Swapping OS in same partition

Before Win 7 I had XP in primary 1, Vista in primary 2, Grub4DOS boot files and Acronis ISOs in primary 3, and 3 logical partitions behind. It worked fine. Then I installed Win 7 in primary 1 and everything continued to work fine.

Having seen as much as I wanted to see of Win 7 I decided to restore XP to primary 1. That worked OK, and Vista still booted OK, but the bootable ISOs in primary 3 all failed to boot with a whole mess of error messages. Restored Win 7 and they all started booting again.

I want XP back. Is there anything I can do to get these ISOs booting again?

(Not sure whether this is an ATI or DD question, or whether it belongs here at all, but as MudCrab and k0lo hang around here ..... )

 

Hi, Bernard:

That is a strange symptom. Is Grub4DOS installed to the MBR? When you restored your XP image did you also restore the MBR? Same question for the Win7 image. If you did, any chance that the version of the MBR code is different between the two images? If it is, try restoring the MBR from your Win7 image to see if that fixes the problem, or reinstall a fresh copy of Grub4DOS to the MBR.

Which version of Grub4DOS are you using? They finally have released a stable version 0.4.4 dated 2009-03-31, so you might try the grldr file from the stable release to rule out questions of bugs in Grub4DOS.

If those suggestions are off-base, could you post your menu.lst file?

Also, there really isn't a need for a separate partition for Grub4DOS. An alternative would be to move grldr, menu.lst, and your ISOs to one of your NTFS partitions.

 

Hi Mark

Yes, Grub4DOS is installed to the mbr, but I doubt I can answer the question about which version is in there atm, though I can try mbrs from the various images to see if one of them sorts it. I do believe that all the images involved had 0.4.4., or as you suggest I could install it again.

I know I can put the grldr etc anywhere, but as one of the first two partitions will normally be hidden I have just found it more convenient to give it its own partition.

One thought I had was to reformat the Grub4DOS partition and copy its files back in from a mounted image. Any reason not to try that?

I am confident my menu.lst file is right, and was totally surprised to get this first boot problem since I started using it.

 

I have a suspicion about what is going on. By any chance is there a grldr file on your XP image? If so, the MBR loader code starts searching for and loads the first grldr that it finds. If the one in your XP image is an old version (before the iso-boot bugs were worked out) then that would explain the behavior.

The MBR code can find grldr even if the partition is hidden, and it starts searching the partitions in order, beginning with the first one. Also, having bootable ISO files on a hidden partition also works. At this point in the boot process (when grldr is running), the hidden flag has no meaning.

 

I wish I had your ability to think outside the box Mark. Yes, there is a grldr in the image, though no menu.lst as it seems I renamed it for some reason.

I'll get rid of that and see what happens, but just atm we're on the second nine of the last day of the Open, and we've got a three way tie for the lead. Wild horses wouldn't etc

 

Don't believe it! Two of your compatriots - Tom Watson and Stuart Cink - in a four hole play off! Nobody gave either of them a snowball's chance in Hell.

 

That was it Mark, everything working again.

Thanks

btw Cink took it - as if I care

 

I never was sure how the MBR loader was programmed to find the menu.lst file. I had wondered if it was programmed to first find grldr and then look in the same partition for menu.lst, but from the behavior you saw apparently it searches for both files. Nice to know that you are free to put them in the root of any partition on your disk, hidden or not.

 

Totally off topic, but while I have your attention Mark would you mind putting your epicentric mind to this one

I have a VistaPE iso. When burnt to and booted from CD the desktop comes up with four icons - the file manager, ATI 11, DD 10, and the fourth, also some sort of file manager whose name escapes me just atm. But when I boot the iso from Grub4DOS the ATI 11 icon is missing. The program is there, and can be booted from the Boot folder, but the icon goes awol every time.

I've even recreated the iso from the CD using Alcohol 120%, but it's exactly the same.

Crack this one and I'll try to get you made Knight Commander of the British Empire

 

Knight Commander of the British Empire? That's quite a worthy goal to pursue...

The two methods should produce the same result after you boot to the VistaPE shell, so why do they differ? At the moment I can only come up with two theories:

1. Which version of grldr are you using? Be sure to try with the stable release version because ISO booting was the topic of many of the Grub4DOS bug fixes over the last year, so if you have an older version, maybe you're seeing one of the bugs.

2. I assume that you're running Mustang's TI script for VistaPE, correct? How did you build VistaPE? Did you produce a build that runs entirely from RAM? If not, the build tries to assign a drive letter to the CD ROM after booting so that add-on scripts run from the CD. Maybe that process fails when you boot from an ISO file instead of from a CD.

If you followed Paul's guide to build VistaPE, the choice was on this screen (credits to MudCrab):



You could try another build but this time check the other option Force place all programs to RAM (boot.wim) and uncheck the option Mount folder with programs as drive Y:. The advantage of building this way is that if you are booting from a CD or flash drive, once VistaPE starts, everything is running from RAM so you can remove the CD or flash drive and use the device (CD drive or USB port) for other purposes. A disadvantage is that the boot image is larger, but even so I have everything in 250 MB, so it easily fits on even a small flash drive.

Then again, I found that controlling the placement of icons on the VistaPE desktop was hit or miss. I eventually gave up on using the A43 file manager and switched to using Vista Explorer as a shell, but I had to edit Mustang's script to prevent multiple desktop icons from appearing on the Vista Explorer desktop.

 

I am using 0.4.4 at present, but wasn't when the iso was created over a year ago, and I did build it to run from RAM. It's only a very minor thing of course, especially as I normally boot ATI from iso now rather than boot VistaPE, so please don't waste time on it.

Anyway, I've only so much influence at the Palace