Should I use BootIt Bm?

Well, it's working, but needs some fine tuning.

Sorry, I failed to follow your instructions exactly, and had two snags, one unimportant.

First off, I failed to unplug my USB drive until after booting the CD. Consequently on the install, I got a message 'creation of EMBR on HD2 failed'. That would have been the USB drive, but it was already unplugged by then, so no harm done.

Next the boot automatically showed all 3 OS's in the right order. Good.

Then I realised I had not uninstalled Easybcd, so decided I would boot into Win 7 and do that before going further. Whilst in there I also removed the unallocated bit between XP and Imaging partitions. Whilst doing that I noticed that a new gap has appeared at the end of drive 0 between the extended partition and the BIBM partition. Seems the 12 Mb I left available was not all used, as the BIBM partition is now 6Mb.....

Next I rebooted and did the maintenance as you described. I note that you did not say to put the default switch on for Win 7 and I will do that shortly.

Win 7 now boots, but only after windows boot manager gets a go as well, and I need to clear that up. The visible drives are now correct.

Win XP boot resulted in the hal.dll missing your experience suggested would happen, so again a reboot to change the order of MBR details was needed, which cleared that up. In Win XP the correct partitions are visible, but as yet have the wrong letters, but there will be no problem doing that.

So it is going pretty well, but I wonder how to get rid of the windows boot manager ? Will it be wise to uninstall BIBM and start again with a clean Windows boot manager ? No doubt bcdedit from partition work can do it too......

 

Windows Boot Manager? I guess it's related to Easy BCD. Make sure there is only one entry in the Boot tab of msconfig. Win7. Delete the other entry.

Otherwise it seems to be working OK. The partitions selected are hidden and both OS are booting. BIBM always uses 6 MB for a 2048 sector aligned partition. If you want to put a timeout in BIBM so it boots into Win7 after a certain number of seconds, this can be done from BIBM Settings.

What happens when you try to boot Win98? What errors are seen?

How much RAM do you have? Win98 can fail to boot on systems with more than 512 MB RAM which I'm sure applies to most of us.

 

Ah, no, there seems to be confusion in there somewhere or other. msconfig shows only one line, but won't allow me to set timeout 0. BootitBM after selecting Win 7 still follows with two boot choices, so the XP one still seems to be there, but you can't see it in msconfig

I tried using the option in partition work to set a win 7 type MBR but apart from disabling BIBM that does nothing.

I tried 'standard MBR' and failing that doing anything (it didn't), reinstalled easybcd and manually cleaned the bcd. That did not work either, until done twice with reboot twice. Then it stuck and so everything is now OK. Boots to Win 7 and XP work as required, drives as required and no more.

I suggest it should be part of the BIBM manual. "If you have anything other than a single booting record in your BCD store, clean it down before installing BIBM"

Win 98 I will leave until I get bored. You are right, there is some option I need to dig out so it will work by limiting memory to say 360 Mb, then there will be tonne of invalid hardware and no sensible drivers for my current motherboard....It won't work probably. That is why I wanted to get close, then turn the raw partition into a virtual drive. That way there is batter hardware emulation and memory is easily limited. It's really not worth the hassle.

Much more interested in adding IFW to the bootit menu and anything else useful.

What are you doing up? It must be 4am in NSW or something like that....??!! BTW I am most grateful to you for your assistance. Have a tinnie or two on me, cobber.....

 

You can also use the BCD Edit feature in BIBM to clean out the BCD boot menu.

 

See this tutorial....

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/howto/tbwinre_tutorial.htm

You can make a UFD and with IFW, copy the UFD partition to Free Space on the HD. Then using Boot Edit you can add the partition to the Boot Menu.

 

Well, there definitely seems something wrong with the BCD menu. The symptom is that resume from hibernation does not do a very quick boot as it used to, it goes the whole full boot, and offers BIBM boot menu again. Very undesirable.

In partition work, if I click the bcdedit button, Under the Boot option are these lines ....
Windows 7 professional (recovered)
Windows Boot manager
Windows 7 Professional
Windows Recovery Environment (recovered)
Windows memory diagnostics

So I have two copies of Win 7, two things saying (recovered) and dont have Windows Resume Application

It might be the latter I need to find in order to get resume from hibernate back, or what about the manual talking about bootnow.exe which might imply that the behaviour I am seeing is normal, but can be partly corrected ? Know anything about that ?

I'm still thinking I should uninstall BIBM, find out how to completely rebuild the BCD menu and reinstall BIBM again.

 

I already did close to that successfully, by adding IFW to the windows recover boot when only IFW was installed, and before installing BIBM. Hope that did not mess things up. It adds IFW to TbLauncher. Adding to BIMB boot would be a lot better.

 

Do you know which of those Windows 7 entries is correct? The invalid/unused one could be removed.

Have you tried booting into Windows 7, disabling hibernation, and then re-enabling it (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/920730).

When using hibernation with BIBM you would want to use BootNow in Windows so BIBM knows to auto-boot the hibernated system. Normally, you just setup "bootnow /hibernate" to run on startup (http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=391).

 

Not able to determine what in BCD might be incorrect, entries probably were all incorrect to a minor degree, as will be described. There was nothing wrong with hibernation, so I did not actually try diasable and re-enable.

What I have done is re-initialise my PC as follows.

Take a snapshot of BCD
Uninstalled BIBM (automatically deletes BIBM partition)
Uninstalled WinRe inclusion of IFW
Deleted Win98 partition (relegated to the too-hard bin)
Unplug USB drive
Unplug 2nd HDD
Boot off WinRe repair CD
backup the BCD
Run repair computer (no problems found)
Replace BDC (BOOTREC /RebuildBcd)
Take a snapshot of BCD again

then reinstalled BIBM with hiding of undesired partition for each OS

It now boots fine, but after hibernation, is still interrupted by a BIBM boot choice, but the subsequent boot of Win 7 is a hibernation resume, not a full reboot. So although I might use bootnow.exe /hibernate, it is not a slow process to resume any more.

I will also be adding IFW to the BIBM boot choice as soon as I work it out - ref Brian K

There are two attachments below - the first before, second after above repair of bcd

 

I forgot to mention, when you copy the UFD partition to the HD, choose 300 MiB for the "Resize After Copy". There's no point having a 16 GiB partition (if that's the UFD size) on the HD.

 

Ahem, how do I perform that copy? I suspect it's some special mechanism to allow a size change?. Also, can I create it as a logical partition on my HDD (otherwise it will have to go on the second HDD) ?

 

It will work in a Logical volume on either HD or in a Primary on HD1. But use BIBM to create 300 MB of unallocated free space somewhere. Use IFW (in Windows) with the Copy choice. Copy the UFD partition to the unallocated free space on the HD. Then set up a Boot Item in BIBM (by clicking Boot Edit, Add) and tick Swap if the partition isn't on HD0.

You won't need the resize option if your unallocated free space is 300 MB.

 

I guessed that would be the process, and I did that. Thanks for the confirmation. There is now a third option in BIBM menu booting a logical partition inside the extended partition on first HDD.

Unfortunately, when it booted, it gave a blank screen saying "Remove disks or other media. Press any key to restart". Then it went straight back to the BIBM menu again. N.B. It was 16-bit 256Kb size.

However, the UFD when booted from the bios, works just fine, and is everything I wanted. I just needed to get it to boot properly from the HDD logical drive, where all 4 primary partitions are used. There are only two primary partitions on 2nd drive, so I thought I could if necessary, add it as primary on there (with swap). That works !!!

Why it works as a primary and not as a logic partition I know not, and don't (much) care. I would like to try and get it going as a logical, because I am down to only one spare area for primary partitions now, unless I go unlimited with BIBM.

 

I just tried it in a Logical volume and it works for me. Both on HD0 and HD1. Try copying your primary partition to unallocated space in an extended partition. Do this in BIBM using Disk Imaging. That what I just did. Then create another Boot Item.

 

I'm grateful for the time you are taking over my problem. Actually, I did exactly as you said to do, starting with creating a 300Mb space at the end of the extended partition. Copied the partition from the UFD with IFW running from Win 7.

Since then, I've run chkdsk on every volume and all passed.
I also looked at the properties of every volume from partition work in BIBM, and there was some moaning as follows....
Drive 0
WiRe -- *Warning* file system ends at LBA 12289712
Win 7 -- This partition may not boot WinNT
Extended -- last volume should be visible FAT/FAT32. This partition is not accessible by Dos. The location of this partition will prevent some operating systems from booting from it.
Data (logical) -- no comment
Setups (logical) -- no comment
Drive 1
XP-pro --This partition may not boot WinNT
Imaging -- this partition will not boot WinNT

Not at all sure if any of those comments give you a hint as to what may be preventing a logical partition from booting, when an exact copy as a primary boots fine. There is 271 Mb unallocated at the end of the extended partition at this time, where I deleted the TbWinRe I was just testing without it working.

 

From TeraByte Unlimited...

Have you done what I suggested? In BIBM, copy the working primary partition to unallocated free space in an extended partition.

That might not be enough. I'd have at least 300 MB.

 

I corrected the end location of the WinRe partition as you instructed. Ok, no warning now.

I re-copied my new tbWinRe booting partition into 300Mb spare space on the extended partition. Four times now, the first time yesterday was without resizing after copy, the second today was after increasing the spare space to 300Mb, the third time with resizing to increase the space to fill all empty space. Fourth time using IFW from the working TbWinRe partition rather than IFD from the BIBM partition. In all four results, when choosing that logical partition to boot from, I just get a blank screen with "Remove disks or other media. press any key to restart." Then it just restarts the BIBM booting menu.

As previously reported, this particular partition works perfectly when booted from the UFD it was created on, and from the same partition as a primary partition on a second HDD.

I'm just giving up on it now. I have what HDD boot I ever wanted working in any case.

Many thanks for your assistance.

 

I can't explain why it works on my system and not on yours. Computers!

 

no it's strange, but you won't be reproducing the precise conditions. When it does not work, for instance, it is the 3rd volume on the 3rd partition (extended) on a drive where there are then 4 primary partitions and 5 volumes.....

 

I just created the above partition structure and copied the TeraByte partition. All OK.

In Boot Edit, MBR Details for HD0, do you have

WinRE
Win7
MBR2
the copied partition

If you select MBR2 and click Volumes, do you see 3 volumes?

In the Boot field on the left in Boot Details, do you have (vol) .... (eg (vol) TeraByte)?

 

Following is the current partition setup. The TbWinRe partition on the second drive works perfectly, boots straight into IFW and tblauncher.

What does not work is to copy that partition TbWinRe into the unallocated space 303Mb on the first drive extended partition, where it has to be a logical partition.

That did NOT appear in Boot edit MBR details for HD0 as far as I remember, what I have now is
WinRe
Windows7
MBR 2
BootitEMBRM

In the boot menu, boot field there was "(vol) TbWinRe"
Select MBR2 and click properties there were three volumes.
Right now there are still three, but the third says volume --- free space

 

I can reproduce this.

My TBWinRE is FAT32 and yours is FAT16. When I converted my logical volume to FAT16 I saw the above error. When converted back to FAT32 it booted. A FAT16 primary partition booted fine.

So, copy the TBWinRE primary partition into the unallocated Free Space in your extended partition again. In Partition Work select the TBWinRE volume and click Resize. Click OK, put a dot in the FAT32 radio button, OK, Continue, Close. Now open Boot Edit, Add, etc.

Fingers crossed.

 

A quick way to copy partitions in BIBM....

In Partition Work, select the source partition and click Copy
Select the Target Drive
Select Free Space and click Paste
Choose a Name, OK, Close.

 

Congratulations !! All because I used a spare, old 256 Mb USB stick.

So now you have four things you can tell Terabyte about.
(1) before modifying a WinRe partition to add IFD and tbLauncher, be sure your BCD store is defaulted and a single OS boot only, otherwise you always get it after the BIBM boot selection.
(2) Booting from a logical partition is probably not possible if the logical partition is a different layout to the enclosing extended partition (Fat16 inside Fat32).
(3) If you are creating a UFD with a view to copying it to a HDD partition for access via BIBM boot, make sure the UFD is big enough to enforce FAT32
(4) If possible, add an option button to the UFD creation panel, or better yet, default to FAT32

Well done all round Brian.....I now have all the desired outcome I could have wished for by using BIBM with IFW.

Down to the beach with you now....you've earned it. (We've had it scorching here for the last three weeks, and we just are not used to it. It's been 40 years since it last happened - I remember it well. Also I am 130 miles from the sea in any direction. Shame really.)

 

I've heard about your prolonged spell of good weather.

I'm glad I could help. When you visit Australia the tinnies are on you.