Can EasyBCD Do This?

Having never used EasyBCD I have a question for you EasyBCD gurus.

I have a bootable Vista PE iso, that I burned to CD. The CD works great for booting my Vista PC but when using it to boot my XP PC it doesn't recognize my C-drive because it's missing my HD driver (which I have on another disk).

Can I somehow use EasyBCD to add the missing HD driver to that iso so that it will recognize the C-drive on my XP PC?

Cruise

 

Vista PE should have the driver for your WinXP hard disk. Something else is going on here. Maybe the XP system does not have enough RAM to load Vista PE. Vista PE needs a minimum of 512 MB of RAM.

As for using EasyBCD to add a hard drive driver to your Vista PE, I do not think it is possible to do that with EasyBCD.

But your problem is not of a missing driver, it is something else.

 

Hi Raza,

Cruise's XP PC has 1GB of RAM. I'm pretty sure the problem is a missing driver because he has an old (2005) bootable XP-PE CD that sees his C-drive whereas the Vista-PE CD doesn't.

Vista PE does see his ATA D-drive (connected the motherboard's IDE controller) but it does not see his SATA1 C-drive (connected to an onboard Promise controller).

Cruise asked for my help but I'm not an EasyBCD user.

 

There you go, if XP based PE can see it Vista based PE should see it too. The hardware drivers inside Vista PE are more comprehensive then the ones carried by XP PE. Now, it might be a case that a driver for certain controller were removed from Vista due to some complaint from the manufacturer but this does not make sense, as any manufacturer would want to have their drivers inside Vista.

Did you built your own Vista PE? or did you get it pre-formulated? You can actually make your own Vista PE and add the custom driver during that process.

By the way am I taking to Scott W or Curise?

 

Cruise,

I googled your situation and it appears there is a problem with promise controller and Vista. However, I got the impression that it has been corrected by Promise. Have you updated the firmware or installed the latest drivers for the controller?

If the above does not solve your problem then your only solution is to build a custom Vista PE and insert the Promise controller driver during that process. I have never created a custom PE myself but the process should not be that difficult. See this post from pandlock for help.

 

Cruise pm'd me and gave me the details of his problems and I was relating to you what he told me. I couldn't help him.

Sorry about the confusion.

Scott

 

Raza,

Thanks very much for researching this problem and for the link you provided. Btw, sorry if Scott's post confused you. As he has been very helpful on other matters I contacted him about this, providing all the details of my system, to see if he could help. He told me he couldn't be of help but that he would post what I related to him.

Cruise

PS. Promise had already informed me they don't have a Vista driver for their Fasttrack 378 controller as it's too old.

 

Thats okay, I was only a little confused. I assumed Scott W was your other persona.

Hopefully you will find a solution to your problem. I hate it when companies do not release updated drivers for their hardware. So, now you know, not to get a system with Promise controller inside it in future.

 

I'm pretty well exhausted searching for a solution. For this PC I'll just continue using my Winternals 2005 ERD Commander CD (which allowed me to add the Promise driver upon creation). It does the job.

You got that right.

Raza, thanks again for trying to help.

Cruise