Vista HnS after Vista SP1

Yes, Vista is up and working - just so you know, whenever I try something and re-boot and I get a message eg bootmgr is compressed, bootmgr is missing or corrupt, or any of the other messages that come up as I have mentioned above, I just immediately press ctrl/alt/del to restart and boot from the cd drive which I have the vista disk in. I run through the startup repair, which "fixes" the start up problem and allows me to boot into vista. So I don't have any problem getting my machine up and running again. Otherwise, I would have problems replying to you as this is the only computer/internet access I have. As well, since I had a problem dual booting into XP, I repaired that as well. So the way I am set up now, I can dual boot into either Vista or XP. It is when I try to apply Vista HnS that I am running into a bug that stops the boot process, so that I then have to repair the startup. (As an aside, when I do use the startup repair on the Vista disk, the bootmgr gets "rebuilt" to the one that is 326KB.)
 
OK CG, I have some good news. I went on the premise that somehow the SP1 pack screwed around with the boot stuff somehow, maybe knocking it around so that my original Vista HnS could not locate what it needed to to boot, or that the SP1 screwed up the XP boot, again I don't know. But what I do know is this:

1. I reinstalled XP, and re-followed the wiki article on setting up a dual boot. I checked and
at this point I could boot into both OS's. (I did have problems booting into XP, was
getting errors like "hal.dll missing or corrupt" which could be a boot.ini problem.)
2. I then deleted all HnS files eg, bootmgr.hns, etc. from both Vista and XP partitions.
3. I then ran the original build of the Vista HnS that I had, hiding the Vista files and setting
the time out.
4. I rebooted and Vista HnS worked, loading the original screen (which I assume is the
GRLDR?) and giving me the option of which OS to boot into. (Easy BCD being set to 0)

This is what leads me to suspect that the original problem was something with XP, that when this was fixed, there might have been remnants of HnS files that were getting in the way as per the stages thing you explained to me - that "X" factor that was off or something, so that I had to take all the files out so that Vista HnS was truly starting from scratch.

I have attached the install logs from the newest build and the one I just did with the older build so you can check them out. (Vista HnS Beta is the earlier build) If you want, I can do the same thing (step 2 & 3 above) for the newest build to see if that works for me, waiting for your word on this.
Saphire
 

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OK, before I do, please take a look at the uninstall log for Vista HnS. There were several denied access items. I was fooling around with ownership on some of the files so I could move, delete, etc. - what is the permissions that the UI uses for Vista HnS so I can make sure to reset these before I install? Or does it make a difference?
 

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HnS relies on Vista to return an access denied error when deleting the bootloader currently in use - so no worries about that particular error message.
 
OK, I did the same thing with the newest build of HnS. Verified I could boot into either Vista or XP before starting (cuz we could assume no boot problems if that happened). Then ran UIl, hid drives. Rebooted and got as far as "booting GRLDR... starting Cmain..." and then it hung. I've attached install and boot.ini from Vista and XP respectfully, don't know if this helps or not. Also, a quick question - bootmgr starts out at 326 KB. After running Vista HnS, there are two bootmgr's - one is the bootmgr which is now 184 KB and the other is an HNS file which is 326 KB. I'd like to know how that works briefly. Thanks. If you have an idea what I am running into, please let me know - otherwise the only thing I can think of is go back to the other build and see if I can see anything different between the two, what one is doing that the other isn't. Oh - another question, sorry:lup: - when says starting Cmain, what is this, ie what is is trying to do?

Saphire 199

ps - sorry it took so long to get back - my birthday party yesterday heh heh.
 
Happy Birthday, Saphire!

I need to find out how adding some hooks to NeoGrub with build 46 broke it for only certain people (you, terry, and jasper)...... cmain() means that thing is starting up, doesn't point to anything in particular.

Thanks for all your help so far and for putting through with all this :smile:
 
CG, would it be any help if the 3 of us you quoted as having problems with the 45+ builds gave you a disk layout description or a disk management snapshot ?
 
Good idea.. A screenshot of the disk management page would certainly provide some food for thought..
 
No sooner said ....
(all the removable drives were off when 45 was tried, as per instructions)
 

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The thing about 45-onwards is that the removable drive problem doesn't matter any more. I don't get why the MBR detection changed, because I didn't touch that code in build 45...
 
I never bothered removing the flash drives in pre-45 builds. Do you think that has anything to do with the fact that the build I'm using now sometimes gets the 0 and 1 disks the wrong way round, and sometimes right ?
Build 45 though was the first one to say "remove all ..... " so I did, but that was the one that ended with the err=115, starting cmain() problem that needed a Vista repair.
 
I think I added that prompt in 44, and it certainly would explain why it used to mis-number on occasion. I assumed you did remove all external drives in the past; as a matter of fact, the reason for that prompt is for the mis-numbering.........
 
When I ran with the flash drives attached (they always are) It didn't have any trouble recognizing them and correctly identifying them. The confusion was always between disks 0 and 1.
Dsk mgmt sees IDE (G:\) as 0 and SATA (C,D,H,(E,F)) as 1, bootmgr sees SATA as 0 (don't know what it thinks IDE is - no bootable system on there anyway)
The build I'm currently using (can't remember which exact number) was the first to successfully reinstate rdisk(0) to my menu.lst after the builds which kept calling it 1. Then after SP1, when I had to rerun it, it too started calling SATA rdisk(1) again and I had to manually edit it. Later (can't remember why) when I had to rerun it, it got rdisk(0) right again. Then I ran 45 with all the problems you know about and I reran the old one again, and it got rdisk(1) wrong again and I had to do another manual edit.
Don't know if you can follow all that, but I thought I'd detail it for background.

Addendum:

Yes please Saphire,
If CG gets screenshots from all of us with the cmain() problem, perhaps he can spot a similarity which gives him a clue what's going on.
You can attach a screen shot if you click "go advanced" and then click on the paper-clip and browse to where you've saved your screenshot as a file on your PC (with the snipping tool)
 
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Thank you.

Addendum:

Terry - was the only thing you ran into on the later builds that there was a discrepancy in assigning the right disk values because of your IDE? I have all SATA, but I noticed in the menu.lst, referred to XP as partition 3 [all are on one disk, (0)], but the boot.ini referred to it as partition 4. Does this make a difference?
 

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