Dualboot Vista/XP on separate drives - Part 2

B

boofus

Member
Or...... here we go again!!!! Actually, as reported in the original thread I got this working fine. However, I wanted to get the XP install migrated over onto a different drive.

So, I thought Norton Ghost would be a good way.... I used ghost to do a drive-to-drive image copy. The dest drive is physically smaller than the source drive, but the source drives contents are small enough that it fits fine on the smaller dest drive.

The ghost imaging operation completed just fine and the contents of the dest drive "look" fine (in other words, "sane") but still the XP side now fails to boot. I suspect the "downsizing" caused this but don't know how to fix it. The error complains about "ntldr" but that file is there in the root dir. I suspect there is a config file somewhere (bootsect??) that needs to be modifed as a result of the downsize, but ghost neglected to do it.

Anyone??

Regards

Boo
 
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If you move XP to another drive, copies of NTLDR, ntdetect.com and boot.ini, still need to be in the active partition of the booted disk, even though XP's on a completely different HDD.
boot.ini (on the booted disk) will need the rdisk() value changed though from 0 to 1 probably
Don't change the drive letter of the XP entry in EasyBCD. (It needs to point to the boot files, not the OS, so it won't have changed)
 
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Most imaging products that I know of require that the destination of the restoration of an image be the same or larger in size (whether that it is partition or disk)

A way to get around this is dong a file-based restore rather then a disk/partition based one. Get all of the files on the disk as they were on the imaged machine, set the boot partition (XP's partition most likely) to active, and go through repairing XP from the recovery console on an XP CD using fixboot and fixmbr to get it booting again.
 
kairozamorro said:
Most imaging products that I know of require that the destination of the restoration of an image be the same or larger in size (whether that it is partition or disk)

A way to get around this is dong a file-based restore rather then a disk/partition based one. Get all of the files on the disk as they were on the imaged machine, set the boot partition (XP's partition most likely) to active, and go through repairing XP from the recovery console on an XP CD using fixboot and fixmbr to get it booting again.
Click to expand...

Thanks to both of you for your replies. It *appears* that the version of Ghost I used did NOT copy over NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM and boot.ini , even though I did a FULL drive-to-drive (not partition) copy. I'm shocked that Ghost would do this, even when imaging from a larger drive to a smaller one. As I said before, the data on the source drive would easily fit on the destination drive. However, at the risk of accusing Symantec of a "major bug" I will just assume that *I* somehow did something stupid and removed said files after the image copy was complete.

Thanks again...

Boo
 
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