WinXP boots, but has error (Vista/XP/Mac OSX)

A

alloy

Member
Hello there,

First I have to thank you for having such a great tool, it made my life much easier.

Recently I'm into installing different OS on my HDD.

I setup Vista first, then I installed XP to run VMWARE to install Mac OS natively using VMWARE (only way i can get Mac on my drive).

Before I install XP, i used partition manager to hide my Vista partition, so that XP will recognized its own partition as C:\ instead of some other drive letter.

After isntalling XP, i recovered Vista's manager and used easyBCD to add XP's entry. Everything works fine at this poing, both XP and Vista boots without any problem.

Then I got OSX on my drive, but it won't boot after i set it up in EasyBCD 1.61beta. Then I figure out it was because I set WinXP partition as active, and EasyBCD copies the nst_mac.mbr to the follow location
C:\device\harddiskVolume2\
where C: drive is the Vista root drive.

Since I set XP as the active partition, it copies all boot files to XP partition, including vista's boot manager and XP's boot loader.

But at this point my OSX won't boot. So I changed Vista's root drive to active.
On C: there was already a boot manager installed, so I have two similar boot config on two of my primary partitions. Since now Vista is the active partition, easyBCD copies the nst_mac.mbr file correctly to C:\NST folder. After that, Mac OSX loads fine except it doesn't work on my machine because it doesn't support my SATA controller...but that's another story.

The problem is, when Mac OSX started working, XP won't boot correctly any more. The entries in EASYBCD is fine, and it loads XP too, the only problem is that when it loads halfway, and error message pops and restarts immediately:
Code: 
autochk program not found -skipping AUTOCHECK

From this message, it seems that changing the active partition on my drive confuses XP about the drive path of certain programs....

Now I can reinstall XP with no problem, but I just want to figure out whether this problem is actually related to BCD's way of applying files to partition. As i mentioned before, BCD copies file by the default active drive, but when the active drive is not Vista's drive, it causes an error when it is applying the files. This error is fine with Win XP and Vista's boot files but not Mac's and I think it might also affect linux booting.

Please let me know if my guess is correct and help me to load XP again.


here's my BCD config
Code: 
There are a total of 3 entries listed in the Vista Bootloader.
Bootloader TimeOut: 8 seconds.
Default OS: Windows Vista (TM) Ultimate (recovered) 

Entry #1

Name:  Windows Vista (TM) Ultimate (recovered) 
BCD ID:  {current}
Drive:  C:\
Bootloader Path:  \Windows\system32\winload.exe
Windows Directory:  \Windows

Entry #2

Name:  Microsoft Windows XP Pro
BCD ID:  {7fa4761c-4e83-11dc-a3b1-ff20c620d3eb}
Drive: Active Boot Partition
Bootloader Path:  \NTLDR

Entry #3

Name:  Mac OS X
BCD ID:  {7fa4761d-4e83-11dc-a3b1-ff20c620d3eb}
Drive: Active Boot Partition
Bootloader Path:  \NST\nst_mac.mbr

And also my partition table is config like this
Code: 
1st partition --- Vista partition (Primary, NTFS, Active)
2nd partition --- XP partition (Primary, NTFS)
3rd partition --- Mac OSX (Primary, HFS+)
fourth --- Extended Partition
4th ---   linux swap
5th ---    linux Ext3
6th ---   NTFS logical
7th ---   FAT32 logical
 
Hi alloy, welcome to NeoSmart Technologies.

Sounds like an XP boot.ini misconfiguration error. Check your boot.ini (on both the XP and Vista drives, please), and see if you can spot a glitch in the numbering (it *should* change when you set the XP partition to bootable or otherwise). If it's all correct, then probably at some point your XP install was corrupted and you'll have to do a repair install to get it to work.

If you do go down the repair install path, be sure to perform the repair install with the Vista partition set as active to avoid any further complications.
Once XP is installed, run EasyBCD from there | Bootloader Management | Reinstall Vista bootloader to get everything working again.

Cheers!
 
Hi again, thanks for the reply.

I checked boot.ini in both XP and Vista partition, both of them looked the same:
Code: 
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Now I want to try to repair install XP again, but there's one problem, if I set Vista as the active partition, after the repair installation, under XP the primary partition where XP is installed won't be labeled as C: drive, instead it'll be some other letter thanks to XP's partition ordering mechanism.

For some reason, I have to keep C: drive as XP's primary drive, is there any way I can make it happen?

I've tried partition softwares to change the order under xp but they didn't work, and I've also tried changing registry entries and that didn't work either, the only way i can do that was when I hide vista's partition and install XP on it, but by doing that, when I unhide Vista and make it primary...XP will have boot error again...

Please let me know if there's a way to do that. thanks again.
 
Thank you very much...I fixed it....The problem was that somehow my partitioner made my XP partition hidden automatically when I set vista as active.
 
Glad to hear it.

It might be useful to do the opposite: hide the Vista partition when you boot into XP.

This will overcome a bug where Windows XP deletes Windows Vista's restore points every time you dual-boot.
 
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