Technology, Support, and News Forum

[yeshuas]

which partition in Disk Management has XP e.g. 1, 2, 3 etc

[hawkdriver Profile]

XP IS ON DISK 1, PARTITION 1 AS D: HEALTHY(ACTIVE,PRIMARY PARTITION)

I VIEWED AN ARCHIVE OF BOOT.INI THAT WAS CREATED PRIOR TO CURRENT DIFFICULTIES. IT IS IDENTICAL TO THE ONE CURRENTLY IN THE ROOT DIRECTORY OF XP C:\

[yeshuas]

when you say disk one, do you mean the first disk, which is actually disk 0
or do you mean second disk which is actually disk 1

if it is on disk 1 and the first partition of that disk, then your boot.ini file is correct, and I will have to give it a little thought as to why you cant get xp to boot if it is in the boot menu.

one thing you can do is use VBP and change Xp to be on D instead of C

another thing is to use my instructions and post an image of your disk management screen, there may be something there I need to see

[hawkdriver Profile]

Thanks for hanging in here with me.
I mean the first partition of the second disk in the laptop.
The first disk (disk 0 ) orginally came with pc and had Vista pre installed.
The second disk (disk 1) was then installed and xp was placed on it.

My question is when I installed windows 7 from a cd, did it (windows 7)then take control of the boot ladder or just enter info into the BCD, that is also available to VBP ver 3.1 to also do the same.?

I am not sure how to change xp in VBP to be seen as D: rather than C: drive.
I did it by deleting xp as an os on c:\ and re-selected xp as an os and assigned d:\ as the location.

I have left the laptop on all week for fear of not being able to boot into any os. One working os is better than 3 that don't.

[hawkdriver Profile]

http://s1129.photobucket.com/albums/m504/hawkdriver7

[hawkdriver Profile]

My, MY, I am still in boot ladder hell, but I now know how to send photo's
disregard this link (above)

This is my disk managment screen save.

http://s1129.photobucket.com/albums/m504/hawkdriver7/

[yeshuas]

If all drives were plugged in during the install of Windows 7 it should have taken over the boot loader

since you have it pointing to D now for XP you should be able to boot to XP from the boot loader, providing the recovery console didn't fubar XP, do you remember what OS you were in when you were doing the recovery console save thingie

The only way to find out is to try to reboot and select it when the boot loader screen comes up

[hawkdriver Profile]

Yeah. I'm almost sure it was in xp that I did my goof it up. I did an image restore to minimize that.
Yes, all drives were present when win 7 was installed. And all, as I said earlier, os's worked perfectly.
I undertand the newer os sets up a boot ladder sequence. My question is can it be altered while in vista (on my pc) using VBP ver 3.1. and by the way what does your new offering dualboot 1.1 add to the table with regard to doing the multi boot high stakes balancing act.

Did my disk mangement scrren shot offer any clues?

Too late in pm to do anything now. later in the weekend when I feel brave I will re-boot and see.
I do have one question. When my pc boots after having installed windows 7 last, does the pc's operating system choice see the same info that comes up when I ask vista boot pro to show the BCD store information screen? If that is the case things should work.

It's a funny thing. My first posting on this site was near Easter of '07 when I decended into boot ladder hell. Here I am again, near Easter time and I'm back. In the first round in '07 the problem turned out to be that I thumb drive could not be hanging in a usb slot while booting occured. Once removed, all was well. We will see how things go this Easter.

Thanks for all your support, Hawkdriver

[yeshuas]

disk managemet showed everything was as you said at least not that I doubted you, but you may have missed something we could have seen (-:

[hawkdriver Profile]

Good morning,
Some good news, some news, but still only one os bootable

I shut off and restarted machine.Vista is still the only available os. However, selecting the xp os now shows the initial splash screen but then goes to an error message. Boot to win 7 starts the splash screen briefly but goes to recovery console and gives signature messages, that suggest registry error 6.1.7600.16385 and a signature message indicating external media, and indicates that it cannot repair the problem.
I do have image files (Acronis) of all three os's taken PRIOR to the disaster. It allows me to restore single files, the whole drive, and the MBR. One plan would be to do a restore. However, it's a question of which os xp or win7. Another plan would be to ONLY restore the MBR first, again either one or both os's (xp and win7). Third plan that is available to me is to install Acronis OS selector which comes with their Disk Director software.
When first attempting to repair this os boot failure I pulled both hd's from the notebook and hung them on an old PC using usb ports, and tried to do an Acronis restore to the os's from images on each of these drives. This may explain why win7 is showing an external media error.
I am determined to repair the booting issues WITHOUT re-installing any os. I beleive we are close, all drives and partitions appear to be healthy, it just seems to be a boot ladder issue or mis-named partition, boot.ini appears correct, all the files for booting are in the root directory of all os's as well as the window directory, and the trippple boot option was working for a long time.
Any suggestions on what to do next. Would purchasing DBP from you offer any help. I have no problem doing this,

Eagerly await rescue. Thanks, hawkdriver