Dual booting Vista/W2K3 on completely separate Hard Drives and controller chips

dpierre

Member
Hello to all

I have used EasyBCD to dual boot Vista and Linux in the past and it’s worked just fine. But know I need to dual boot Vista and Windows Server 2003 on complete SEAPARTE Hard drives which complete SEAPARTE Raid controllers and I am running into problems.

First off I am running two SATA drives raid 0 together on the Intel® ICH9 controller and two separate SATA drives raid 0 on a JMicron jmb363 raid controller (this is on an Asus Maximum Extreme motherboard). I installed Vista first on Drive 1 (which is the Intel ICH9 controller) In Vista it can see the Drive 0 (JMicron jmb363) just fine. So I install W2k3 on Drive 0. I should mention that I do have to go into the BIOS to change the Hard Drive settings to boot the Jmicron controller before I install W2k3. Then when I want to boot Vista I switch it back to the ICH9 controller. This all works fine, I am able to boot into either OS by toggling the BIOS settings.

I install EasyBCD 1.7.1 on Vista and of course it sees Drive 1 (which is the Vista install) just fine on drive letter c:. It all sees Drive 0 (which is the W2k3 install) just fine on drive letter H:. When I add the legacy OS (W2k3) it defaults and grays out to driver letter C:. I am assuming because it thinks that I have both OSes on a single hard drive. I then have to go in and edit it to select drive H. When I boot up it says “Boot.ini missing, booting from C:\windows\, NTDECT failed". After doing some reading I discovered that the boot.ini, ntdect.com and ntldr files should be on the root directory of my C: drive (which in my case is the ICH9 controller Drive 1.) After I copy those files I then get “ntoskrnl.exe is either missing or corrupt in the Windows\system32 directory" error message. I check the directories and both drives have the files. At this point I’m at a lost.:brows:

Remember this same configuration worked fine when I had Linux instead of W2k3 and using the Grub tab. Is EasyBCD able to boot two Windows OSes on completely separate hard drives and on completely separate controller chips? Thanks in advance for any help.

David
 
Last edited by a moderator:
The problem comes in with your 2 RAId controllers. If you haev to go into your BIOS to be able to switch between them and boot there will be no way for the BCD to be able to do this as well. WasyBCD is just to manage the Vista bootloader. Not to manage your BIOS bootloader which is needed to switch your RAID controllers.

Ther reason it worked with Vista/Linux is because you did not switch the RAID controllers. At least from what you have told us you didnt have Linux on RAID.

If you are not able to boot Windows without messing with the controllers then there is no way to force it with EasyBCD. It jsut manages the bootloader. IT cant control the RAID controllers for you.
 
The problem comes in with your 2 RAId controllers. If you haev to go into your BIOS to be able to switch between them and boot there will be no way for the BCD to be able to do this as well. WasyBCD is just to manage the Vista bootloader. Not to manage your BIOS bootloader which is needed to switch your RAID controllers.

Ther reason it worked with Vista/Linux is because you did not switch the RAID controllers. At least from what you have told us you didnt have Linux on RAID.

If you are not able to boot Windows without messing with the controllers then there is no way to force it with EasyBCD. It jsut manages the bootloader. IT cant control the RAID controllers for you.

I think your misunderstanding the problem. My RAID controllers only control which drive i chose to boot into NOT the ablity to boot from either if one is selected or not. The BIOS just gives you the selection as to which drive is defaulted when booting. Also keep in mind that BOTH drives are listed as "Active" in Vista. Meaning that both are up and running, in addtion i am able to see,copy and execute files from either drive when Vista is running.

Linux was on the SAME configuration (on a sperate RAID controller). Remember these are embedded controller chips and are meant to function independently from one another, not be restricted because one is chossen as the default over the other.

I guess what want to know is if EasyBCD is able to boot two OS on seprate hard drives. For now lets forget about the controllers cause i am certian that is not the problem. Can you point me to either documentation or tell me how to set up a sperate hard drives dual booting. All the documentation i have found assumes both OSes are on the same drive.

Thanks
David
 
Yes EasyBCD can boot 2 drives. I do it everyday. My XP install in on 1 drive, my Vista install is on another drive and my Ubuntu install is on a 3rd drive. So it can do 1,2 or 3. This has nothing to do with dual drive booting. Cause all it is, is a simple entry that needs to be modified. All the documentation talks about how toadd a entry. Cause that is all it is.

When i installed Vista on my 2nd SATA Drive the BCD was already modified to dual boot between my 2 drives for XP and Vista. Adding Ubuntu was just as easy as adding a entry.

So what you have to do is check the entries and make sure they lead to the right path for the boot. Since you dont seem to think this is a controller issue which you state it is, then the entries have to be wrong. The reason i say it is a controller issue is because when you make the Intel® ICH9 controller active you make the JMicron jmb363 controller INACTIVE. So yes both Drives maybe active doesnt mean both controllers are active. Within Windows the controller will become active becuase it gets installed when you go thru the install process and the contrller gets loaded upon boot.

Now since you make the 1 controller inactive and the other active to boot a certain OS, the opposite controller become active within the respective OS cause it is isntalled. It runs with the OS.

This is how i understand it from your explination. Simply saying they are on seperate drives doesnt mean anything cause i have had 4 OS's on 3 different hard drives and have been able to boot to them just by addign a entry and modifying that entry to match that of the boot info within that OS.

So the only suggestion i can say is boot to the Intel RAID. Check teh boot info from within msconfig. Copy to a notepad and save it. No boot into the other OS. Check the boot info there. Now make sure that both entries that you just checked match that of the entries in EasyBCD. If so you should have a dual boot config without any issues. If there is still a issue it will have to be due to your 2 different controller cards both not being active after the POST and before the OS selection screen.
 
Here's how it works:

EasyBCD tells the Vista bootloader where to find the XP boot files. It then reads the XP boot files and boots from them.

So you need to have NTLDR and NTDETECT and BOOT.INI on the boot drive. And boot.ini needs to contain the right entries to boot into XP/2k3 on the other RAID controller.

You do not need to change any settings in the BIOS/RAID-config every time, you just need to determine the correct values as seen by the NTLDR process for the 2k3 ARC path.

You'll need to find the correct multi()disk()rdisk()partition() path to the 2k3 drive on the second controller as seen by a program running from the first.
BOOT.INI and ARC Path Naming Conventions and Usage

See this, too: ARC path for new disk mirror, on system with 3 controllers
 
Dual boot Vista Ultimate/Server 2003 on seperate drives

Im having a Similiar Issue

I have 2 seperate drives and they are configured as follows
C Drive has Vista Ultimate Intalled
D Drive has Server 2003

When I try to boot to Server 2003 I get an NTDETECT Failed Error.

Here is what is listed in EASYBCD
__________________________________
There are a total of 2 entries listed in the Vista Bootloader.
Bootloader Timeout: 30 seconds.
Default OS: Microsoft Windows Vista

Entry #1

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

Entry #2

Name: Microsoft Windows Server 2003
BCD ID: {144d3ebf-7a70-11dd-833b-e43ea7fe17a4}
Drive: D:\
Bootloader Path: \NTLDR
______________________________________________________

In Detailed Debug Mode it shows the following
and it seems to me that there are entries missing
for the D drive.
________________________________________________________
Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier {9dea862c-5cdd-4e70-acc1-f32b344d4795}
device partition=C:
description Windows Boot Manager
locale en-US
inherit {7ea2e1ac-2e61-4728-aaa3-896d9d0a9f0e}
default {331658db-11ac-11dd-8ea7-959f090b176a}
resumeobject {331658dc-11ac-11dd-8ea7-959f090b176a}
displayorder {331658db-11ac-11dd-8ea7-959f090b176a}
{144d3ebf-7a70-11dd-833b-e43ea7fe17a4}
toolsdisplayorder {b2721d73-1db4-4c62-bf78-c548a880142d}
timeout 30

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {331658db-11ac-11dd-8ea7-959f090b176a}
device partition=C:
path \Windows\system32\winload.exe
description Microsoft Windows Vista
locale en-US
inherit {6efb52bf-1766-41db-a6b3-0ee5eff72bd7}
osdevice partition=C:
systemroot \Windows
resumeobject {331658dc-11ac-11dd-8ea7-959f090b176a}
nx OptIn

Real-mode Boot Sector
---------------------
identifier {144d3ebf-7a70-11dd-833b-e43ea7fe17a4}
device partition=D:
path \NTLDR
description Microsoft Windows Server 2003
_________________________________________________________


I apologize for the long post but I wanted to supply as much information as I could.
 
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Hi pitriff, welcome to NST.
Follow the advice in this post from earlier today.
Your BCD entry for XP should not be pointing at the XP system but at the XP boot files (which do the pointing to XP),
and the XP boot files must be with the Vista boot files.
In your case step 2 won't be to add an entry, but to change the one you've got to point at C:\
 
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Yes NTLDR works the same for all NT systems. (sorry ! I was just using XP as a generic for NT, 99.99% of windows dual boots on here are Vista/XP and I'm just used to typing it)
 
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Good news.
If you're interested in honing your understanding of dual-booting, I can recommend this site for a nicely illustrated exposition.
 
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