Internal counting of hard disks

asteindl

Member
Hello,
I ran into a lot of troubles using EasyBCD during the recent days:
After buying a new SSD disk for my Win7 and WinXP installation I finally managed to transfer these OSes to the disk; after that I would have liked to keep the old systems for some time as fallback solutions and have the same startup procedure as before:

I had used grub2 from a fedora installation as primary startup method, with the bootloader installed in the MBR of /dev/sdc.
From the first menu I could either boot Windows XP, Windows 7 or Fedora; the Windows systems by a BCD- boot, which I wanted to configure using EasyBCD. From these second menues the user would still be able to select the other Windows OS.

With this method I could boot into Windows 7 and Linux, but by no means into Windows XP; I got messages about invalid boot.ini files, missing NTDETECT.com files and so on.

In Windows 7 I also wrote a EasyBCD MBR to /dev/sda. When I selected the first disk as boot disk in the BIOS, booting into Windows 7 and Windows XP succeeded without problems, but I did not yet try to boot Fedora from BCD. So after checking, that everything went well, when booting from /dev/sda, I reconfigured the Grub2 installation files and wrote the new Grub2 bootloader to /dev/sdc. Still I could not boot to XP; sometimes even not to Windows 7. (Grub 2 uses a quite sophisticated guess for booting into Windows systems, that helped sometimes.)
When I booted from /dev/sdc into Windows 7, I was unable to install any Windows XP entry in EasyBCD, it constantly answered that it could not find any valid Windows XP installation on any partition. Also bcdedit could not access its data base.
(Since I did not realize, that this problem occured, when I booted from /dev/sdc, I was just desparate, what was wrong with my configuration efforts.)

Finally I observed by looking closely at the output of BootGrabber /tlist, that the partitions on /dev/sda had assigned rdisk(2), while those on /dev/sdc showed rdisk(0). So at this stage the numbering of the disks also depends on the boot disk. The partitioning tool in Windows 7 displayed the disks in the "right" order.
After realizing that, I do understand now, why Windows XP thought, that the boot.ini files were invalid. And why EasyBCD could not install the XP entries.

Maybe it should be mentioned somewhere in the documentation, that the disk numbering at this stage depends on the boot order.
I would also have loved to find any description of the parameters and the output of BootGrabber.

It would also help a lot, if there were some option to list all files (boot.ini, ebcd.*, NST/*), which belong to a certain BCD file.

With best wishes
Alois
 
Back
Top