1)Vista64/ 2)Vista64, How do I Remove 2) safely?

I

interested

Member
Hello, maybe someone here can help me.

My Pc is currently setup with two installations of Windows Vista Business 64bit.

1) Windows Vista Business 64bit on Drive C: 699GB, which is a RAID 0 Setup
2) Windows Vista Business 64Bit clone on drive G: 233GB which is a single Drive setup

For some reason when I boot into either installation, whatever I do in one install gets applied to the other install. In other words if I boot into 1), and then do something as simple as change the desktop, and then restart and boot into 2) the desktop on 2 has also been changed to the same desktop. Same for other things like if I add a favourite in IE8 on one OS it is also then seen in the other OS.

So for some reason these drives do not appear to be completely independent.
This may have something to do with how I ended up with my current configuration, which is as follows:

Initially I had the following setup:
1) Windows Vista Business 64bit, C:\, on a 699GB RAID 0 setup
2) No OS Empty G:\ 233GB Single Drive

I wanted to clone this setup onto another smaller hard drive so I used Maxtor MaxBlast5, which is basically an Acronis product just licensed by Seagate/Maxtor, and given for free on Seagate's website, for cloning and creating backups.

Maxblast went through the cloning and cloned my drive.
Immediately at the end of the clone I was supposed to change my Bios boot order ( go into bios or press F8 and select boot device) to the 2) drive so it would now boot from the newly cloned drive. Unfortunately I booted into the original drive 1). Once in the windows of the original drive 1), it found the new 2) setup and once again automatically mounted it with drive letter G:\.
So now my clone was no longer an exact replica of my 1) setup( since should be drive C:\) , so when I restarted the OS and this time selected the 2) drive in bios, I ended up with a BootMGR is missing error, and thus could not boot into my new cloned drive.

Not wanting to go through the long cloning process again, I thought I could probably just fix this by using the windows vista 64bit DVD repair. In doing so I selected the 2) drive within the windows vista system recovery tools, and selected startup repair, and let windows repair it.

The above activity resulted in where I am at now, whereby I now have a boot loader screen that pops up when I have my Bios starting from drive 1) and in the boot loader I can start the windows vista 64 installed on drive 1) or the vista installed on drive 2)

If I tell my bios to boot from drive 2) I still have the same Bootmgr is missing error.

Ideally what I wanted in the first place was to be able to have windows vista 64 bit installed on both drives 1) and 2) and be able to keep them both physically connected to my pc, and select which one I boot from by using my bios, and not by using a software boot loader, thus ensuring they are both completely isolated and separate from one another. I have had this kind of setup before when I was using 2 installs of windows xp32bit each on their own drives, with no issues.

Since I can't seem to get this to work what I would now like to do is go back to square one, and remove the drive 2) completely, both physically and in terms of its OS presence in the boot manager, while safely maintaining my drive 1) setup
What is the safest way to do this that will not mess up my original drive 1) setup?

I have installed EasyBCD1.7.2 and I do see that I can use the Add/Remove Entries section and possibly remove the instance on Drive2) within the boot manager, however is it safe for me to do so,?
Then can I then delete and format the partition on my Drive 2) without affecting my Drive 1) setup?

Or is there an easy way I can still achieve what I originally set out to do without messing up my drive 1 setup?

I appreciate any help anyone here can give, and I apologize for the long post.
If you want me to provide any more information please let me know.
 
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Welcome interested, welcome to NST

Both your Vista entries are proably pointing at the same drive letter. You can easily change this with change settings in EasyBCD. By all means post your bcd details from view settings in EasyBCD to give us a clue as to what may be happening though.
 
kairozamorro said:
Welcome interested, welcome to NST

Both your Vista entries are proably pointing at the same drive letter. You can easily change this with change settings in EasyBCD. By all means post your bcd details from view settings in EasyBCD to give us a clue as to what may be happening though.
Click to expand...


Hello Kairozamorro.

Actually Both my vista entries have been pointing to different drives
1) points to Drive C:\
2) points to Drive G:\

Cut and paste from EasyBCD1.7.2 (note i put ***** just to shorten values in my paste)
Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier {9dea862c*****}
device partition=D:
path \bootmgr
description Windows Boot Manager
locale en-US
inherit {7ea2e1ac*****}
default {91032e57*****}
displayorder {91032e57*****}
{24d79a32*****}
toolsdisplayorder {b2721d73*****}
timeout 30
Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {91032e57*****}
device partition=C:
path \Windows\system32\winload.exe
description Microsoft Windows Vista
locale en-US
inherit {6efb52bf*****}
osdevice partition=C:
systemroot \Windows
resumeobject {91032e58*****}
nx OptIn
Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {24d79a32*****}
device partition=G:
path \Windows\system32\winload.exe
description Windows Vista (TM) Business (recovered)
osdevice partition=G:
systemroot \Windows
resumeobject {64c7324e*****}


Also:
When i boot into drive 1) and go into windows explorer, the windows logo is on drive C:\
When i boot into drive 2) and go into windows explorer the windows logo is on drive G:\

Also i failed to mention that i do have another partion D: which is a RAID5 setup. we will call that drive 3)

And i just noticed that the Boot folder and bootmgr file is for some strange reason on that drive!!
Which makes absolutely no sense to me since that is just a storage drive with no windows OS on it at all.

I should explain how my Drive 1) C: and, Drive 3) D: are actually a Intel Matrix Array, of RAID 0 on drive 1) C:\ and RAID5 on drive 3) d:\ both these partitions reside on 3 physical harddrives setup by the intel ICH10R chipset in a Matrix Array.

Drive 2) G: is a totaly sepearate physical drive not setup in any RAID at all, and is simply in AHCI.

Regards.
 
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That's really odd. Your bcd details look fine but it must be booting into the same system. Some things you can try:

* Post the debug bcd details from EasyBCD view settings
* Within each individual Vista install, go to disk management (Right-click computer, manage, disk management). Right click the other Vista partition from the copy of Vista you've booted into. Select Assign Drive Letters and Paths and remove all drive letters/mount points for the partition.
* Reset your bcd store (you'll need to re-add your other entries) EasyBCD -> Diagnostics Center.
 
kairozamorro said:
That's really odd. Your bcd details look fine but it must be booting into the same system. Some things you can try:

* Post the debug bcd details from EasyBCD view settings
* Within each individual Vista install, go to disk management (Right-click computer, manage, disk management). Right click the other Vista partition from the copy of Vista you've booted into. Select Assign Drive Letters and Paths and remove all drive letters/mount points for the partition.
* Reset your bcd store (you'll need to re-add your other entries) EasyBCD -> Diagnostics Center.
Click to expand...

Sorry i edited my post probaby as you were replying, and i had included the debug details and some extra info i just thought of.

Given my extra details and info, should i still remove all drive letters, and Reset my bcd store?
 
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Remove the drive letters for the opposite installs as directed first. If that doesnt work reset the bcd store.
 
kairozamorro said:
Remove the drive letters for the opposite installs as directed first. If that doesnt work reset the bcd store.
Click to expand...

ok.
Please forgive my confusion: This is what i am about to do:

Boot into Drive 1) Microsoft windows vista, Drive C:\
Go into Disk Management
Right click on Drive 2) G:\, select "change drive letter and paths..."
Within Change Drive letter and paths for G:, i will select G: and click on Remove

Then i will ?

Restart windows and try booting to drive 2) ?
or Restart windows and try booting into drive 1) again?

Whats the end goal your trying to help me get to, as i did ask how i could remove drive 2) in my Original Post, however i also asked if it was possible to get this working with two seperate drives.. which one are you helping me try to acheive.

Sorry for my confusion, but its been a long day and i am probably not thinking straight right now.
:x
 
interested said:
Also i failed to mention that i do have another partion D: which is a RAID5 setup. we will call that drive 3)

And i just noticed that the Boot folder and bootmgr file is for some strange reason on that drive!!
Which makes absolutely no sense to me since that is just a storage drive with no windows OS on it at all.
Click to expand...
That is just where the boot files are. Make sure not to mess around with those files, or Vista wont boot!

If you look at your bootmgr entry
Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier {9dea862c*****}
device partition=D:
path \bootmgr
description Windows Boot Manager
locale en-US
inherit {7ea2e1ac*****}
default {91032e57*****}
displayorder {91032e57*****}
{24d79a32*****}
toolsdisplayorder {b2721d73*****}
timeout 30
Click to expand...
you'll notice its pointed at D. So as you can see, moving those files or deleting them will render your system unbootable, and require having to run Startup Repair from a Vista DVD or our recovery disk (probably 2-3 times) to repair it. Not saying you were going to do that, just want to warn you against doing so...
Now to your problem...
In Disk Management, set your G: partition to "active" if it is not already.
Set the drive with your cloned Vista to boot first.
Now boot from the Vista DVD, and run Startup Repair 2-3 times (it can only fix a single problem per pass) after selecting your G: partition to "active", and you should now be able to boot into either drive, by changing the drive order in the BIOS like you wanted. In addition, if you have what you called drive 1 as first in the boot sequence after, you will be given a choice to boot into either OS. Keep in mind the D: partition is being used on that hard drive, and your BCD bootmgr entry is pointed at D:, so you will need to make sure the Vista system on that hard drive is calling the D: partition, D. If it is not, then just give the partition that drive letter in Disk Management, or ask me how to change the partition being pointed to in the bootmgr entry to a different drive letter, and I will give you the command you need to run. The drive letters are specific to the OS being booted into, so it could very well be what is D: in one Vista system (possibly your cloned system), is not D: in your other (original) system. Once you do that, then both Vista entries in your original system's BCD should work if they do not right now.

Jake

EDIT: And if some other partition (from your original Vista system) has been given the D: drive letter instead of the partition that contains bootmgr, and /boot/BCD, then you will need to make it give up its drive letter, so you can apply it to the other partition. To do this, in Disk Management, right-click on the D: partition, and select "Change drive letters and paths...". Then hit Remove, and then Ok. Now reboot, and once you get back into the original Vista again, assign the partition that contains the boot files the D: drive letter, and then it should work.

Addendum:

Of course there's an easier way to fix it though...

  • Boot into the original Vista.
  • Use Reset BCD storage(selected)>Rescue my system from EasyBCD's
  • Set your original Vista's partition to "active" on its hard drive.
  • Set your cloned Vista's partition to "active" on its hard drive.
  • Go into your BIOS, put your original Vista's HDD before the cloned Vista's HDD, and put your CD rom device before both of them.
  • Then boot from the Vista DVD, run Startup Repair to the original Vista installation 2-3 times.
  • Your original Vista should now boot from its own partition.
  • Go into your BIOS, put your cloned Vista's HDD before the original Vista's HDD, and put your CD rom device before both of them.
  • Then boot from the Vista DVD, run Startup Repair to the cloned Vista 2-3 times.
Both systems should now boot fine, by just putting the Vista you're trying to boot's HDD first in the boot sequence. And you can also add an entry with EasyBCD to your cloned Vista's BCD to boot the original system as well, so that way you can boot into either system regardless of which hard drive is the boot drive.
Of course, if after doing that, one of the systems wont boot, then it means your problem is slightly more complicated, and you will need to open up EasyBCD's Power Console (on the "Useful Utilities" page) from the system you can boot into, and run the following commands:
bcdedit /set {current} osdevice boot
bcdedit /set {current} device boot
bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device boot
bcdedit /set {memdiag} device boot
Click to expand...
Then just open up EasyBCD, add an entry to the Vista system's BCD that works, and then reboot, and use that entry to boot into the other system. Then, once you're in the other system, go ahead, and run the exact same commands again from that system, and then both Vista systems should now boot from their respective hard drives if you put either of them first in the boot sequence in the BIOS.
 
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Do the same in the second install (ie make the other partition available). The end goal is that niether you or the OS can access the other OSes partition whichever install you're in.

So say install As drive c: and install Bs drive g: and they both appear the same way in either OS. In install A, you would remove all letters and mount points for drive g: and in install B you would remove all drive letters and mount points for c:.

Leave the boot files where they are like Cool says. Messing wtih them well make it not boot at all.
 
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kairozamorro said:
Do the same in the second install (ie make the other partition available). The end goal is that niether you or the OS can access the other OSes partition whichever install you're in.
So say install As drive c: and install Bs drive g: and they both appear the same way in either OS. In install A, you would remove all letters and mount points for drive g: and in install B you would remove all drive letters and mount points for c:.

Leave the boot files where they are like Cool says. Messing wtih them well make it not boot at all.
Click to expand...
Ok, now I understand why you advised to remove the drive letters... :grinning: I was wondering what the point of doing that would be, but I see now what you had in mind. To make each system not visible to the other system.
Of course, doing that is optional though...
The restore points issue is only when you have a dual-boot of Vista and XP. I would think Vista wouldn't be stupid enough to delete its own restore points...:brows:

Jake
 
Its not to protect against restore cool, its to try to get the two systems to be independant of one another, assuming his bcd data is correct.
 
Hello again.
First I would like to thank you both for helping me with my problems

Here is what has happened since I last posted here.

Sunday night one of my 3 hard drives within my Intel Matrix RAID0/RAID5 died, before I could apply either of your recommendations with my issues :frowning:

Don’t know why but the timing could not have been better or worse depending on how you look at it, given that just the night before I had made my clone.
This was quite a coincidence as I did not create my clone expecting one of my drives to fail, but strangely enough one just did.
It is possible that the cloning process itself was enough stress to finally kill the now dead drive which must have been weak to begin with.

And before someone asks, I am sure that the drive is physically dead, as SMART reports failures, and the drive will just spin down and up for no reason.:x

Given the death of one of my 3 drives in my Matrix 0/5 array, the following things occurred.
Now my RAID 5 was in Degraded mode (if you remember my RAID5 contained my boot folder and files), and my RAID0 was sporadically dead/alive. I will explain this a little more, basically sometimes when I boot, so long as my dead drive was spinning the Intel ICH10R bios will detect the drive and the RAID0, but once it spontaneously spins down it the RAID 0 would be lost.

Well in this condition My drive would not boot into windows, given that windows was on the RAID0 and the boot files were on RAID5 (I still don’t know how or why that was originally setup like that), Any well after a few tries trying to get my Original setup to work again, I gave up given the sporadic nature of the failed hard drive I did not see much chance for success.

So I had to get my clone working, but unfortunately it too would not boot, again due to the issues I have mentioned in my previous post about the "Bootmgr is missing error" which I did not have the opportunity to fix before my drive failed in my Original setup.

So I took Coolname007's advice and I modified it as follows in order to get my clone back up and running.
1) I disconnected all 3 Matrix Raid drives, and left only the single clone drive connected.
2) I ran windows vista 64 DVD and did a repair. I had to do the repair 2 times.
3) Windows would now boot from the clone drive and the Bootmgr error was now gone.

So now I could boot, however I once again had another problem.
As I mentioned in my original post, my clone drive had its drive letter changed from C: to G:
So when I booted into the clone drive it would take forever to boot and eventually it ended up at a blank desktop with a blue background.
I was not surprised by this as instead I was expecting it given the drive was now trying to load things from C:\ however the drive letter was actually G:\.
So I had to fix this too, and I did this as follows:

1) Google found me a Microsoft webpage with the directions to change the drive letter.
2) I followed the instructions, here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223188 with a few minor changes which I will list.
I) I entered safe mode ( F8 at start).
ii) Given the blank desktop I had to ctrl-alt-del to get task manager up
iii) Using task manager I could select run to run Regedt32.exe, and Regedit.exe as per Microsoft’s instructions.
iv) And instead of renaming C: as mentioned in Microsoft’s instructions, I just deleted it, everything else I followed as per Microsoft's instructions. (Note it would have probably been safer to rename but I saw no issue with the delete)

After rebooting, I was now able to log into my clone drive, and my profile would now load and everything was now running just fine on my clone drive :booyah:

But wait there is more problems ahead... even though I cloned my drive on Saturday morning, I had since actually generated some data on my original drive that was not on my clone. oh noes... well it was not much data but regardless I wanted to see if I could recover it, so starts my next adventure, trying to remount the broken Matrix Raid0/5 setup. Also to make it worse the data I required was on the RAID0 and not the RAID5, (just had to make things harder):rage:. If it was on the RAID5 I could just pull out the dead disk, let the Intel ICH10r report Degraded RAID5, and missing RAID 0, then boot from my clone and let the clone find the RAID5 drive and pull my data from it in degraded mode.

But since the data I wanted was on the RAID0, I had to leave that dead drive in so that the Intel ICH10r controller would at least see the RAID0, when the drive was partially functioning. As I tried to boot from my clone with my dead drive installed, I encountered several issues.
The main issue was that as I booted into the clone, right before I would get into windows a check disk session would automatically start up on the dead drive's RAID0 (which was now Drive F: which I could not cancel, and check disk would lock up the machine at 59% and never boot into windows.
So I had to use Google again and find out how to prevent checkdisk from starting in vista:
I found instructions on how to do that here http://www.ocmodshop.com/ocmodshop.aspx?a=874
So I disconnected the Matrix array drives, and left only the working clone connected.
Booted into windows on my clone drive, and followed the instructions above to prevent check disk from running on drive F: (which would be my RAID0).
I then shut down the system. Plugged my matrix array back in, booted from my clone, and voila, it very slowly booted into windows, with my dead drive attached.

Upon booting into windows on my clone with the dead drive attached, the Intel matrix storage manager popped up letting me know about the crappy state of my matrix array, and pointed out the obvious that I should back up data from my RAID0 ASAP.

Fortunately I was able to (slowly) pull the data off the RAID0 drive literally seconds before the dead drive spun down and once again caused the RAID0 to disappear from windows, and cause my system to slow to a crawl.
I was then able to successfully shut down my computer, and finally pull out the dead drive, which I will now send in for RMA.

So now I will have to live off of my single clone drive until my replacement drive shows up, at which point I will then have to decide whether I will once again clone it back onto a new matrix setup, or just start new windows install from scratch. I haven’t decided yet what I will chose, as my current windows setup is only 1mth old ,and it does take a long time to install windows and get all my apps and settings the way they are now. But that’s an adventure for another day.

If there is one positive thing out of all this is that I did learn a lot of new things that I did not know before all this happened, and I am definitely more prepared should I encounter these kinds of issues again on a vista system.

Once again, sorry for the long post, and thank you for all your help.
 
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