help in multi boot setup

K

KLund1

Member
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Here is a list of my drives from Acronis Disk Director. Click on image to enlarge. it shows MBR's on every partition, 3 are bootable, 2 are active. very confusing. shouldn't there be only 1 MBR, and only 1 place that holds the bootloader program menu? The Win7-SSD is a PCI, raid0 drive that needs special driver to work. The other 2 HD's are sata.
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Here is easyBCD showing all my OS entries. The only one that works is the Win7 SSD.
What Can I do to get all windows OS to work. (we'll worry about linux later)
I know just enough to do real damage to my system, So i'm turning here to experts that know this boot stuff really good.

Thanks
 
Terry60

Terry60

Telephone Sanitizer (2nd Class)
Staff member
That Acronis screenshot is indeed confusing.

Disk Management flags have the following meanings


"boot" = "this is the system you're running"
"system" = "this is where I found the boot files for the currently running system"
"active" (on the first HDD in the BIOS boot sequence) = "this is where I started the search for the boot files"
"active" (on subsequent HDDs in the BIOS boot sequence) ="this is where I will look if I don't find something in the MBR on the first HDD"

Looking at the Acronis online documentation, they seem to use the same words with different interpretations
"boot" = "There's a copy of some sort of Windows on here"
"system" = All these Windows store their boot files here"
"active" as above
but this is logically impossible.
I use "logically" in the punning sense, since your screenshot supposedly shows the "system" (boot) files on a logical partition and that's an absolute impossibility.
One rule dating from the first days of DOS in the 1980's is that IBM-compatible PCs can only boot from a primary partition.
Since XP, the OS can reside on a logical disk but it's boot files cannot.
Your Acronis screenshot seems to suggest the exact opposite.
Can you replace it with the equivalent generated through Disk Management please.
 
Terry60

Terry60

Telephone Sanitizer (2nd Class)
Staff member
OK, so that looks all right now.
The only problem I can see is that W7 bootmgr can't chain W8's boot loader (invalid dig sig) which is a generic forward-compatibility problem (W8 can boot W7), but all the others seem fine.
You say none of them boot !
Possibly Linux might have problems if you picked the wrong grub option from the dropdown (mostly they use grub2 unless you've purposely installed an old distro.), but if you chose auto-configure for XP and specified the correct letter (D) for W7HDD as you appear to have done, they should all boot.
What's happening ?
 
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