There are two drives on this system. Drive 1 - Windows 8.1 - and drive 0 - Windows 7. There is a DOS-screen legacy dual boot.
When running one drive's O/S the other drive's O/S becomes J:. This has worked smoothly for many years.
Recently drive 1 was replaced by a larger drive. This caused boot problems that appear to be resolved. The "unallocated space" issue described here recently also occurred during the swap but that too is fixed - two nearly equal partitions filling drive 1.
Drive 0 has a SYSTEM partition, with no drive letter; the rest of its 120G contains everything else.
One oddity remains, related to an imaging program. Historically, W8.1's partition is restored while working from within the Windows 7 drive.
Since the new drive 1 install, when this restore is attempted the imaging program warns that it cannot lock the drive. Unmounting Win 7's BCD00000000 hive in the registry avoids the error, but it's remounted each time to O/S system boots.
The "lock" warning can be easily "ignored" but it's annoying. The imaging company suggests the plausible explanation that Win 7 may now be booting off the W8.1 drive - inadvertently changed when the MBR was reconstructed.
The attached image was made while in W7 on drive 0. The "J:" shown is Windows 8.1 on drive 1.
What further diagnostic or EasyBCD screen would be useful to sleuth this out? And if the suggested explanation is the case, how can it be easily and safely remedied? It's not worth risking another descent into MBR purgatory. ^_^
Thanks for the read.
When running one drive's O/S the other drive's O/S becomes J:. This has worked smoothly for many years.
Recently drive 1 was replaced by a larger drive. This caused boot problems that appear to be resolved. The "unallocated space" issue described here recently also occurred during the swap but that too is fixed - two nearly equal partitions filling drive 1.
Drive 0 has a SYSTEM partition, with no drive letter; the rest of its 120G contains everything else.
One oddity remains, related to an imaging program. Historically, W8.1's partition is restored while working from within the Windows 7 drive.
Since the new drive 1 install, when this restore is attempted the imaging program warns that it cannot lock the drive. Unmounting Win 7's BCD00000000 hive in the registry avoids the error, but it's remounted each time to O/S system boots.
The "lock" warning can be easily "ignored" but it's annoying. The imaging company suggests the plausible explanation that Win 7 may now be booting off the W8.1 drive - inadvertently changed when the MBR was reconstructed.
The attached image was made while in W7 on drive 0. The "J:" shown is Windows 8.1 on drive 1.
What further diagnostic or EasyBCD screen would be useful to sleuth this out? And if the suggested explanation is the case, how can it be easily and safely remedied? It's not worth risking another descent into MBR purgatory. ^_^
Thanks for the read.
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