[Download] Vista Hide 'n Seek BETA

Guru

i attached a couple of snap shots - this time it did run, but XP does not load. after that nothing loads, so i used paragon to unhide my partitions and set Vista to active to boot back up into Vista. since i saved my original NeoGrub settings, i just ran EasyBCD again, and <Ctrl> C, <Ctrl V>.

guess i have to go into work tommorrow.
 

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  • NeoSmart NeoGrub Bootloader Configuration File.pdf
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Computer Guru said:
Yes, do tell!

And - does that mean everything is working again now?
Click to expand...

Its working! :grinning: oh, my lovely XP... :lol:

Ex_Brit said:
???? What mysterious partition was this?
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Well, if you look at my computer in XP, it will say that Windows XP is installed on D: , and Vista is installed on J: and boot files are on C: .

But if you look at Vista, it will say that Vista is installed on C: , XP is installed on D: and boot files are on E: .

They mark the partitions with different letters, is that normal?
 
Computer Guru said:
Sounds like she knew what she was talking about, eh? May she rest in peace..

Question: for those of you that tried it, when you got the invalid boot.ini message, did you also see the text "NTDETECT failed" ?

thanks.
Click to expand...

Guru i did NOT get the NTDETECT Failed message as well. I only got the boot.ini missing loaded from C:\Windows message.:wink:
 
Sarge,
You can use Admin tools/Computer Mgmt/Disk Mgmt to change the letter assignments so that they match. You can't change the active partition so you couldn't make Vista J on Vista, but you can make Vista C on Xp.
I've got all my HDD, card readers, USB sticks, camera, DVD drives, external HDD, mapped to the same letters on both boots - It keeps life simple.
Only Vista C and XP D are unmovable, because of where they were mapped as they installed.
(Don't do it if you've installed 3rd party software that expects to find them on J etc, unless you're prepared to do a lot of registry editing to change all the incorrect paths !)
 
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Terry60 said:
Sarge,
You can use Admin tools/Computer Mgmt/Disk Mgmt to change the letter assignments so that they match. You can't change the active partition so you couldn't make Vista J on Vista, but you can make Vista C on Xp.
I've got all my HDD, card readers, USB sticks, camera, DVD drives, external HDD, mapped to the same letters on both boots - It keeps life simple.
Only Vista C and XP D are unmovable, because of where they were mapped as they installed.
(Don't do it if you've installed 3rd party software that expects to find them on J etc, unless you're prepared to do a lot of registry editing to change all the incorrect paths !)
Click to expand...

I have every partition renamed, so its not a problem for me to know which partition is what. So I have partitions named "NEW WIN" (XP) (its new cause there used to be old win as well), boot partition is "SYSTEM FILES", and 2 other partitions "DATA", "DOCUMENTS". True, I don't have Vista partition renamed, cause there used to be Ubuntu on it, so since I formated it back to ntfs I didn't rename it. All in all, no problems with finding partitions :smile: Thanks.
 
Yes I've got all my partitions/drives named eg Vista System / XP System / User Apps / User Data / xD Card Rdr / DVD RW Drive / U3 1GbFlash etc etc, but I'm anally retentive I guess - I just like them all to map to the same letters across all systems. That way when I plug in my camera I know it always comes up O:\ ( for Olympus - sad or what ?)
I would have mapped my Old IDE HDD to B:\ (it's named Backup of course) which Vista will allow you to do now, but unfortunately XP still reserves A:\ and B:\ for floppies ( I can remember having a PC at work with 2 floppies (when they were really floppy) and no HDD - you probably weren't even born then !) so, of course I couldn't call it B:\ because it wouldn't have been consistent !
 
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I'll be interested to see everyone's reviews of this once it's final because my darned Bitlocker still wont cooperate, dammit! I had hoped that SP1 would bring an improvement in that area too, but it didn't. However, at least the error is different now....a memory problem, whereas before it was insufficient drive space (which was also total bulls**t).

Bitlockerbullshit.jpg
 
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Configuration Options

Hi,

I'm testing Vista HnS Beta and i have a question, is it possible to configure this using menu.lst or similar?

TIA
 
At this point in time no. The only options are the ones available. It is a Beta and therefor not all options are there.
 
rpaz said:
Hi,

I'm testing Vista HnS Beta and i have a question, is it possible to configure this using menu.lst or similar?

TIA
Click to expand...
What Mak says is true, but if you like to manually modify it by editing menu.lst once the procedure is complete, you can do that.
 
HnS will modify the special HnS menu, EasyBCD will modify the Vista boot menu (which is launched from the HnS menu, but should normally contain only one entry and a timeout of 0).
 
OK, just uploaded a major update (build 32).

* Uses map() command, now it should be able to boot XP always
* Mostly code-complete, more options page works
* More reliable NTFS handling in grldr
* Specify timeout
* Change default entry
* Check for (or download) EasyBCD to remove XP entries from Vista menu
* Support forums links
* Bunch of changes, try it and see for yourself

This should be much more reliable :smile: Testing it on a real PC and a VM, works pretty well this time :wink:

Download link in initial post:
The NeoSmart Forums
 
Vista HnS Error

Hey CG,

I tried Vista HnS back in December and it didn't work. One thing I noticed is that my XP installation is now a bit weird-- not sure if HnS did that, but I now have a Windows and a Windows.0 directory.

Anyway, here's my config:
C: - Vista
D: - NTFS Data
E: XP
(I also have another partition - playing with a foreign OS that Windows doesn't see).

I just tried your latest drop of HnS and it fails with:
Access to the path 'C:\NTLDR' is denied.

That seems wrong to me. I correctly identified C: as Vista and E: as XP.

Any ideas?

Uman
 
Vista HnS doesn't have anything to do with the Windows folder, so it's safe to say that Windows.0 is not from it.

Usually .000 files are created by chkdsk, when it finds a corrupt, missing index in a `chkdsk /f` scan.

I'll look into the NTLDR error though.
 
Re: Vista HnS Error

Thanks. The error seemed out-of-place because Vista doesn't use NTLDR. BTW, I did ensure that the partitions were correct. One suggestion (if it's easy to do, don't bother if it isn't) would be to indicate the size of the partitions underneath your icon. I know my partition sizes because I set them up a particular way, so seeing the size would be a good visual check that I've chosen the right icon (but maybe that won't be true for other users).

Other info if it helps your debugging:

This is a new PC, that I bought over the holidays. I had to reinstall Vista, blow away the recovery partition (I installed XP there).

I'm using EasyBCD 7.1 and NeoGrub. The Vista BCD menu gives me three choices: Vista, the other OS, and XP. XP calls NeoGrub. My menu.lst:
default 0
timeout 0

title Windows XP (Hide Vista)
hide (hd0,2) # SET THIS TO THE VISTA DRIVE
# Optionally repeat the above entry for all the Vista drives
chainloader (hd0,0)/ntldr # SET THIS TO THE BOOT PARTITION
boot

Of course, this wasn't too smart as it left Vista unhidden, if I started XP. So I needed to use GParted to unhide Vista so that I could boot into Vista-- otherwise I got the autochk error.

I haven't done anything else with this-- waiting to see how HnS works.
 
Succumbed to temptation and gave build 32 a try. All looked great with partitions recognised ok (Vista partitions carried out by Vista, so new structure etc). Able to identify XP and Vista partitions clearly, but whole thing failed at stage 4 with message saying drive access denied. Automatically 'undid' installation, much to my relief. Any ideas as to what I have done wrong?
 
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