PC Help Needed

[guddler]

Can anyone help - I managed to screw up my boot config last night.

Here's the disc config before I started:

Disk 1 (SATA)

Partition 1: EFI + Chameleon BL (200M?)

Partition 2: OS X (400+G)

Partition 3: Kubuntu (100G)

Partition 4: Kubuntu Swap (8G?)

Disk 2 (SATA)

Partition 1: Windows 7 Boot (100M)

Partition 2: Windows 7 (The rest)

Now what I always do before I attempt any windows updates is to remove disk 1 from the system altogether as getting the OS X side of things recovered completely would be a pig. Don't ask me how, but somehow Windows works just fine like this seeing disk 2 as though it was disk 1 - maybe this is a result of the SATA controller? I don't know.

Anyway, so I wanted to add a 32 bit XP partition to the Windows disk so I booted into Kubuntu and used gparted to shrink the main Win7 partition and create a 30G XP partition. I then rebooted Win7 to let it do it's disk check following the resize. So far so good and Disk 2 now looks like this:

Partition 1: Windows 7 Boot (100M)

Partition 2: Windows 7 (The rest)

Partition 3: Windows XP (30G)

At this point everything still works just fine. After much messing about I find a combination of XP disk and SATA driver disk that supports the install (XP Pro w/SP3 + Intel Raid driver disk if anyone cares) and I manage to get through the 1st text part of the XP installation, during which time I formatted partition 3 to NTFS and it did it's copying files thing.

On reboot it all went pear shaped!

With only the Windows drive attached all I get on boot is a BIOS message saying "Error loading operating system".

With both discs attached (so I can use the Chameleon boot loader) I can still boot OS X & Linux, obviously & thankfully, but selecting either of the Windows options results in just a flashing cursor.

I've removed the OS X drive again since I want that well out of the way and have so far tried:

- booting from the XP disc, going to a repair console and running 'fixmbr'. No difference

- booting from the XP disc, going to a repair console and running 'fixboot E:'. Again, no difference (E is the correct drive).

Anyone know what I've got to do to restore this? AFAIK all the data on all the drives is still intact but clearly the XP install isn't even remotely complete yet.

Ta,

Martin.

 

[Alpha1]

Restore from backup.

 

[guddler]

And I thought you were knowledgable about Windows!!

Since I've never been able to get Windows backup to work with my NAS there's no backup.

 

[andyman]

The error is XP specific, and XP has to boot from drive C:

Was a drive letter assigned ?

Maybe, maybe not, cant think of much else at the moment

Andy.

 

[DanP]

I think you'll need to run the repair from the Win7 install disc. Once you're back up and running with Win7 I think you need to use BCDEDIT to setup your Windows boot config. Here's an article on it;

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc709667(WS.10).aspx

Hopefully a certified MCSE expert on here will be able to confirm if this is correct, it worked for me ymmv

HTH

DanP

P.S What you're doing is possible, I have a triple boot setup (XP, Vista and Win7) although I think I installed them in that order which makes things easier. I also have XP as my D: drive.DanP2010-06-29 18:11:11

 

[guddler]

Thanks guys - got a few more mundane things to do then I'll check it out. That makes sense though, I think as it stands the XP partition is E: so it would stand to reason that XP would need the help of a boot loader like the one built into Windows 7 to get it running.

Martin.

 

[Guests]

yeah boot using the win7 install disc and try the auto repair if that fails, from the console run bootrec

 

[guddler]

Man, that wasn't obvious! You certainly got me down the right track though!

For reference, here's what I did so far:

To recover the situation, as stated.

• Boot from the Windows 7 install DVD
• Select 'Repair'
• Select the Windows install I wanted to repair
• Let Windows decide that it couldn't repair it.
• Reboot as I didn't realise there was any other option
• Next time round, don't select ANY installation to repair but just click next instead (this was the bit that was not at all obvious).
• Select to go to the command prompt.
• 'bootrec /FixMbr'
• 'bootrec /FixBoot'
• Reboot - Windows 7 now boots.
• From Windows 7, make the system partition (100MB, partition 1) visible to XP by giving it a drive letter
• open an elevated command prompt
• Enter the following commands:
  • bcdedit /create {identifier} /d "Some Description"
  • bcdedit /set {identifier} device boot
  • bcdedit /set {identifier} path ntldr
  • bcdedit /displayorder {identifier} /addlast
• Now when I boot Windows 7 I get the Win7 boot menu so I'm able to continue the XP installation.
• All is well, AND, the reason I wanted XP worked (I can now write Acorn native format floppies from my Windows PC)

Sadly, after plugging my OS X drive back in, neither of the Windows partitions boot from Chameleon. I imagine that's just a chameleon boot thing though so I'll sort that out another night. I've proved what I wanted to prove

Phew! Many thanks.

Martin.

 

[trm]

For background, I recall reading an article on the improvements in the Win7 bootloader to support this kind of multi-boot scenario. WinXP was pretty violent when it came to writing its own MBR and wouldn't play along with anything, which is why back in XP days you always had to put it on first and then load Linux/whatever and install grub.

W7 seems to play much more nicely, so I suspect it was the attempt at installing XP which porked the boot. Glad you've got it working, and also glad that somebody has a more complex disk config than I do

That's also reminded me to get my ReadyNAS NV+ finally setup for automatic backups of my Windows box and not just leave it there flashing away and looking generally cool.

 

[guddler]

Sadly, not sorted yet. XP still won't come up when both disks are connected so when I want to boot to XP I need to go into the BIOS and swap the order of the disks over so the chameleon loader doesn't kick in first. Then the Win 7 loader takes control and it boots fine.

I'm kind of hoping that I need to use XP rarely enough that the author of Omniflop will get a fix out for his 64 bit driver before I get round to tackling the boot problem further

 

[Guests]

could you not run the xp in vmware on the win7 part?