C
CZ
OT:
John:
You appear to be a non-zealous person.
May I ask your opinion re: Linux vs Vista vs Mac OS X?
TIA
John:
You appear to be a non-zealous person.
May I ask your opinion re: Linux vs Vista vs Mac OS X?
TIA
John said:rewriting the disk signature with the Windows 98 fdisk /mbr command will
cause a boot failure. In most cases Windows 2000/XP will hardly bat an
eye and boot as if nothing had happened when the signature is rewritten,
Vista on the other hand will not boot if the disk signature is changed.
jorgen said:The hole point was that the MBR only has one job, and the job is the
same whether you run vista or xp
John said:I don't think anyone said any differently. My point was that replacing
the Vista MBR may prevent Vista from booting properly, and it will if
you replace it with the standard W98 MBR and it may if you replace it
with the Windows 2000/XP MBR. For earlier Windows versions it hardly
mattered but replacing the Vista MBR with a different version is not a
recommended practice.
jorgen said:It won't break because you replace it with a W98 MBR, it breaks because
fdisk does more than it should. It you use another tool that doesn't
wipe the signature, it will work the same
John said:I don't think anyone said any differently.
John said:...unless or until the user decides he wants to enable BitLocker.
jorgen said:Unless I've misunderstood the concept, it wont break there either. It
will only break/go into recovery mode if you change the mbr while
bitlocker is active.
CZ said:OT:
John:
You appear to be a non-zealous person.
May I ask your opinion re: Linux vs Vista vs Mac OS X?
TIA
jorgen said:Actually, the discussion started because Timothy Daniels said otherwise. The
source he referred to stated that the specific boot loader was installed in
the MBR and not the the partition boot sector
Timothy said:Not true. The discussion started in the thread "Blank entries in
Boot.ini file" in microsoft.public.windowsxp.general where I
commented that there were web tutorials on restoring Vista's MBR
if it had been overwritten by an installation of XP, and you argued
that MBRs were generic.
Again, no one has said that Vista's MBR function is any different
from that of previous Windows MBRs - that is, to simply call the
executable code in the active partition's Boot Sector. The essence
of the discussion is whether *contents* of the MBRs of Vista and
previous Windows are different so as to justify reloading the Vista
MBR if it had been replaced by XP's MBR, ...OR... whether the
MBRs could be used interchangeably. So far in this discussion,
the answer appears to be "sometimes" - which implies that the
MBR recovery should be done as a standard practice unless the
user knows exactly whether some special condition existed or not.
It's stored in the MBR at offsets 1B8h through 1BBh.
Yes, I tried it with one of the Vista Release Candidates and Vista
failed to boot after the change. Maybe the final Vista release handles
disk signature changes differently?
John said:Yes, I think that is correct. It will break if you change the MBR
*after* BitLocker is enabled, the MBR hash is only crated and stored in
the TPM's Platform Configuration Register when BitLocker is enabled, so
when BitLocker is enabled it should/will just create the hash with the
existing MBR be it the Vista MBR or another one, I think.
It's stored in the MBR at offsets 1B8h through 1BBh.
Jawade said:I did made a XP-MBR on Vista and it works ok. Note te disk signature
belongs to the boot-partition and the 3 bytes at 01B5-01B7 belongs
to the IPL. The disk signature can you find back in the register at
the boot-partition at DosDevices.
CZ said:Re: disk signature:
John:
I just used Disk Probe via XP Pro and regedit in Vista SP1 on my dual
boot computer to confirm the data value and its location in the MBR and
in Vista's registry.
I may run the fdisk /mbr via Win 98 SE floppy boot disk test again.
Based on my previous test, I would not expect the disk signature to change.
It might be useful to know if SP1 makes a difference.
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