Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 08:05:08 +1100
From: Raymond <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [LIB] U105 Back UP!
<snip>
on your second format, the XP install may have changed the paths in the
already installed OS ..
No it is sneakier.
WinXP (& NT, 2000....) maintain a list of partitions like
"multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)" (meaning the 3rd partition (count
starts at 0) on channel 0 of IDE controller 0 in this case), and in the
registry these can be "mounted" as a DOS drive letter.
Now if you insert a partition before a known partition outside WinXP's
disk manager service, the physical list shifts one up but Windows doesn't
know about it. Result: the mounting list is broken because Windows mount
points now refer to the wrong partitions.
If the new partition is before WinXP's boot partition, the system will
boot a little bit, until it has processed the mount points in the
registry: at that moment it gets confused (cause it can't find system
files on the new partition that it thinks to be the boot partition) and XP
refuses to boot further.
That's what happened to the OP.
<snip>
I can't speak for XP (XP came out after I got out of the sysadmin business)
but under NT and 2k I often shifted things around for a variety of reasons
and to account for this, I created a Win2K boot disk with a boot.ini file
that pointed to pretty much every combination of
multi(x)disk(0)rdisk(x)partition(x) I was likely to have. As long as the
partition 'serial numbers' (can't remember what they're actually called -
it's the numbers Windows looks at to figure out what drive letter to assign
to the partition even if you move the drive around so its partition list
changes) don't change the drive letters don't tend to be mucked up and
everything is happy. I imagine if all you've done is added partitions and
mucked up the partition order, you might be able to fix things by simply
editing boot.ini (it should have worked under 2K/NT, I don't see why it
won't work under XP).
I have had related issues where these serial numbers have changed (eg.
because I'm copying an install from one partition to another) and as a
result all the drive letters shift and I get side effects like Windows not
being able to find its pagefile and kicking you right back out if you try
to log in - that requires a registry hack to remove the mapping between
drive letters and these partition 'serial numbers' ... I can't remember
exactly which key it is (and it requires either mounting the drive in
another machine and opening the registry from there or doing a remote
network registry edit because, of course, you can't log in!) but it's on
the MS support website somewhere ...
- Raymond
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