All kinds of confused

CWBillow

Member
I run a Windows 7 Ultimate main O/S. On that I have VMware Workstation. For some reason, unbeknownst to both me and Epson, my scanner won't work when VMware is installed.

So...

I set up an XP partition to use just for scanning. Somehow, I got the mult-boot set up so that it works.

So I wanted to have just a vanilla Windows 7 setup alongside the XP setup, so that if anything ever crashed or hardware changed etc., I would have a plain Jane setup to restore.

But, when I tried to restore just the Windows 7 partition, I could NOT get it to work and keep the multi-boot properties. If I just rested the '7' partition, it wouldn't boot into EasyBCD. If I restored the MBR, then the XP stops working. So I went all the way back to the beginning to see if I could start with a claen disk and get the two working. Could NOT seem to get that toi work either.

So, thank goodness, I had made a backup after I first got EasyBCD working, and the restoration of that works fine.

But what if I needed to restore just one of the partitions and wanted the other(s)cess?

What am I doing wrong here, and how do I fix it?

Chuck Billow
 
MS multi-boot architecture is to put all the boot files, from all the OSs in the same place ("system" in Disk Management).
Depending on which that is affects what you can restore without possibly compromising the boot.
Multibooters, Vista Dual and Multibooting - A Guide to the Multiboot Process

Terry that's what I would have thought -- particularly if "all" I restore is the partition and not the boot sector. But that isn't what happened.

I restored the "C" partisan -- the active Windows partition -- and it screwed up the other from running at all, and didn't show the boot menu any longer.
 
The boot folder containing the BCD and the boot manager program are part of the partition, located in the partition root. (they're super-hidden, so you'll need this to see them there) It might not be the W7 partition though, that depends on the order in which you created the multi-boot. So when you overwrite whichever partition is "system", you'll be replacing/removing/backdating the boot files to whatever state they were in when you made the partition image.
 
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