wanted to boot into one or the other and subsequently killed my 80GB IDE drive because the power was still on when disconnecting it. :embarrassed: I've since dual booted a pair of XPs with both drives connected and never had an issue between one and the other, not even viruses or malware, besides the activation issue if it's the same XP disc.

The problem you're having is that drive 0 will have the MBR records for both and when you disconnect that drive, you will have a failed boot on drive 1 because there is no MBR boot info. Your call man.
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Re: Abandon first drive and boot direct to Vista

Postby Codger » Fri Apr 24, 2009 8:29 pm

Thanks for the input Augie
augie wrote:The problem you're having is that drive 0 will have the MBR records for both and when you disconnect that drive, you will have a failed boot on drive 1 because there is no MBR boot info. Your call man.


Yup. That's a cool assessment of the problem. You got it in one. It's like poetry.

Classically, what we need now is some development and a resolution, man. :fro:
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Re: Abandon first drive and boot direct to Vista

Postby augie » Fri Apr 24, 2009 8:44 pm

Codger wrote:Thanks for the input Augie
augie wrote:The problem you're having is that drive 0 will have the MBR records for both and when you disconnect that drive, you will have a failed boot on drive 1 because there is no MBR boot info. Your call man.


Yup. That's a cool assessment of the problem. You got it in one. It's like poetry.

Classically, what we need now is some development and a resolution, man. :fro:


Hehehe :P :lol: Only things that I can see are the switch option or keep fiddling with cables. I gave up on those 'solutions'. Good luck on your search for the holy grail.;)
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Re: Abandon first drive and boot direct to Vista

Postby Codger » Sat Apr 25, 2009 6:47 am

Oh dear! Wrong kind of music. :dontgetit
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