disaster booting from drive 2

[Irwin]

Hello all. It's a really long story, but the short version is:

1. Partition Magic killed my primary XP OS on drive 1.
2. I took the corrupted partition and imaged it elsewhere.
3. I restored an old backup and overwrote the corrupted partition on
drive 1.
4. I installed a second hard drive.
5. I restored the corrupt image to a new primary partition on drive 2.
6. Svend was amazing and got the corrupted partition visible and
uncorrupted on drive 2. That is a whole story in itself. Anyhow, could
see the files and the partition and everything. So now I have primary
OS partitions on both drives. The old one is on drive 1, and the recent
one, the one I really want, is on drive 2.
7. I back both up first. Thank you.
8. I edit boot.ini to let me boot to either. Booting to drive 1 works
fine.
9. Booting to drive 2 shows the splash screen, gets to the desktop,
gives a litany of errors, and ultimately just auto exits and reboots.
But at least it boots.
10. I figure maybe it is having two visible boot partitions isn't so
good, or maybe it is a drive letter problem, so I install Bootmagic so
only one primary partition will be visible at a time.
11. Drive 1 from Bootmagic with drive 2 hidden still boots fine.
Booting to drive 2 with drive 1 hidden just hangs after the splash
screen with 'autocheck program not found'. Not even close.
12. I will follow up this message with some discussion, but I thought I
would just float it out there and see what response I get. It has been
an interesting ride. What a flail!
13. Svend, thank you so much. At least I have the files back. At least
I think I do, unless this last little attempt fried them again. But I
did back them up....

Well, it's time for sleep. More in the AM.

Irwin

 

[Antoine Leca]

Hoping it will help.

I guess the problem is with disk serial number (in the boot record at offset
0x1b8). When you booted XP from disk 1, it detected the same number twice so
it reseted those of disk 2 to a new value. But of course it did not reset
the value engraved _inside_ the registry of volume 2. This is what you
should do by hand now.

If you feel adventurous, keep going:

Open Regedit, navigate until HKLM\System\MountedDevices. You will see that
your C: is recognized as a string of twelve bytes: first 4 are the very disk
number (other 8 are the byte offset of the beginning of the partition, 00 7E
00... if sector 63 as usual). Of course, the same is engraved on your second
disk, and it is NOW wrong.

You should be able to find the new number for the _other_ disk from the
other entries.

Now, the game is to change the _other_ registry. Be sure the other disk is
mounted on XP (say on E. Run REGEDT32. Select HKLM, Register/LoadHive,
browse until E:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG, select SYSTEM, give it the name
OtherSys for example. Back into Regedit, you'll see in
HKLM\OtherSys\MountedDevices what is in the registry for the _other_ XP. You
should find for C: the same value as the one on your running XP, and it is
the thing that does not work.

Well, now is time for chirurgy: the objective is to have for C: the value of
the _new_ disk, which happens to be the one found under
HKLM\System\MountedDevices for E: (I _hope_ you've followed me until here).

When it is done, close Regedit, go back to REGEDT32, Unload the hive,
shutdown and give a try to your second disk.



En (e-mail address removed),
Irwin va escriure:

3. an old backup on drive 1.
5. corrupt image on drive 2.
8. I edit boot.ini to let me boot to either. Booting to drive 1
works fine.

But killed the other meanwhile...


Antoine