Dual Boot Vista / XP and HD failure - beware!

Ok so my HD was starting to go out on my TM 8204. The service center was closed over the weekend so I just went and got a bigger HD (160GB vs 120) and installed that.

I thought it would be very easy - just use Ghost to make full backups of both C: and D:, slap in the new HD, start with the Ghost recovery CD, and recover. I had already partitioned the new HD using an external enclosure.

So far so good, everything worked as expected though it took a pretty long time for 100GB total to be backed up on an external USB drive and then recovered. That's when the fun started.

The dual boot menu came up. But whether I selected XP or Vista, I would end up with an error message that the ntldr (or the Vista equivalent) was not found. So I took the HD out, put the old one back in - still working, just a few bad clusters - examined the disks - they were 1:1 the same. Everything Ok. I swapped HDs for a while without finding a solution.

Then it dawned on me that there was something about the boot loader that told it to look in the wrong place. There's bcdedit.exe in Vista which makes changes to the boot database - but only on the boot disk, you can't use it to change the boot db on an external hard drive. So I can't boot from the HD, but I need to boot from the HD in order to change the boot database. Tricky.

Then I used the Vista install DVD and luckily, it has a "repair" option. I was able to repair the Vista side of things using that, but not the XP side. So I booted into Vista, then used bcdedit to set things straight on the XP side, then edited boot.ini on the XP disk to set things even more straight.

All in all, the main cause of problems was the hidden recovery partition on the original disk. I had not copied that, but somehow that was logical partition 1, XP was 2, and Vista 3. On the new system, the logical partitions were orderer 1 for XP and 2 for Vista. That's why things died.

I have no idea if or how to copy the hidden recovery partition - would have been a good idea and saved me a lot of time, in hindsight.

Just a word of warning for those who have made it all the way to the end of this long post

At least I have 40GB more than before now

 

I recently tried to clone a dual boot XP/Vista HDD.

I used Acronis TrueImage which has given me good service for the past year or two. However, on this occasion it failed and the cloned HDD wouldn't boot properly.

A friend had recently recommended Casper to me because he had had problems with TrueImage not restoring an image onto a replacement HDD. Casper cloned the dual boot HDD with no problems. I haven't yet worked out if Casper will make backup images onto an external HDD.

John

 

Thank's orthorim

I am sure you will be helping lots of folks out there with similar problems.

I don't have Vista yet but when I do I will also want to Dual Boot. You have saved me a whole heap of wasted time and problems with this valuable thread.

Theo

 

Try this Vista Forum I'm sure someone will have a solution for you.

http://thevistaforums.com/index.php?&CODE=03&uid=2937&aid=92a8c64e79ac7656b43fcca90ac015f6