Generic Host Process svchost.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close

Hi Mark,

It could be something as simple as a boot.ini setting or (as you say and I think your right) deeper in the registry.
As you know with multi boots windows puts a new option in the boot.ini so it knows what is the "root" drive and partition. ( multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1) as an example).
For windows booting up that is translated into a /Device/HarddiskVolumex
The example of what windows does in the registry under
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\hivelist it lists \REGISTRY\MACHINE\SAM as
\Device\HarddiskVolume1\WINDOWS\system32\config\SAM (for me)

So it probably more comes down to how it's recognising what \device\harddiskvolumex is and how you map it back to your sata.

Then theres subkeys of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum (IDE and SCSI mainly)
which map a physical drive to a clsid (and more importantly a driver subkey). The clsid is used in multiple places in the registry and the driver subkey off it lets you see whats used for the specific device.

Then add in the values of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices to the mix and you can see it's quite complex. (I've not finished yet with how the whole chain holds together either, I just listed some of the bigger links in the chain)
One mistake with these sorts of keys and the windows will blow up pretty much.

I'm still trying to find the article I had that listed all affected registry keys, but trust me, it's long.
I'd just re-install if I was you, gives you a clean registry and you are safe to attach the other drive without windows or programs mistaking one drive for another.

I don't understand all the details of multibooting too well.  I would use the bios boot manager by using tab and F8 to get the boot selection popup at the bios level.  It would show me a list of drives, and I pick one and it tries to boot from it.  I used to do this and it work.  I'm not sure what changed since this last time when I restored my test drive by imaging the raid C: system image onto it.  I thought I had beat the problem by leaving the non-booted drive disconnected.  And it's true that works until the first time you let them see each other, then bad things happen, and now the test drive wont even boot (hal dll error).  I restored the image back to fix it so it boots again if the raid is not present.  I read an article http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/  that's very good but it's really more than I am able to or want to know about it.  I tried hkey.localmachine system mounted.devices and deleting the memory of other drive letters its assigned.  Didnt make any difference.  So maybe it's not a drive letter thing.  My gut is it's because it's a clone of the same windows, or maybe because it's a raid C system image going onto a non-raid drive.  But you would think it would correct the drive hardware recognized and forget it.

I tried Acronis OS selector (part of disk director suite) but it is kinda buggy and hasn't helped.  I was hopeful though because it claims to be able to hide the unbooted OS from the booted one, and that sounded like it might help.  I'm still working with their support but they take very long per response.

Well I think it's ok now, but I'm not certain which thing I did really fixed it.  I restored the test drive image because to me that was the fastest way to fix that hal error.  It's probably only 5k worth of stuff that's hosed, but finding it....   I've been down the usual ways before with repair of winblows and it was fruitless.  After that I booted to the test drive using the bios popup, and while windows was settling down I held down the shift key.  I heard it keeps programs from running automatically.  I was trying to stop windows from installing the raid and freaking out over seeing itself in the mirror.  I don't know if that worked for sure, but I didn't get the usual dreaded messages about new hardware, then reboot, then svchost dying.  Then just to be safe I went to device manager and disabled the stripe array so it would not see that other system stuff.  Time will tell if it remains stable, but so far so good.