Adding Win2k drive to new Vista system

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larryS

Member
I just bought a new Dell computer with Vista Home Basic on C: and a Dell recovery partion on D:. I Want to dual-boot with a clone of my original Win2k drive, installed on a second drive. The Win2K drive was restored from an Acronis Image made from my previous system, and installed in place of the Dell drive. A Win2k repair-install was performed to rebuild drivers for the new hardware. It needs video and other drivers installed yet, but boots and runs OK for now--when it's the only drive installed.

I reconnected the original Vista drive (drive 0), and connected the cloned drive as drive 1. When I boot into Vista, loads appropriate drivers and I can see the Win2k drive as drive F:. I installed EasyBCD to Vista and configured it as follows:

=========
There are a total of 2 entries listed in the Vista Bootloader.
Bootloader TimeOut: 5 seconds.
Default OS: Windows Vista

Entry #1

Name: Windows Vista
BCD ID: {current}
Drive: C:\
Bootloader Path: \Windows\system32\winload.exe
Windows Directory: \Windows

Entry #2

Name: Microsoft Windows 2000
BCD ID: {2697bfc3-f2b6-11db-bd52-0019d141109e}
Drive: C:\
Bootloader Path: \ntldr
Windows Directory:
=========

Because the Win2K drive is now drive 1, I modified boot.ini on the Win2k drive to read as follows:

=========
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect
=========

I copied this boot.ini, and ntldr and ntdetect.com, from the Win2k drive to Vista's c:\. On reboot, selected Win2k to boot into, and got "Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check both boot path and disk hardware." Put the Win2k drive back as only drive, ran Win2K's fixboot and fixmbr, put everything back together again and still get the same message. I should add, that I had to set the BIOS to "Auto-configure Raid or use ATA" (or words to that effect) in Raid Operations to be able to boot to the Win2k drive on its own, and restore it to the original Raid0 setting after reconnecting the Vsta drive.

Any suggestions? I've spent WAY too much time trying to get this to work, but I'm stubborn. :smile:

Larry
 
Hello Larry,

First off, thanks for such a well-documented, clear, and rich post. Makes my job much easier :smile:

OK, your Windows Vista side of things looks OK - and you did perfect by coping boot.ini and ntldr to the Windows Vista partition as well.

one question:
What are you using for each drive: RAID, IDE, SATA, SCUSI, etc.?
If you have a RAID, what drives are contained in it?
 
Computer Guru said:
First off, thanks for such a well-documented, clear, and rich post. Makes my job much easier :smile:

OK, your Windows Vista side of things looks OK - and you did perfect by coping boot.ini and ntldr to the Windows Vista partition as well.

one question:
What are you using for each drive: RAID, IDE, SATA, SCUSI, etc.?
If you have a RAID, what drives are contained in it?
Click to expand...
Thanks for your kind comments, Guru, and too for all the effort you have put into this program and the forum. I know next to nothing about Raid, as is obvious, but the system came configured as Raid0. After adding the Win2K drive as drive 1, SATA Operations in the BIOS was set back to Raid On from Raid Autodetect/ATA (which is what I had to use to set up the Win2k drive for the repair-install). Both are SATA drives. During Boot, the boot process lists all devices and mentions these are each NonRAID Disks. The BIOS mentions that RAID On is used to improve system performance eben though only one drive may be (originally) present.

Larry
 
Guru,

I tried disk(0)rdisk(1) and got the Windows startup progress screen, then a BSOD
STOP: 0x7B(0xEB42384C,0xC0000034,0x0,0x0); INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE

Tried disk(1)rdisk(1) and got no Windows startup progress screen, just the old message on a black screen:
"Windows 2000 could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check both boot path and disk hardware."

Larry
 
OK, disk(0)rdisk(1) is the right configuration.
Keep it that way.

The problem seems to be that 2K doesn't have the drivers for your RAID setup.
You'll have to repair install 2K, then fix the Vista bootloader once 2k has finished setup and boots into Windows.

(DON'T REMOVE OR CHANGE THE ORDER OF ANY DRIVES!)

You'll end up with no Vista, but you'll boot into 2K.

From there, install EasyBCD and in the "Bootloader Management" screen press "Reinstall Vista Bootloader"
Reboot.
You'll have the Vista bootloader come up, and from there you can choose 2k or Vista.

Good luck.
 
You are most welcome, Larry.

At this point, SaeyBCD has done its job and your dual-boot is properly configured, but if you need further help with your Windows problem, feel free to open ansother thread.

Hopefully it's easy and you won't need to do that though :wink:

Cheers!
 
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