Robert Baer wrote:
Got my HD set with various partitions and OSes: Win2K, WinXP, Win7 2 copies, SPARE.
Used Macrium "rebuild" for the multi-OS boot.
Well, the "older" OS selection does not work; get some kind of boot
error and "press enter to continue" which takes you back to the main
menu (which at least lets you to select one or the other Win7 partitions).
Tried the "rebuild" twice with no joy.
Help?
Oh, goodie :-)
No, that Macrium doesn't seem to be working that well.
I cloned over the following. Via drag and drop clone,
since the source disks are all different ones.
+-----+--------+--------+--------+------------------+
| MBR | Win2K | WinXP | Win10 | SystemReserved |
| | | | Active | | +-----+--------+--------+--------+------------------+
I boot repaired from Macrium. It gave quite a long list
of "activities" in the interface, but it didn't seem
to fix everything, not by a long shot. For example, it
did not edit the boot.ini, and my WinXP, the boot.ini
needed the ARC path to be corrected because WinXP is
normally the first partition, and now it's the second
partition.
Next, I tried EasyBCD 2.4 . However, it placed the
reference to NTLDR in the wrong place.
https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/easybcd.html
I tried VisualBCD 0.9.3 , which you'd try after the
EasyBCD attempt. The EasyBCD gets closer than Macrium
did, but it wasn't perfect. If the EasyBCD gets you
close enough, this could actually make it to
finish the edits, without resorting to Command Prompt.
https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/visual_bcd_editor.html
After install (very important)
cd \d C:\program files (x86)\visualbcd <=== go to the program dir
visualbcd.exe C:\boot\bcd <=== too stupid to find it!
*******
If you can get your advanced OS to boot, try this.
I had to change
path \xxx\ntldr
to
path \ntldr
and this command allows reviewing how you're doing so far.
I had to specify the /store location, because the program
was seemingly too stupid to look in this, which is the default
location. Maybe I could have moved it back to one of those
small partitions, but I didn't want to waste more time
doing re-partitioning nonsense.
C:\Boot> bcdedit /store C:\boot\BCD
Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier {bootmgr}
device partition=C:
description Windows Boot Manager
default {default}
displayorder {default}
{b2e1278a-0ba5-11eb-a318-001fc68cdcf4}
{c3134114-0ba5-11eb-a318-001fc68cdcf4}
timeout 30
Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {default}
device partition=C:
path \WINDOWS\system32\winload.exe
description Windows 10 Pro
osdevice partition=C:
systemroot \WINDOWS
Real-mode Boot Sector
---------------------
identifier {b2e1278a-0ba5-11eb-a318-001fc68cdcf4}
device partition=D:
path \ntldr
description WIN2K
Real-mode Boot Sector
---------------------
identifier {c3134114-0ba5-11eb-a318-001fc68cdcf4}
device partition=E:
path \ntldr
description Microsoft Windows XP
C:\Boot>
*******
This is an example of me attempting to fix the path and
make it point to \ntldr.
bcdedit /store C:\boot\BCD /set {c3134114-0ba5-11eb-a318-001fc68cdcf4} path \ntldr
The EasyBCD 2.4 created the Real-mode Boot Sector entries,
when I added Win2K and WinXP to the menu.
However, the second level menu, I can't figure out where
the labels come from. They don't come from the BCD.
They're not copied from the boot.ini. Since the
two labels for Win2K and WinXP are identical except
for the drive letter then
Windows XP on D:\
Windows XP on E:\
I have to assume Win2K is D:\ and is the first
choice while WinXP is on E:\ and is the second choice.
Mine is working. But it ain't pretty by any stretch.
No tiles visible in the interface, the old-fashioned
black background menus are in usage (because of EasyBCD
usage, it's the one that does that).
Anyway, without working automation, you'll have
your hands full getting this to work. I'm sorry to
say that none of the tools used was exactly flawless.
I can show you my config, but I'm sure "something different"
will happen on yours, for sure.
Paul
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