Hide 'N Seek stuck

[frustrated999]

I had a triple boot system on Win7 XP and Vista but have removed Vista by deleting the partition. Uninstalled Hide 'n Seek and rebooted and after a bit of workl got Win7 to boot up. Went to reinstall HnS so that I could use XP safely and its been about 10 mins on step 4/5 "Upgrading bootsectors to vista format". The Stop button on HnS does nothing.

 

[JustinW]

Which partition is active/system? Also if you could post a log if its available.

 

[Terry60]

Kill it with task manager.
Run it in "remove" mode again.
Check your HDDs for any residual .hns files which didn't get cleaned up properly.
Delete anything you find.
Run HnS again.

 

[frustrated999]

Ok got it fixed and it was working fine with the current EasyBCD 2 beta build and then went and tried build 61 of H n Seek again and had problems with Win7 saying "error 8 kernel must be loaded before booting". Win xp booted ok. Was able to get in to Win7 partition and remove the h n seek files and then after a while got Win7 and XP to boot with EasyBCD 2 beta only. XP is the first partition then there is unallocated space where Vista was followed by Win7 primary partition.

 

[Terry60]

Can you post the .log file from the folder containing UI.exe, and the menu.lst which was created in the "system" root.

 

[frustrated999]

Can you post the .log file from the folder containing UI.exe, and the menu.lst which was created in the "system" root.[/quote


Files are attached as .txt files.

 

[Terry60]

That all looks OK.
Everything worked exactly as designed.
What's your current situation ?
There's no sign in the log that you've removed HnS.
If you've deleted it manually by removing .hns files without uninstalling first, you'll have broken the W7 boot.
Remember that HnS works by pretending to be the MS bootmgr
It renames MS bootmgr to bootmgr.hns and itself (grldr) to bootmgr, and the uninstall reverses that rename process.
If you deleted bootmgr.hns, that was the real MS version, not an hns file, and the bootmgr you left behind was grub4dos (grldr) pretending to be bootmgr.

 

[frustrated999]

That all looks OK.
Everything worked exactly as designed.
What's your current situation ?

I am using EasyBCD beta 2 only to allow booting between XP and Win7

There's no sign in the log that you've removed HnS.
If you've deleted it manually by removing .hns files without uninstalling first, you'll have broken the W7 boot.
Remember that HnS works by pretending to be the MS bootmgr
It renames MS bootmgr to bootmgr.hns and itself (grldr) to bootmgr, and the uninstall reverses that rename process.
If you deleted bootmgr.hns, that was the real MS version, not an hns file, and the bootmgr you left behind was grub4dos (grldr) pretending to be bootmgr.

I had to delete it because Windows7 was unable to boot at all when I installed H n S and rebooted to test it out. Since HnS was installed in Win7 which was dead I had to fix the problem via other means which I eventually did.

 

[Terry60]

Is your W7 in a logical disk ?

 

[frustrated999]

No XP and Win7 are both primary disks. Logical partitions are only used for data.

 

[Terry60]

What's the size of bootmgr on C: ?
What do you tell it to boot from after F11 ?
Vista (V) used to be your "system" partition, what did you do to move the boot files before deleting it ?
Can you post a Disk Management screenshot.

Addendum:

Sorry ignore the f11 thing, that's a different thread. I'm getting two things confused.
Time for bed.

 

[frustrated999]

What's the size of bootmgr on C: ?
Vista (V) used to be your "system" partition, what did you do to move the boot files before deleting it ?
Can you post a Disk Management screenshot.

The old Bootmgr.hns from the non functioning HnS is 185KB. I had forgot to copy the files over before removing Vista primary partition so the system would not boot properly. I then got it working properly with EasyBCD with XP and Win7. I then setup HnS again in Win7 and tried to reboot to test and could not get back into Win7. I then redid the creation of the boot information once again and redid EasyBCD yet again. At that point I had enough and left it alone without HnS. Disk Management screen shot is attached.

 

[Terry60]

185k is the size of grldr, which gets renamed to bootmgr
375k is the size of W7 bootmgr which gets renamed to bootmgr.hns
There should never be anything called bootmgr.hns at 185k
I thought you said you'd manually deleted all the .hns files ?
What's the size of "bootmgr" (in the XP root) ?

 

[frustrated999]

When I deleted the files, I first copied them over to another directory on the Win7 partition. It appears that there are a variety of file dates for these files (see WinOldFiles.gif). The Bootmgr file is 185KB the Bootmgr.hns is 375KB (not 185k as I previously stated).

The bootmgr file at the root of the XP partition is 375KB (see XP.GIF).

 

[Terry60]

When you deleted the .hns files before rerunning UI.exe, did you delete them from ALL partitions or just W7 ?
That is very mixed up.
There's no menu.lst on the XP partition, which is where it should be (the "active" "system") and the two copies of the bootmgr on XP are the wrong way round. The MS version (the big one) and the hns version (the small one) shouldn't ever both be present with those names and sizes.
As I explained before the 375k one comes as bootmgr and gets renamed to bootmgr.hns,
the 185k one comes as grldr and gets renamed to bootmgr.
HnS never creates a bootmgr.hns of 185k in normal use. The only way I can think that happened is if you copied bootmgr after you accidentally deleted the Vista partition and got a copy of grldr which was pretending to be bootmgr, then ran the UI against that incorrect copy of bootmgr which renamed it.
That would account for W7 failing to boot.
The pseudo-bootmgr chains to the renamed real-bootmgr (.hns) which is then supposed to boot W7 normally.
In your case when you select W7, instead of chaining to the real W7 bootmgr, it chains to a second copy of grub, hence the grub error message.

You need to put all those W7 files back in the W7 root from where you copied them.
copy menu.lst into the XP root
reverse the naming on the XP bootmgr and bootmgr.hns so that they're the same way round (size wise) as on W7.
Hopefully that will get HnS booting again.

 

[frustrated999]

When you deleted the .hns files before rerunning UI.exe, did you delete them from ALL partitions or just W7 ?

Only off Win7

That is very mixed up.
There's no menu.lst on the XP partition, which is where it should be (the "active" "system") and the two copies of the bootmgr on XP are the wrong way round. The MS version (the big one) and the hns version (the small one) shouldn't ever both be present with those names and sizes.
As I explained before the 375k one comes as bootmgr and gets renamed to bootmgr.hns,
the 185k one comes as grldr and gets renamed to bootmgr.
HnS never creates a bootmgr.hns of 185k in normal use. The only way I can think that happened is if you copied bootmgr after you accidentally deleted the Vista partition and got a copy of grldr which was pretending to be bootmgr, then ran the UI against that incorrect copy of bootmgr which renamed it.
That would account for W7 failing to boot.
The pseudo-bootmgr chains to the renamed real-bootmgr (.hns) which is then supposed to boot W7 normally.
In your case when you select W7, instead of chaining to the real W7 bootmgr, it chains to a second copy of grub, hence the grub error message.

You need to put all those W7 files back in the W7 root from where you copied them.
copy menu.lst into the XP root
reverse the naming on the XP bootmgr and bootmgr.hns so that they're the same way round (size wise) as on W7.
Hopefully that will get HnS booting again.

Windows XP was the first OS installed on this system a couple years ago. I remember at one point using EasyBCD on that parttition when I only had Vista and XP before Windows7 appeared. I then went to using Hide N Seek installed on Vista to boot between it and XP.

When Win7 was installed last year I used Hide N Seek on Windows7 until Sunday of this week to booth between the 3 o/s s.

I noticed that these Neosmart files etc on XP and are various dates. Some are from April 2010, some June 2008, etc.

This computer is booting fine between XP and Win7 with EasyBCD which is being used via the Win7 partition. I do not want to screw up the bootup by moving old files back and forth between the remaining XP and Win7 partitions.

Is there any way of removing the detritus files from XP and Win7 partitions and starting from square one with Hide N Seek?

 

[Terry60]

You should have cleaned everything, not just W7 before running the UI again.
Post a list of the W7 partition root (not the files you backed up, but what's there now)

 

[frustrated999]

Here are the file list currently on the Win7 partition.

 

[Terry60]

Delete everything in the bad hns files folder except bootmgr.hns.
drag that back into the root and rename it to bootmgr (That's the MS version)
delete the .gz file (hns splashscreen) and the ntdetect.com and ntldr from the W7 root
delete all the .hns files from the XP root and from all your other HDDs
Run the UI.exe again.

 

[frustrated999]

Delete everything in the bad hns files folder except bootmgr.hns.
drag that back into the root and rename it to bootmgr (That's the MS version)
delete the .gz file (hns splashscreen) and the ntdetect.com and ntldr from the W7 root
delete all the .hns files from the XP root and from all your other HDDs
Run the UI.exe again.

Did all the above and HnS is doing exactly the same thing it was doing on Sunday. It is in step 5 (Upgrading bootsectors to Vista format) and it has been 10 mins and the top progress bar is stuck at 3/4 done. Also like on Sunday the read stop button on the UI does nothing.

Update:

Was able to fix it. Terminated UI.exe and reran it told HnS to start over. This time it completely properly. Made sure the right bootmgr was there and rebooted. Both Win7 and XP boot properly with the latter not seeing Win7 partition. Thanks for all the help sorting out this mess.