new mobo, no boot menu

[gordo998]

I had EasyBCD set up with a dual boot with XP and Win 7, But I changed the mobo and things went south.

I have an odd setup. I used to have a dual boot with win 98 on partition 1 - logical drive C: and XP on logical drive D: Of course, ntldr has to go on drive C: since it's the first partition. It was too much of a hassle to remove the win98 partition so I left things as they were, gutting 98 as much as I could.

Then I added win 7 on another drive. So I have XP on partition 2 (logical drive D:\ ) of drive 0 and win 7 on partition 1 of drive 1.

Here's how Easy BCD interpreted that setup:

Drive 0
Partition 1 (E:\ as FAT32 - 4 GiB) ........former Win 98 logical partition
Partition 2 (F:\ as NTFS - 39 GiB)........current Win XP logical partition
Partition 3 (G:\ as NTFS - 3 GiB)
****plus a few more partitions

Drive 1
Partition 1 (C:\ as NTFS - 466 GIB) .............Win 7 logical partition

Drive 2
Partition 1 (J:\ as FAT32 - 124 MiB) ....who knows???

That seems messed up from anyone's perspective.

1)naming partition 1 on Drive 0 as logical drive E:\ seems plain wrong. If anything, based on the explanation in the EasyBCD help files, it is logical drive D:\, given that Drive 1 - Partition 1 is logical drive C:\ on that disk However, I named Drive 0 as the principle boot drive when I was setting things up in EasyBCD, so it appears EasyBCD shifted logical partition C:\ on Drive 0 to 3rd logical position, leaving Drive 1 - Partition 1 as Partition 2 on Drive 0.

Got a headache yet, read on?

Either way you look at it, if win 7 on drive 1- partition 1 is the principle boot drive, partition 1 on drive 0 has to be logical drive D:\, not logical drive E:\.

The EasyBCD help file claims the other drives are named based on how they look from one drive to the other. I can see drive 1 - partition 1 (win 7) seeing drive 0 - partition 1 as logical drive d:\ but not logical drive e:\ You cannot be in two places at the same time unless you have a quantum fetish. If drive 1 is looking at drive 0, it cannot insert itself as drive D:\ on drive 0, pushing drive0 - partition 1 to logical drive E:\.

2)I have no idea where Drive 2 with FAT32 and a size of 124 MiB came from, but if you factor it into the equation that might explain why drive 0 - partition 1 has been shifted 2 spots.

My Drive 2 is a DVD/ROM drive and it does not have a disk in it that is FAT32 with 124 MiB. There is a Cisco wifi adapter that shows up in Explorer as a drive, probably because it is a USB unit that has been mistaken by Windows as a storage.drive.

3)The 3 GiB Partition 3 on Drive 0 is a swap file, in case anyone is wondering.

 

[Terry60]

Logical drives in IBM-speak (for IMB compatible PC architecture) are contained within an extended partition (as opposed to a primary partition).
This is a work-around to overcome the architectural limitation of the maximum 4 primary partitions which can be described by an MBR partition table.
I take it you are not using "logical" in this sense ?
Logical drives (in the above sense) can only contain an OS since XP SP1 onwards, and cannot be booted directly.
Only a primary partition (one of the entries in the MBR PT) can be flagged "active", which is how the BIOS knows where to go first in its search for the boot files.
It follows that the boot files for an OS in a logical drive, must be located in a primary partition, not with the rest of the OS.

Bearing this in mind, and from your description of W98 as logical, I will assume that you're using the term loosely. (W98 must be not only primary, but also physically located at the start of the HDD)

Disk letters are entirely virtual.
i.e. when your PC is turned off, no letters exist on any drive.
If you boot Linux, you'll see the complete absence of letters.
Letters are a Windows construct, not present on the hardware.
When you boot Windows, early versions like 95/98 would dynamically assign letters at 'plug and play' time, giving itself C and other partitons/devices subsequent letters from D to as high as required in the order that drives were detected by PnP.
This often caused problems if a new HDD was added, and the PnP sequence resulted in a complete scrambling of device letter allocation.
Later WIndows can store devices/partitions in a registry table, which again by default will dynamically associate letters with drives.
However you can now "fix" those allocations by using "change letter" from the Disk Management snap-in.
If you take such manual action, the registry entry will recognize your HDDs, flashdrives etc and keep the map constant even if you add a new drive. Your flashdrives will also always come up as the same pre-defined letter, even if irregularly inserted.

Because all of this is just a virtual "map" of letter-device correllation, it has no "logic" other that one that you as the user give it (should you take the bother).
It also means that when you boot a different OS in a multi-boot PC, the map can be entirely unrelated to what you previously saw. Different OS, different registry, different map.
That's why EasyBCD wiki will warn you that the letters are as "the running system" sees them, because the BCD contains no letters at all, just barely intelligible UID strings.
EasyBCD is translating those strings for your convenience using the registry map, so that what you see corresponds to the same letters as you will also see in Explorer.

None of the letters need correspond to physical locations on HDDs.