I have a computer with three hard drives. One of them contains a working Windows 7 operating system. We'll call that drive A. The second drive contains a backup of a Windows XP operating system. We'll call that drive B. The third hard drive is blank. Using restore software on drive A, I restored a windows XP operating system to the blank drive. When I rebooted after the restore, I booted into the restored Windows XP operating system. The original operating system was Windows 7 and went to the SATA zero port on the motherboard. So even though the XP system went to the one port on the motherboard, it was the active drive on the system. I then unplugged the Windows 7 drive from Port zero and plugged in the Windows XP drive to Port zero. It wouldn't boot. I had to put things back the way they were. Can anyone explain this phenomenon, tell me how to avoid it in the future, and tell me how to make the two system drives independent so that I can use either one.
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>> how to avoid it in the future << easiest solution is to ONLY have the 2 disks connected : 1 you do the image from, and 1 to do the image to.
the same goes for installing different OS'es on different drives; if no other disk is connected , it's always set up as disk 0.
so in short, if you have the different OS on different drives that way, and you connect only 1 disk, it will always work.
Okay, so this is how I would approach it. Tell me if I'm wrong. I would edit the boot.ini file in XP to be disk(0).I would unplug the Windows 7 disk and plug XP into port zero. That's when I want Windows XP to be the operating system. When I want Windows 7 to be the operating system I would unplug Windows XP and plug the Windows 7 drive into port zero. It might not boot. In that case I would put the Windows 7 CD in and do a boot correction. When that happens in my experience I would get a boot menu with two items. I can get rid of one of them with Easy BCD. I would delete "Windows 7 restored." The other one that I would not delete would be simply Windows 7. Once that happens I won't get a boot menu anymore. I would maintain another drive with the data. That would always be the D drive. I tried Windows 7 and my Dragon Dictate microphone wouldn't work. I couldn't get my data into my Palm desktop, and the data in office was messed up. I tried a dual-boot system but it became corrupted. So I retreated to Windows XP. I was told that Windows 7 was backwards compatible with Windows XP but my experience told me differently. This way I always have something to fall back on.
When you're dealing with multiple drives, multiple ports, and multiple OS's, it's bound to cause trouble. If you get Windows 7 (Pro or Ultimate), and your CPU support virtualization, you can run XP programs natively from within Windows 7 in true XP. Then you wouldn't necessarily need the separate XP drive & OS. Or just keep the drive around for the random times you want to boot into XP and just manually plug it in. I still do that with a Windows 98 drive I have (haha).
http://www.microsoft.com/w
This is the copy of the current windows XP boot.ini file. I didn't change it. Note that it refers to disk(0). I'm a bit confused because if I unplug the Windows 7 installation and plug this windows XP into port zero, it should work. Comments?
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdi
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)par
Dear nobus,
That was an extremely valuable piece of information. I'm keeping a record of this entire thread in my computer repair files. The drive is working fine right now. I want you to know that I really respect you and your knowledge. You are doing a wonderful work. Can you tell me what the equivalent would be in a Windows 7 drive that doesn't boot? I know you would like the error message but I'm asking it in a generic way. This may not be a fair question. I know that Windows 7 allows you to create a repair disk. I also know that that creates a boot menu and that you can remove the undesirable part of that menu with Easy CDE. Is there anything that you would add?
i'll try to do even better.
first the full works for XP :
Boot using the Windows XP installation disk, press R. Then type the following commands:
note : you can test after each command
FIXMBR
FIXBOOT
BOOTCFG /rebuild
cd\
copy E:\i386\NTLDR
ATTRIB -arsh ntldr
copy e:\i386\NTDETECT.COM
ATTRIB -arsh ntdetect.com
E: should be the location of your CDRom where you have the Windows install disk located.
and check if those files are in the root : NTLDR boot.ini ntdetect.com
Contents of the boot.ini file :
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdi
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)par
check this too for more info : http://tinyempire.com/note
==========================
for Vista, or windows 7 the system is different and uses BCD as you said
here an article on it's use : http://www.vistaclues.com/
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by: pcspecialistsPosted on 2009-11-05 at 22:26:47ID: 25756987
XP uses a file on the root drive called BOOT.INI
With your W7 / XP setup the BOOT.INI file would probably have been setup as disk(1), not disk(0). Once you removed the W7 drive the XP is now disk(0) so it doesn't know how to boot up. Putting the W7 drive back in restored things to the way they were and it could boot again.
If you want to boot to the XP drive without the W7 drive plugged in you'd need to modify the BOOT.INI file. I don't think you can move drives in and out and have it continue to boot the way you want without making changes to this file to reflect the current technology. Back when they designed XP most people had only one hard drive in their system.