Using NeoGrub to hide Vista partition from XP

Can't be anything to do with NeoGrub, because NeoGrub doesn't touch any Windows files - it sits before the OS even begins.

You can revert the windows to original size by holding down shift+alt when closing the window when its the size you want.
You can separate the items by right clicking | group by | type
 
"Show in groups" was what I was looking for. I wonder what undid that... very strange. Anyway thanks a million for your patience & I hope you get a good night's sleep.
 
My Vista drive is the third partition of C. (I installed Vista after XP, and there was already a second partition on C.) However, when booting to XP, the Vista drive appears as drive H. Does this mean I should use the sequence (hd5,1) to designate my Vista drive in NeoGrub? Or should I use (hd0,3)?

--
Michael
 
Hi Michael,


Letters don't matter. H, k, b, z, it doesn't make a difference.

Go to the Linux/BSD tab and look at the partition list. Identify the partition you want and use the numbers that EasyBCD shows you.
 
Alas, I'm not having any luck. All I get is a black screen with the word "GRUB" in the upper left, and a pulsing tone from the speakers. By the way, I installed EasyBCD from Vista, not from XP. Does this matter?

--
Michael
 
Can you not jump to conclusions and maybe trust that I'm doing my best to help?

If you clicked that link, you'd have realized it's just a copy of EasyBCD 1.61 BETA which just happens to be uploaded to a Linux website, because, guess what, EasyBCD supports Linux too.
 
Well, it's not a very big jump to make. When I clicked on the link, I was presented with the Ubuntu Forums login page.

I do appreciate your efforts. If there's anything I can do, any information I can give to help you figure out what might be the snafu, please let me know.

I've downloaded the EasyBCD 1.61 beta from the link you posted, and shall get back to you with the results. Thanks again.

--
Michael
 
Disaster! NeoGrub booted into Windows XP with the Vista partition hidden. That's the good news. The bad news is I can't get back into Vista. When I reboot and choose Windows Vista, the screen displays a shutdown error message, and the words "autochk program not found" appear briefly before it boots me back into Windows XP. All my critical data is hidden on the Vista partition. Unless I can boot into Vista again, I'm sunk. Help!

By the way, because everything on my Vista drive is now hidden from me, I couldn't retrieve my password for this forum. When I requested the password be sent to my e-mail address, the response was that my e-mail address is not on file with the forum. So I had to create a new member name and password, and register with a different e-mail address.

--
Michael (a.k.a. Velcro Face)
 
OK, no problem.

It's alright, I probably over reacted back there, sorry, just too many other people aren't what you'd call grateful.

Run the "unhide" entry - does that fix it?

If so, we can modify it so that booting XP hides Vista, and booting Vista brings it back.
 
In NeoGrub I omitted the option to boot into XP with the Vista partition unhidden. At the time I couldn't see a reason for it, as the Vista boot loader already included such an option. I had no idea that the Vista partition would remain hidden after booting out of XP, making it impossible to boot back into Vista (hence the "missing autochk" message).

A few gray hairs later, I found a posting on some forum about such a problem occurring in dual-boot situations. The remedy was to download the free utility PTEDIT from PowerQuest, boot into DOS, and change the flag from 17 to 07, thereby unhiding the partition. I breathed a sigh of relief after Vista loaded as it should.

At this stage, you can understand my reluctance to do any further experimenting. I may just learn to live with XP wiping out my Vista restore points.

-- Michael
 
That's what the Hide/Unhide option is doing

Just the quirk that it wasn't unhiding it before booting Vista.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention, I'll work on a workaround now.
 
Hi Guru,
Just looking at Velcro Face's story... having an happy-end, fortunately.
The original question was "Is anyone using NeoGrub to hide the Vista partition? If so, how easy is it to set up? "
Being a dummy I have a question: what's the answer?
Seriously, now I'm not sure I understand what are the correct steps to get the target of using NeoGrub : hide the Windows Vista partition when booting into XP!
First I've understood that the following section in menu.list solve everything:

hide (hd0,1) # SET THIS TO THE VISTA DRIVE
chainloader (hd0,0)/ntldr # SET THIS TO THE BOOT PARTITION
boot

(full list of drives and partitions by going to the “Linux/BSD” tab of the “Add/Remove Entries” section in EasyBCD)

After Velcro Face's fight, it seems that also "optional section to see a second bootloader menu" has to be in place.
Or really I understood nothing?

As you said, hope "Just need to sort out a couple of technicalities, then I will post the guide."

Thanks,
mcg
 
ATM to make it work you need both sections.
Change the timeout to > 1
To hide Vista and boot XP: select the first option
To reshow Vista, select the second option
 
hello,

I've read your tutorial (about a dozen times now!) and I can't quite seem to figure it out! here's my arrangement: I have two sata drives in my machine.
the first one (hd0, according to window's nomenclature)has TWO partitions.
the first partition on this drive is for vista, and the second partition for XP.
the second drive (hd1), I use for backing up the first.

so: what I want to do is set up my neogrub so it hides the first partition of the first disk, and the entire second disk (there is only one partition on the second disk).

here's what I've put in the menu.lst file:

# NeoSmart NeoGrub Bootloader Configuration File
#
# This is the NeoGrub menu.lst file, and should be located at C:\menu.lst
# Please see the EasyBCD Documentation for information on how to create/modify entries
# http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD

default 0
timeout 0

title Boot XP - Hide Vista
hide (hd0,0)
hide (hd1,0)
chainloader (hd0,1)/ntldr
boot

I'm pretty sure I have this set up the way it is supposed to be, but when I boot and select neogrub from the bootloader, it just says "GRUB" on a black screen and does nothing. thinking maybe the ntldr was on a different disk, I tried it both at (hd0,0) and (hd1,0) too. all had the same result.

I just can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. per your suggestion, when I pull down the "drive" dropdown from the linux/bsd tab, I see the following:
drive 0
Partition 0 (HPFS/NTFS - 208 GB)
Partition 1 (HPFS/NTFS - 25 GB)
drive 1
Partition 0 (HPFS/NTFS - 233 GB)

so, it looks like I have everything right.... what gives?
 
wow, i almost had it, but managed to mess it up.

the version Computer Guru suggested in the reply above worked! (for a minute!) I was able to boot into XP, and both of my vista partions were completely hidden from xp! the problem came however when I tried to boot back into vista: I got velcroface's exact "autochk program not found" problem. perhaps I didn't do the unhide option right? I'm now stuck in a no man's land between xp and vista: I can't boot (or recover using the install cds) vista OR xp. I think i'm going to nuke the entire thing and start over from scratch.

PLEASE NOTE: I figured out PART of what was wrong above: the tutorial was a little unclear about what the BOOT PARTITION was. in my example, I put this code:

chainloader (hd0,1)/ntldr

however, it wouldn't work that way. I had to use:

chainloader (hd0,0)/ntldr


I'm going to do this all over from the start and get it right, but now I have a question about the original article (http://neosmart.net/blog/2007/hide-vista-partition-from-xp/) regarding this section:

# Optional section
# If you include this section, you will see a second bootloader menu!
title Boot XP - Unhide Vista
unhide (hd0,1) # SET THIS TO THE VISTA DRIVE
# Optionally repeat the above entry for all the Vista drives
chainloader (hd0,0)/ntldr # SET THIS TO THE BOOT PARTITION
boot

I'm not sure I understand the unhide option: when unhiding vista, I want it to boot into vista, not into XP! because, if I'm understanding this correctly, this second "optional" section will boot me into xp, with vista unhidden, and therefore overwrite my vista system restore points, which was the whole point of hiding vista from xp in the first place!

what I really want is two options:
1. boot into xp with vista hidden
2. unhide the vista partitions and boot into vista

how do I set it up so that I have these two options? or do I need to go in and some how unhide the vista partitions every time after I boot into xp, before booting vista?

thanks in advance for your help. I think I'm going to take a day or too off from this project, I've worn my pointer finger out from hitting "reset" so many times! and one final thought: even though I actually used to work at microsoft, i'm ashamed of them that they haven't come up with a good dual boot xp/vista solution. if I were a business owner instead of an enthusiast, there'd be no way I would make the switch to vista until this were 100% ironed out.
 
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