multiple boot partitions

I use XP pro and home on my pc. I wanted to install them to seperate primary partitions on the same hard drive. I created images of each using TI9 2337 and was going to restore them to the primary partitions I had created with PartitionMagic. I have 2 80g WD drives which have an OS on each. I used partmagic to delete the partition on one of the drives and then created 2 primary partitions each half of the capacity.

Then I booted to a BartPE cd with TI8 plugin and restored XPhome to the first partition. When I tried to restore XPpro to the second partition there was no way to choose it. I could choose the drive but not the partition. How can I accomplish this?

Maybe I should let TI do the partitioning? Can I tell it to only use half the drive capacity for each image?

 

Hello troubledAGAIN,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.

The most probable reason for the problem you encounter is that you try to restore an image of the entire second hard drive rather than a single system partition. In this case Acronis True Image allows you to choose only the entire hard drive as a possible destination for the image restoration. If you want to restore only a system partition from the image the entire hard drive (even if it is the only partition on the backed up hard drive) then you should check the tick box near the partition name and not the tick box near the hard drive's name on the respective Recovery wizard (Restore Image for version 8.0) screen.

If that's not the case then please provide us with the more detailed information on the problem:

- Use a digital camera to make a shots of your consequents steps taken during the image restoration process;

- If you do not have the ability to use a digital camera for some reason then please describe these actions step-by-step;

- Let us know where you store your images.

Please also create Acronis Report in the way described below:

- Download and run Acronis Report Utility;

- Select the "Create Bootable Floppy" option;

- Insert a blank floppy disk in the A: drive and proceed with creation of the bootable floppy;

- Boot the computer having the issue from this diskette and wait for report creation process to finish;

- Collect the report file from the floppy.

Please submit a request for technical support. Attach the collected report.txt file and information to your request along with the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with the solution.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov

 

Creating a multiboot system is easy and TI really has no part in this:

First, does the boot.ini file on the C drive refer to both OSes?
It should look something like the following (I have 4 OS):

You must have an entry for each OS in boot.ini.
If the problem is that you are merely missing an entry in boot.ini, you could manually edit the boot.ini.

Otherwise, you can create a multiboot system by:

1. Repartition the hard drives as required.
2. The OS on the C drive must have the boot.ini.

3. Restore the FILES, not the drive, for the other OS into any other partition on the PC.

4. Make sure that the boot.ini on C refers to the correct partitions.

The MSFT KB and the MSFT Windows 2000 Resource Kit have discussions of how to deal with boot.ini. I believe would be same for windoze XP.

 

Situation here has slightly changed. Have 3 OS's now and want to put all 3 on a 200gb drive with 3 primary partitions.

boot.ini shows all 3 OS. XPhome, XPpro, and XP64. So I should make disk images of all the os's? Not backups of the files? Then when I go to restore the disk image, I should restore just the partition and not the image, and select the partition I want to restore to.

boot.ini will be modified to show disk(0)partition(1) or (2) or (3) respectively, correct?


Sorry for the delay. I won't wipe the original drives until I get this working correctly.

 

Hello troubledAGAIN,

Please have a look at this thread. It describes a basic scheme for building multi boot system with help of Acronis True Image.

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov

 

I have succeeded in what I wanted to accomplish. All 3 os's are on one 200gb drive in their seperate partitions.

I copied drive_C to the new drive and sized the partition to what I wanted(1/3 the capacity). Then made images of the other drives and restored them to the new drive but only chose the partition for restore and not the entire drive. Worked great. Thank you Alexey Popov. I manually set the size of the partitions on the new drive.