Copy partitions loses Windows dual boot info

[jimraehl]

I have an old disk with two bootable partitions, WIN 98 partition 1 and WIN 2000 partition 2. When I boot that drive, WIN 2000 boot manager menu comes up.

I copied both partitions to a new disk. Only WIN 98 boots. I think the new MBR is setup only to see WIN 98, since I didn't install WIN 2000 on the new disk (just copied its partition).

I could probably re-install WIN 2000 in recovery mode, to get back the boot menu. That's time-consuming, as I have to re-do all the updates. I could use Acronis boot manager, but prefer not to--fewer boot managers to deal with.

Is there any other quick-to-do option to fix the MBR to dual boot the new disk. I expect that copying the old MBR to new disk is not polite.

[bodgy]

Just so that I've got this straight.

You've copied W2K and W98 partition to a new hard drive, and the W2K boot menu doesn't come up - you boot straight into W98.

If you did this with DD, when in DD does it show two partitions, one formatted as NTFS and the other as FATxx ?

If so then I'd suspect the 2K partition is hidden and possibly this might have had the boot manager on it.

I think the easiest thing to do would be to bung in the 2K CD go into console mode and remake the boot.ini file.

Colin

[jimraehl]

Yes, I copied with DD. WIN 98 is the first partition (start of disk), FAT32. WIN 2000 is the second, NTFS. When I originally installed WIN 2000, boot.ini etc wound up in the WIN 98 partition. Those files are also in the WIN 98 start-of-disk partition on the new disk.

I'm thinking the WIN 2000 original install modified the MBR boot code to look for WIN 2000 boot files. The copy didn't change the new disk's MBR, so it only knows about WIN 98. But my understanding of the MBR boot could be wrong.