questions about Vista vs. XP partitioning

Re: OK now I know just enough to be dangerous

The separation of the bootloader has nothing to do with the BCD file and doesn't change how you work with it (with the exception that you can't use boot for your OS entries). The reason for the separation is that Vista won't boot from an NTFS partition that doesn't have 4K clusters. Mark has 16K clusters on his Vista partition so he needs to have a separate 4K cluster "boot" partition in order for Vista to boot.

In #1, I think the command is bcdedit /enum ALL instead of /eval. This the default for bcdedit so you don't need to specify those commands. In a normal non-multi-booting system, you won't see the indentifer values for the entry. bcdedit will be using {default} or {current}.

The device and osdevice value assignments are what tell the computer the booting location. These values are not the same as the entry's indentifier value.

 

Re: OK now I know just enough to be dangerous

Following up on Paul's comments, to fix the BCD manually you would boot from the Vista DVD and go to a command prompt in the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE). You then need to figure out the drive letter of the Vista partition as seen by WinRE. Let's assume that the drive letter is C: and that you don't have a weird layout like I do with a separate boot partition. Then the commands are:

Code:

bcdedit #to display the current contents
bcdedit /set {default} device partition=c: #To specify the partition where winload.exe is located
bcdedit /set {default} osdevice partition=c: #To specify the partition where the \Windows directory resides
bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device partition=c: #To specify the partition where the boot files are located

That sounds correct to me.

Paul:
Thanks for jumping in and setting me straight. There is a lot about this that I still don't understand. But I'm resisting the temptation to use EasyBCD or VistaBootPRO for BCD editing since they hide the underlying principles of operation.

 

Thanks so much to both of you for the interesting tutorial, trying to figure all this stuff out on my own from the MSFT website would have been just about impossible.

And thanks for the 16k cluster size clarification, I didn't know that's what he had setup, but that makes sense to me because I remember reading before about the need to always boot from a 4k cluster. I hadn't considered the possibility of multiple cluster sizes when I asked the question.

So now I think I've actually run out of questions, imagine that!

I still can't believe the length and depth of this discussion over a simple partition resizing operation, ya gotta love Vista! (I really don't hate it that much, even if it sounds that way)

Thanks again guys!

 

You're welcome! These are great learning experiences.

I didn't mention the cluster size earlier so as not to confuse the issue at hand, but I managed to do that anyway.