EasyBCD 2.0 b97 overwrites all MBRs even on disks with no MBR

joevt said:
Also, I think there's some requirement that Windows XP has to be the last primary partition in the MBR but I can't find that in official documentation anywhere.
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No, there's not. On my system, I have XP as the first partition in the MBR partition table, and it boots fine.
I think Windows XP also has a problem if it's partition is moved to a different position in the MBR from the original position it was installed as. I'm not sure about Vista...
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Sort of. The problem comes from where boot.ini happens to be pointed. If you modify boot.ini to point at the correct slot in the MBR partition table after the partition is moved, then you shouldn't have any problems.
 
joevt said:
If there's a problem then it's with the BIOS compatibility loaded by EFI. I don't doubt there's problems with the BIOS. It's not configurable so my Mac Pro can't boot into Windows in AHCI mode without a hack. Also, I think there's some requirement that Windows XP has to be the last primary partition in the MBR but I can't find that in official documentation anywhere. Do real PC's have that problem? My Vista partitions work fine where ever they are.
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This is what I'm referring to. I use "BootCamp" to mean the whole package, complete with the BIOS emulation kit used by Apple *and* the partitioning tool which is used to synchronize changes from the GPT partition table to the MBR.
 
This is from a discussion a couple of minutes ago:

Computer Guru said:
Yes. In RC4, the select a drive option is back (which is WAY more logical than "automatically determined" for all the posters. Funny how we never got anyone that added a Vista/7 entry wrong!)

....

I've been reverse engineering NTLDR for 2 weeks off and on during my free time at work... I finally got around the check to see if NTLDR has been tampered with and was able to rewrite NTLDR to load its configuration from a custom file.

This rewritten NTLDR is known as "easyldr" located in \NST\ (a different easyldr for each XP entry) and reads "ebcd.00x" files located in the root for the configuration.
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Oh wow...
So you replaced ntldr now with an EasyBCD version?
That's cool...
So I guess the BCD ntldr entry will now point at the \NST\easyldr then?
I guess that's probably handled automatically by EasyBCD? But why did you say the "select a drive" option is back then? Does this mean the user will now have to manually point it at \NST\easyldr?
 
:smile:

No, but the user does have to pick *which* Windows XP to add to the menu, since adding one no longer adds them all. It's now exactly the same behavior as Windows Vista/Windows 7 entries: you add as many entries as you need, one for each installation.
 
Computer Guru said:
:smile:

No, but the user does have to pick *which* Windows XP to add to the menu, since adding one no longer adds them all. It's now exactly the same behavior as Windows Vista/Windows 7 entries: you add as many entries as you need, one for each installation.
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Well, that's what I meant when I said "manually point it at /NST/easyldr". I didn't mean the user actually selecting the full file path in some kind of dialog, I meant just manually pointing the XP entry at the XP partition, and EasyBCD would handle pointing the BCD entry at the full filepath.
So I guess you no longer need XP's boot files to be in the root of the "sytem" partition? They can be in XP's partition?
 
No, EasyBCD still requires ntdetect and an easyldr-specific configuration file to be on the root of the boot drive.

easyldr itself is in the \NST\ directory.
 
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