M
mark
is MBR in the first partition of a hard drive ?
(I have 3 partitions in the hard drive.)
(I have 3 partitions in the hard drive.)
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Will Dormann
mark said:is MBR in the first partition of a hard drive ?
(I have 3 partitions in the hard drive.)
The MBR resides in the first sector of the drive.
It is not contained within any partition.
-WD
T
Timothy Daniels
Will Dormann said:The MBR resides in the first sector of the drive.
It is not contained within any partition.
Can it be changed manually to point to a different
partition to boot up?
*TimDaniels*
R
Rod Speed
Timothy Daniels said:Will Dormann wrote
Can it be changed manually to point
to a different partition to boot up?
The question doesnt make a lot of sense.
The active partition in the partition table in the MBR is the one thats booted.
Maybe you mean can the MBR be placed somewhere else if say the
first physical sector is bad. The short story is no, you normally just use
the drive manufacturer's software to map that away and replace it with
a spare if its bad so it still appears to be the first physical sector.
M
mark
any utility to edit/modify MBR ?
Rod Speed said:The question doesnt make a lot of sense.
The active partition in the partition table in the MBR is the one thats booted.
Maybe you mean can the MBR be placed somewhere else if say the
first physical sector is bad. The short story is no, you normally just use
the drive manufacturer's software to map that away and replace it with
a spare if its bad so it still appears to be the first physical sector.
R
Rod Speed
any utility to edit/modify MBR ?
Yep, heaps of them.
Everything from the original Norton's DiskEdit which has a rather
convenient multiple format display approach so you can see the
contents of that sector in mulitiple formats and edit the values
in the start and end sector format, thru stuff like WinHex to
the stuff in various things like Partition Magic.
E
Eric Gisin
Most people use disk manager or diskpart.
Resource Kit dskprobe if you want low-level MBR and bootsect editing.
Resource Kit dskprobe if you want low-level MBR and bootsect editing.
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Timothy Daniels
Rod Speed said:The active partition in the partition table in the MBR
is the one thats booted.
Can the partition table entry be changed so that
a different partition would be booted?
*TimDaniels*
R
Rod Speed
Timothy Daniels said:Can the partition table entry be changed so that
a different partition would be booted?
Yes, thats what the active flag does basically.
T
Timothy Daniels
Yes, thats what the active flag does basically.
Does the partition table entry have to point to
the active partition as well as have an "active"
flag set to ON for that partition?
Is there a simple utility one could use to change
the MBR so that a different partition is booted?
I would like to copy multiple bootable HD images
(made a various times) to a single big HD (since my
current system occupies just a fraction of a big HD)
and be able to boot from the image I select.
*TimDaniels*
R
Rod Speed
Timothy Daniels said:Rod Speed wrote
Does the partition table entry have to point
to the active partition as well as have an
"active" flag set to ON for that partition?
Yes, nothing else makes any sense. The partition table
entry specifys the detail of that partition, particularly
where it is physically on the drive and the active flag
just flags that thats the partition to be booted.
Is there a simple utility one could use to change
the MBR so that a different partition is booted?
Yes, even fdisk will do that.
And any decent boot manager does that too.
I would like to copy multiple bootable HD images
(made a various times) to a single big HD (since my
current system occupies just a fraction of a big HD)
and be able to boot from the image I select.
Best to use a decent boot manager. There is normally
a bit more that needs to be done than just change the
partition that is active, you can need to hide partitions
that arent going to be booted from, particularly if you
have multiple partitions with the same OS installed on
them. You arent supposed to have more than one active
primary dos partition per physical drive and one way
to ensure that is to hide the ones you are booting from.
They get hidden basically by changing the partition type entry.
T
Timothy Daniels
Rod Speed said:Best to use a decent boot manager. There is normally
a bit more that needs to be done than just change the
partition that is active, you can need to hide partitions
that arent going to be booted from, particularly if you
have multiple partitions with the same OS installed on
them. You arent supposed to have more than one active
primary dos partition per physical drive and one way
to ensure that is to hide the ones you are booting from.
They get hidden basically by changing the partition type entry.
What are your opinions on various multi-boot managers?
Are there better multi-boot managers than Boot Magic?
How about the one built into WinXP?
Can Ghost, Drive Image, True Image, et. al., be used to
put multiple boot partitions on a single large HD? IOW,
must the placement of bootable drive images on one big
HD have to be done by, or in coordination with, the boot
manager? That is, can they just be imaged there to be
subsequently simply "discovered" by the boot manager?
*TimDaniels*
R
Rod Speed
Timothy Daniels said:Rod Speed wrote
What are your opinions on various multi-boot managers?
I dont really use them enough to be able to say that much.
Are there better multi-boot managers than Boot Magic?
Boot Magic does what I need. I have been planning to try
http://www.osloader.com/ which appears to be particularly
powerful and easy to use, but havent gotten around to it.
How about the one built into WinXP?
Too crude and manual for me.
Thats not to say that it isnt adequate. I just have a philophical
objection to those relatively crude manual boot managers
when a decent user interface is so much more convenient.
Just like I used the command line with ghost for years
and much prefer a decent modern user interface instead.
Can Ghost, Drive Image, True Image, et. al., be used
to put multiple boot partitions on a single large HD?
Yes. You just have to be a bit careful with some particular
configs like with XP with multiple boot partitions and even
then only on the first boot after you have created the multiple.
You just have to hide one of them on the first XP boot after
the multiple has been created if you dont want to have to
manually fiddle with boot.ini after it changes that in that situation.
IOW, must the placement of bootable drive images on one big
HD have to be done by, or in coordination with, the boot manager?
Nope, any decent boot manager can use the hard drive
after you have set it up with the boot partitions you want
on it, listing them in the boot time menu with you just
specifying which it should default to booting if you dont
select one from the menu and the timeout time etc.
That is, can they just be imaged there to be subsequently
simply "discovered" by the boot manager?
Yes, if the boot manager is any good.
The one in XP is pretty grotty in that area. Its possible,
but nothing like as easy as with a real boot manager.
M
mark
how about installing System Commander as the Boot Manager. When you
first boot System Commander presents you with the list of OS that you
can boot. You choose what you want to boot.
Tried it some years ago and it was a breeze. Don't know how the
product is now. But they have been around for some years now and they
support multiple OS including linux.
you don't have to worry about the partition to be flagged active etc
stuff.
first boot System Commander presents you with the list of OS that you
can boot. You choose what you want to boot.
Tried it some years ago and it was a breeze. Don't know how the
product is now. But they have been around for some years now and they
support multiple OS including linux.
you don't have to worry about the partition to be flagged active etc
stuff.
T
Timothy Daniels
How is System Commander made aware of each of the
OSes and their locations on the disk? Does it "discover"
them, or does it have to be "told"?
*TimDaniels*
OSes and their locations on the disk? Does it "discover"
them, or does it have to be "told"?
*TimDaniels*
mark said:how about installing System Commander as the Boot Manager.
When you first boot System Commander presents you with the
list of OS that you can boot. You choose what you want to boot.
[...] you don't have to worry about the partition to be flagged
active etc stuff.
R
Rod Speed
how about installing System Commander as the Boot Manager.
I've never used it much. I have seen some reports of problems with it.
When you first boot System Commander presents you with the
list of OS that you can boot. You choose what you want to boot.
Any decent boot manager does that.
Tried it some years ago and it was a breeze. Don't know
how the product is now. But they have been around for
some years now and they support multiple OS including linux.
Yeah, tho the reports of problems dont breed confidence.
I'd personally use Boot Magic or OSL2000 instead.
you don't have to worry about the
partition to be flagged active etc stuff.
Sure, but any decent boot manager handles that stuff.
M
Michael Cecil
How is System Commander made aware of each of the
OSes and their locations on the disk? Does it "discover"
them, or does it have to be "told"?
Every time you create a new partition, it asks what OS is in there. If
you install it to a machine with a lot of OSes already present, it will
try to figure them all out on it's own during the installation but
sometimes it fails. It's better to install one OS, then SC, and then add
more OSes.
It's a nice program but if you're using W2K/XP/W2K3 or Linux as your
primary OS, you can use their boot managers already so installing a
separate program just for that is kind of pointless. For instance, I'm
booting XP, W2K3, Beos and Gentoo 2004.0 using the XP boot manager
(upgraded a bit by W2K3).
M
mark
would you know of some of the problems that you would know/experienced
with syscommander ?
with syscommander ?
T
Timothy Daniels
Michael Cecil said:[.....] if you're using W2K/XP/W2K3 or Linux as your
primary OS, you can use their boot managers already
so installing a separate program just for that is kind of
pointless. For instance, I'm booting XP, W2K3, Beos
and Gentoo 2004.0 using the XP boot manager
(upgraded a bit by W2K3).
Can you copy an entire system image to the HD using,
say Drive Image, and then select it for booting by the
WinXP boot manager? Does that image have to be
marked "active" by Drive Image, or will WinXP do its
own thing with the image? I would like to avoid using
Boot Magic because it's now a part of Partition Magic
version 8.0, and I don't need all that bloat.
*TimDaniels*
M
Michael Cecil
Michael Cecil said:[.....] if you're using W2K/XP/W2K3 or Linux as your
primary OS, you can use their boot managers already
so installing a separate program just for that is kind of
pointless. For instance, I'm booting XP, W2K3, Beos
and Gentoo 2004.0 using the XP boot manager
(upgraded a bit by W2K3).
Can you copy an entire system image to the HD using,
say Drive Image, and then select it for booting by the
WinXP boot manager? Does that image have to be
marked "active" by Drive Image, or will WinXP do its
own thing with the image? I would like to avoid using
Boot Magic because it's now a part of Partition Magic
version 8.0, and I don't need all that bloat.
If you want to use the XP boot manager, then the XP partition needs to be
active so the boot manager loads. If you wanted to copy a image to some
partition and have it be bootable, you'd need to add an entry to the XP
boot manager file, boot.ini, and usually add a boot sector for that new
partition to the root directory where boot.ini is kept. (I used a program
from Raxco, the PerfectDisk guys, called DiskState to add such boot blocks
to my boot.ini.)
However, if you already have Partition Magic, can't you install Boot Magic
independently? The last time I looked it was in a subfolder of the
Partition Magic CD/download and had it's own installer you could use.