Question:
How can I tell the Windows 7 Boot Manager to boot from a specific HDD and partition, just like I could with Windows XP?
Background:
I have a complex boot system set up with multiple partitions, multiple hard drives, and multiple PC's.
Every time I touch my HDD partition information, Boot Manager breaks and I can no longer boot to that partition. (EasyBCD reports "Deleted Partition")
If I resize my partitions, Boot Manager breaks.
If I clone my HDD, Boot Manager breaks.
I figured out WHY this happens by doing some reverse engineering on how BCDEdit/EasyBCD changes what drive a boot loader application boots to.
It came down to this... Boot Manager's BCD hive stores a disk signature and a partition offset and uses that to figure out where to look for the winload.exe file.
See this Link: Editing the MountedDevices Registry Key
Since it stores the signature, copying a HDD to another will break the Boot Manager.
Since it stores partition offsets, shrinking/growing/moving partitions around will break the Boot Manager.
This is NOT what I want!
In WinXP, you could tell it to boot from "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)", and no amount of copying HDD's or resizing partitions would screw this up.
How can I get the same functionality in Windows 7?
I'm a little worried that this will not be possible, because EasyBCD only lets you choose drive letters.
How can I tell the Windows 7 Boot Manager to boot from a specific HDD and partition, just like I could with Windows XP?
Background:
I have a complex boot system set up with multiple partitions, multiple hard drives, and multiple PC's.
Every time I touch my HDD partition information, Boot Manager breaks and I can no longer boot to that partition. (EasyBCD reports "Deleted Partition")
If I resize my partitions, Boot Manager breaks.
If I clone my HDD, Boot Manager breaks.
I figured out WHY this happens by doing some reverse engineering on how BCDEdit/EasyBCD changes what drive a boot loader application boots to.
It came down to this... Boot Manager's BCD hive stores a disk signature and a partition offset and uses that to figure out where to look for the winload.exe file.
See this Link: Editing the MountedDevices Registry Key
Since it stores the signature, copying a HDD to another will break the Boot Manager.
Since it stores partition offsets, shrinking/growing/moving partitions around will break the Boot Manager.
This is NOT what I want!
In WinXP, you could tell it to boot from "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)", and no amount of copying HDD's or resizing partitions would screw this up.
How can I get the same functionality in Windows 7?
I'm a little worried that this will not be possible, because EasyBCD only lets you choose drive letters.