Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2004 12:02:40 +0100 From: Philip Nienhuis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [LIB] Question on W2000 & partitioning
Matt Hanson wrote: > > Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2004 17:46:56 -0800 (PST) > From: Matt Hanson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: Question on W2000 & partitioning > > I want to create a new partition and restore a W2000 > image to it in order to test making it run faster. > Will W2000 run from a logical/extended partition? Or > must it be run from a primary partition? All windows versions I know of can run perfectly from any logical partition. But... they all need to *boot* from a primary partition. And that's where you must look out - Win9x/ME can't boot from a primary NTFS partition, it must a FAT type -somethingto keep in mind if multibooting W98 & W2K. (BTW such a primary partion can be very small, 7.8 MB (i.e. just one cylinder) should do to keep all boot files for Win2K + Win9x.) I have Win2K on a primary (+ another IE-free on a logical >8GB) and Win98 on a logical <8GB. XOSL claims Win98 can be run *and* booted from a logical partition, I've tried a number of times on my desktop but never managed to get it together. YMMV. I doubt if Win2K's disk manager can be fooled into this. As for a restore, I doubt whether you can simply restore a Win2K from one partition to another one. It is not quite enough that the drive letters are the same (as the registry is pervaded by it), but you must also restore its boot manager + boot files on C:, irrespective of where Win2K is going to end up. The entries in c:\boot.ini are not drive letters but refer to partition enumeration, and must match the physical partition layout. In addition, Win2K uses Logical Volume Management, which is an abstraction of Win9x's partitions and drive letters, and a restored Win2K might complain bitterly about missing drive letters, missing paging files, and GUIDs (=volume indicators which are on cyl. 0 track 0 somewhere in an undocumented place beyond the MBR). You also run the risk of seeing it log in and log out immediately again, a consequence of Win2K not being able to find userinit.exe, which in turn is a consequence of not finding its mount points. Maybe you are lucky, you can try to restore to a partition with the same drive letter and then do a FDSISK/ MBR from DOS (yes DOS) - this will reinit the LVM info (don't forget the boot stuff on c:\). To summarize: just give it a try, but if it proves to get even just a tiny little bit complicated, forget it. Philip
