Os selector Vista 2nd Drive

Ok , I am trying to get Vista up and running on a 2nd hard drive primary partition . I'm having fits with it . I've installed it multiple times and it does fine until I hook my first drive up then I lose it . This time again I deactivated oss then disconnected the first drive . Re installed vista on the 2nd primary partition . It did fine . I installed acronis TI made an image and then shut down and hooked the 1st drive back up . The problem is everytime I do I get 2 new icons in oss . One of them when I select it gives me the black screen with the message theres been a hardware or software change and it can't find winload.exe . The other icon just reboots the machine . I made a few screenshots . newv.jpg is the new vista disk management before the 1st drive has been hooked back up . newvmd.jpg is also before hooking the 1st drive back up and is just a shot of mounted devices . new V react is after I hooked up the first drive , reactivated oss and could not get back into the new vista anymore . This shot was taken from the old vista . At this point I'm confused about what to hide and unhide . If you recall the first drive has xp on partition 1 with dd and oss installed . partition 2 is also another xp . partition 3 is vista . Those still work fine . I am baffled about what to do . I'm going to reboot into xp1 and log back in here and post my current bootwizz file . I hope you can help me get this going but at least i do have a perfect image of vista 2 working perfectlly as c drive on partition 2 as a single drive . thanks added a shot from xp1 dd . I think to start I need to know what to hide or unhide . Also I attached my current bootwizz file below . I should also mention I will be assigning partition one of the second drive the D: letter as that will be my common data drive with all of the op systems . One last note . Oss must be changing somthing on the new vista making it inoperable . If I shut down and disconnect the 1st drive the new vista still won't boot even though it is the active primary partition . It gives the same black screen with the can't find /windows/system32/winload.exe

 

Turn off the Manual Disk Order option for Vista 2 in OSS and see if that works. Vista will not boot properly with that option selected.

 

its off , I can deactivate oss disconnect the 1st drive and boot the new vista . I cannot boot it even if i hide all the partitions hidden on the first drive with i connected. I know now its intact and ready . I'm trying to make this less complicated so I got rid of partitions so heres the new dd pic and the new bootwizz . I'm pretty sure its an oss problem . I've already booted the new vista in this config by deactivating oss and removing the first drive

 

I'm trying to understand if Vista 2 will boot correctly regardless of OSS when both drives are connected.

Have you tried this?

Deactivate OSS. Select XP 1 as the default OS.
Change the booting drive in the BIOS to the second drive (the one with Vista 2).
Does Vista 2 boot directly now?
If not, what happens?

 

ok heres the current status . I am in the new vista and booted up fine . I had to reinstall it again because everytime I use os selector its messing this vista up on paths or somthing . I also have the other drive running . This vista 2 is HDD1 of course and the other drive is HDDzero . All I've done is set the bios to boot to HDD1 first . If I shut down and set the bios to boot HDDZero first it works . So here I sit with both drives running , oss de-activated and HDD1 set to boot first . I do have a new image in case this install gets toasted . Now what do you want me to try ?

 

Boot into Vista 1, start a Command Prompt in Administrator Mode and run the following command:

Code:

bcdedit /store c:\boot\bcd /enum all

Save the results.

Boot into Vista 2 and run the same command:

Code:

bcdedit /store c:\boot\bcd /enum all

Save the results.

For each Vista:
Also run just

Code:

bcdedit

and note the output. Is it the same as above or do you get an error message?

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Reactivate OSS, but DO NOT boot into Vista 2. For the Vista 2 entry, make sure the Disk Order option is not checked. Make sure OSS has the correct partition as the booting partition (the checkered flag) and that it is also the Active partition. Make sure the XP and Vista 1 partitions are hidden. Then try to boot Vista 2. If you get a boot error, post back with it, but don't make any changes to anything on the Vista 2 partition.

If OSS is "breaking" the booting of Vista 2, figuring out how to repair it may help to figure out what's going wrong.

 

ok just to confirm , since i'm booted up in vista2 right now can i go ahead and run the commands or did you purposely want me to do it after booting into vista 1 . I'm assuming you want me to reboot , put hdd0 back in charge and use my dd cd to make the vista 1 partition active . Xp1 is currently active on that drive as per your instructions .

 

You can do them in any order you wish.

Yes, when you boot Vista 1, make it the booting drive and the Active partition.

You're just doing the boot managing manually for now.

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Save the bcdedit outputs to files so we can compare them later, if necessary. Something is being changed somewhere that's causing a problem.

 

Well I did the bcdedit commands , shut down , changed the bios settings , booted up to the dd cd and now my vista 1 is doing the same thing vista 2 had been doing , giving me the black screen with the winload.exe error . i restored vista 1 , hid vista 2 , booted into vista 1 . Then I went back into bios , reversed and vista 2 was giving the autochek error . It seems like no matter how close i control it and proceed carefully , they just knock each other out . Up till now vista 1 had been solid as a rock . I really have a good sound machine . Its an older Asus a7n8x deluxe ver.2 . amd 1700+ . I've been using system commander for years and os for about 2 years . At this point I'm about ready to toss in the towel . I thought this was a pretty common thing people were doing but with 3 primary partitions per hdd I needed to expand into another . I can make either one run but not without it knocking the other one out of commision . oss was deactivated . It seems like when I hide one it throws off drive letters and then when I unhide the letters change . maybe some form of drive swapping is occuring outside of oss and maybe thats the problem .

UPDATE! ok I confirmed it . The hiding is whats messing everything up . Its like a never ending vicious cycle of throwing off paths and locations . I unhid the two vistas and they boot fine in harmony by just changing the bios settings from one drive to another . That being said and confirmed I just need to have oss do the selecting instead of me having to change the booting order . Is it possible ? in case you read this while I'm gone I am abouto re-reun those commands for you in each vista and compare outputs but i have a feeling they are gonna math up now . Be thinking about how to make os do its thing

I'm back , I've tried multiple boots back and forth now with both vistas unhid and both work . Its def the hiding thats throwing a wrench into it . here are the command results from both vistas attached . I'm afraid to do the last part of the instructions pertaining to reactivating os and hiding the vista1 partition . Without a doubt it will mess up one of them . Honestly i think thats what was messing up the vista logical partition experment as well . All the symptoms were the same , all path and locations . Hindsight is 20/20 hehe but it helps us see ahead better .

 

The autocheck error is one I've run into before. Vista is really getting confused about where to look for its files. This problem is worse when it's on multiple drives or Logical partitions. If both of the Vista partitions were on the booting drive, I suspect it would work properly. The problem is that Vista will not always go by the normal defaults. It can and will try to boot from a hidden partition (and it fails when it does).

There is one other thing you can try. Use the Force Hiding option in the Advanced section of the OSS entry's properties. This will remove the hidden partitions from the partition table so Vista won't even know they exist. Perhaps that will allow them to boot. If you use this option, don't use Disk Management to make any partitioning changes because it won't know about the hidden partitions and may corrupt the drive.

In my previous tests with trying to change the drive order (like you would do with XP), OSS wouldn't work to boot Vista. Using BING and Grub4DOS, the swap wouldn't stop Vista from booting, but Vista didn't swap the drives. In other words, it didn't make a difference booted, but it may have during the boot.

 

When you're doing the restores, are you making sure that only the drive with the Vista being restored is connected and set as the boot drive? I ask, because if you restore Vista to the non-booting drive and TI tries to "fix it" so it boots, TI may be editing the wrong BCD file and causing the two to cross-link (Vista 1 is trying to boot from Vista 2's partition, for example, and it fails because Vista 2 is hidden). You'll need to verify that Disk Management shows the correct partition as both the System and Boot partition. Hopefully, you also have different desktop backgrounds to tell them apart.

 

well heres what I'm getting at , when I hide a vista partition , do somthing with the other vista by the time i come back and unhide that vista the drive letters have changed up so then its out of whack and can't find itself . I have tried so many things but I'm thinking if I leave them unhidden drive letters might be constant . In all the time I've use os with the 2 xp's and the vista I've never hidden anything . I could be wrong with the vistas but I aim to test a few theories tomorrow . To tired tonight . I appreciate your help and you might need to fix me a bootwizz file yet . Like I say , nothing is hidden at the moment and both are booting fine . Would a new bootwizz file fix os so it knows how to start them up ?

 

I think the BOOTWIZ.OSS file you have is okay since it was properly booting the XP's and Vista 1. The only thing left to try with OSS is to go ahead and hide the partitions from each other (like you did before), but also enable the Force Hiding option so the partitions are REALLY HIDDEN from Windows.

This can be tested manually with DD, but you would need to be really careful because you'll be making changes to the partition tables of the drives.

With each Vista not being able to see the other partitions at all, it may allow them to boot more normally like when you switch the booting drive in the BIOS.

 

By the way, I have plenty of notes on Vista "running in circles" trying to get it to boot from multiple drives. Sometimes it worked and then didn't. There didn't seem to be a real clear reason why except that it's very easy for it to get confused and boot the wrong partition or cross-link them. It's very confusing.

 

good morning , Mudcrab I think I'm pretty close . I'd appreciate it if you could look over this bootwizz file . The two labeled windows vista (this one) and windows vista 2 (the last two selections) will almost boot vista 2 on drive 2 with drive one the first in the order . Vista2 begins loading , progresses into where the vista box with the green scrolling line comes up . It keeps loading after the green line appears for about 10 to 15 seconds and then it acts like the video card is changing resolutions and just reboots . Theres no error message at all . I have found I can easily have os activated and all 3 op sys on drive 1 work fine , then if I want to run vista 2 I just reboot , change bios to boot the 2nd drive first and it runs fine as well . It continues to work fine back and forth until I try to start it from os . It just seems so close to being there I hate to give up but my technical savy in this area is very limitied . perhaps you know some way I can find a log that might show that precise moment when it reboots ? Please just look this file over and let me know if you have any ideas . one more note is even with everything abve os is not actually breaking vista 2 anymore . Vista 2 works everytime when the bios settings are changed so it could be a path out of place when it gets to that point but somthing is making vista reboot when using os .Heres one more observation . If I reboot change the drive order to the 1st drive , boot any of the 3 op sys there , then reboot set drive 2 and boot to vista 2 the 3 op sys on drive one are not hidden . In contrast if I attempt to boot vista 2 from oss making it the last selection even though it fails , go back to bios set 2nd drive first , boot vista 2 then those 3 op sys on drive one are hidden .thanks

 

Good morning to you too.

I've had the reboot happen, but I got an autochk error message. It may be the same for you, but going by really fast so you can't see it.

The fact that the partitions are hidden or not hidden is important. My best theory at this point is that Vista is trying to use something from the hidden partition (the hidden Vista partition) and is having a problem with it.

The last two entries in the BOOTWIZ.OSS file are the same (except for the titles). Before trying anything else, I would enable the Force Hiding option for one of those entries and see if it will boot successfully. This option can be found by right-clicking on the entry in the OSS menu, selecting Properties from the pop-up menu and then selecting the Advanced section. Check the Force hiding partitions option and then click the OK button to save the changes.

When you try this, make sure to keep the XP/Vista 1 drive as the booting drive.