Moving The Bootloader

Maybe CG will find a way to incorporate hide/unhide into Easy3, but it's hard to see how when HnS grub is essentially relegating bootmgr to a subroutine which makes EasyBCD virtually redundant.
What he would be doing in essence would be writing his own boot manager to replace MS's.
It's a long way from writing a GUI to BCDedit to replacing the MS boot routine.
You'll have to ask him how likely that is.
 
It's something that I've considered many times, but don't see *too* much benefit in. At the end of the day, most things that I need to do at boot time I can do via the MS bootloader. Other stuff, I can call from the MS bootloader. It's only partition management that needs to be done *before* the BCD, and the userbase for that is way too slim for the effort and work it'll take, the complications it'll introduce, and the bugs it'll add.

But thanks for the suggestion :smile:
 
Not to mention that userbase will naturally decline as XP fades into history.
(I wonder how many HnS users there are ? Not a huge number of posters, but could be a significant slice of Silent Sams !)
 
Well, there's over a 1200 downloads for the latest build alone over the past year and a half....

(First time I visit the HnS thread in ages... glad to see all that work wasn't entirely wasted :smile:)
 
More than I thought.
Obviously intuitively easy to use or we'd have heard more from them.

completely off topic
Have you noticed a change in W7 behaviour in the last 2 days ?
I've been a default W7 user for nearly a year and in all that time it never detected my card reader, then suddenly yesterday "new hardware detected" and up pop 4 more removable disks.
 
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No, they're all on generic MS 7600 level drivers, as supplied with W7 RTM.
Just suddenly decided to acknowledge that they're connected.
 
I have an external card reader, haven't had any problems with it.

I remember when I had a PC with an internal media card bay and Windows XP, the card reader would be recognized one or two days for every 30 days it wasn't.
 
That was always the case on XP and Vista, but W7 never saw them till Thursday.
They've gone again today, so I guess W7 is finally settling into standard MS mode.
(It's a combined internal 7-way card reader / floppy drive / USB connector, and the latter two functions have always worked 100% on all OSs, so shouldn't be a connection problem - I guess there's a PnP detection problem in the USB section of the MS kernel which has propogated through multiple OS releases. My TV card (which presents itself as a pair of USB tuners so that the cheapskates at Hauppauge can use the same firmware on their internal and external versions) also presents problems. Each boot, W7MC says it's not there till I stop the receiver service and restart it at which point it suddenly detects it perfectly till the next boot. I expect the 2 things are part of the same faulty detection logic. I don't hold out much hope of MS fixing it any decade soon)
 
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Yep. That's exactly the same infrastructure + behavior that I had with the integrated USB/Card Reader/Floppy thing on an ancient Medion PC.

Like this:

medion_tesco_pc.jpg


Crappy hardware, really. I never had a problem with any laptops w/ embedded card readers or my external card readers. Glad to be rid of that PC :smile:
 
Terry60 said:
Each boot, W7MC says it's not there till I stop the receiver service and restart it at which point it suddenly detects it perfectly till the next boot.
Click to expand...

Set the service to "Automatically Start (Delayed)". Might save you some extra frustration.
 
Tried every combination/permutation of manual/auto/on/off/delayed/stopped /started
Nothing works except manual intervention before first use.
It's part of my morning boot routine now, start MC, stop MC, stop service, start MC.
That generally works, though sometimes it's necessary to repeat the last 3 steps, and more infrequently repeat again. If several attempts fail, then start MC,stop MC, stop service, start service, stop scheduler, start scheduler, start MC, normally does the trick.
As you can see, it would be rather more convenient if it just worked.
 
Hide n Seek Build 61

Hi CG and Terry: Well following on from my earlier posts, I have bitten the bullet and used HnS. And it worked first time, and hey my Win XP sys restore points are intact :smile:

A couple of points please, I followed the instruction to remove the XP entry, however when selecting Win 7 from HnS the second old BCD screen still shows Win 7 which needs selection. Can I delete that from the BCD menu too or is there another way of going straight from win 7 selection in the HnS boot screen.

I also note that its now wanting me to run check disk on all my data only drives, but thats no big deal although they are clean.

As these progs of yours have been around a while why don't you just take them out of beta?

Great though :smile:
M
 
Try ticking the "don't display" box in theEasyBCD "edit boot menu". Don't delete the W7 entry.
HnS never made it out of Beta because CG decided to put all his effort into writing Easy2.
HnS is perfectly stable, but has never been properly packaged for release, with install/uninstall and rigorous housekeeping, hence continual Beta status.
Its user-base is a tiny fraction of Easy's, so that's where the effort goes.
 
Thanks again guys for all the help. A couple of q's.
(1) There is a zipped file called vhns.xpm.gz in the root directory, what does this do and can it be deleted.

(2) HnS doesn't install in prog dir so do I assume it just works from the unzipped files, and that I can just hide it somewhere till I need it again?

Mike
 
It isn't installed as such.
The UI just runs from the download
The only extra things in your system after running it are grldr (grub4dos) masquarading as bootmgr, the menu.lst file with the custom hide/unhide instructions for your system, a dummy file on each partition (0 bytes), used as a label for menu.lst to locate the correct place, and the .gz file you mentioned which is your HnS splash screen you see under the menu.
I have a custom xpm file from the same source as my avatar, of which this was the prototype.
If you look at the menu.lst, you'll see how HnS works, and if you look in the download folder at the .log file, you'll see how it installed itself.
 
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Hi Guys I'm very pleased with HnS. However, I have a strange thing to report. It works great system restores are maintained, and looking from WinXP, Win7 drive is hidden. But, on rebooting for the first time something has put dirty flags on all the partitions of my 3rd data drive 750GB part into F/G/H/I/J. Letting it run chkdsk automatically cleared all but H:/. The drives are ok but h: is the problem I have run myself chkdsk /r from XP and Win 7 and they are clean, and acronis says its logical, ntfs, healthy. When in XP I cannot access h: it says unaccessable, and the title is local disk k when it should be software k:.
Running from the Win 7 direction on boot, it wants to do chkdsk and then says disk checking cancelled (without my intervention), however good news is that I can access H: from the Win 7 side. (In any event I was wise to copy off all my data somewhere else). Wondered if you had any similiar experiences.
 
I know its just strange that chkdsk clears the problem, yet cannot access H:\ from XP side, but everything is OK from the Win 7 side. M
 
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