Eric Greene said:
I think I made a mistake!
The machine is running XP Pro (loaded via upgrade from XP Home) and SP
2.
Installed Partition and Boot Magic (PartitionMagic 8.0) on the system
with the plans of installing another operating system. I made a small
FAT partition (following the directions in BootMagic) to install
BootMagic. Installed and all went fine.
However, it turned out I didn't need to install another operating
system (don't ask) and, rather than RTFM, just erased and deleted the
small partition BootMagic resided in. Now, when I boot, I get a
message saying that the BTMAGIC.IMG file can't be found and Boot
Magic needs to be installed again. Press a key and the system boots
normally.
Tried to recreate the partition, but when I attempt to re-install BM,
it tells me that:
"Setup cannot find the location of where BootMagic was originally
installed. Make sure the volume BootMagic is installed on is visible,
and is assigned the same drive letter as at the time of install."
The volume is there, assigned the same drive letter and visible, but I
expect that when I erased the partition, everything disappeared and BM
setup gets lost.
Any ideas on how I might get BootMagic out of there at the time of
boot or how to reinstall it and exit gracefully?
Boot using the Windows XP install CD. Select the first Repair option
which will dump you into Recovery Console mode. Run "fixmbr". That
will overwrite the 460-byte bootstrap area in the MBR (master boot
record = first sector on hard drive) on the first physical hard drive
found by the BIOS and used for booting the machine. It will overwrite
the BootMagic boot code with the standard boot code. Then run make sure
the Windows XP partition is the active partition.
The standard bootstrap program in the MBR can only read the partition
table also in that MBR. The BIOS can only read the MBR bootstrap
program from the first physical drive it finds. Hence the default or
standard bootup has the BIOS reading the MBR of the first physical drive
to load its bootstrap program into memory and passing control off to
that program. The MBR bootstrap program reads the partition table also
in that same first drive's MBR partition table to determine which is the
active partition. The bootstrap program then loads the boot sector from
that active-marked *primary* partition and passes control to it (which
is the operating system). You may have used BootMagic to boot from an
operating system on a 2nd hard drive so taking it out means you can't
boot that OS over there. I don't recall if BootMagic will boot and OS
residing in a logical drive within an extended partition. That
partition table in the MBR records only primary partitions and the start
of extended partitions (but not the logical drives defined, if any,
within an extended partition), so the standard bootstrap program cannot
find a logical drive because it isn't listed in the partition table.
Hopefully Windows XP was installed on a PRIMARY partition and on the
first physical drive so you can replace the MBR bootstrap code with a
standard version using "fixmbr" (you can also do the same with an DOS
bootable floppy and run "FDISK /MBR" although it will be an older
version MBR bootstrap program).
Although you will overwrite the MBR bootstrap code with a standard
bootstrap program when using "fixmbr" (or "FDISK /MBR"), you may have
left the system with the partition table pointing at a partition as
"active" which is not where is Windows XP (i.e., you might've been
booting the other OS or even into the DOS partition for BootMagic - that
you now deleted). Windows XP Recovery Console doesn't provide the FDISK
utility. You can use a DOS bootable floppy to run FDISK and mark the
Windows XP primary partition as the active one (you can get images to
create MS-DOS bootable floppies at
http://www.bootdisk.com/). Or you
could use the Windows XP Recovery Console and run:
diskpart
active
exit
I'm not sure if you will need to use the LIST and SELECT commands to
pick the drive and partition on which to exercise the ACTIVE command;
you'll be told if you need to select an object against which the
commands get exercised. Since the Recovery Console booted into the
partition with Windows XP (according to your selection of which instance
to load for the Recovery Console), it will make that partition the
active one. Hopefully now you should be able to reboot, the now
standard MBR bootstrap program will load, read the MBR's partition table
to see the primary partition marked as active is the Windows XP
partition, and load the boot sector from that partition to begin loading
Windows XP.
By the way, BootMagic requires a FAT partition for its installation. So
you could either create a separate small partition just for MS-DOS on
where to install BootMagic. If you are running Windows XP on a FAT32
partition or have another partition as FAT then you can install
BootMagic on that FAT partition. BootMagic usurps the MBR bootstrap
area to put its boot code in there which knows where the rest of its
multiboot manager program and configuration is located. Since no NTFS
driver or file system is getting loaded, the BootMagic loader in the MBR
can only look in a FAT partition.
Also, during the install of BootMagic you are asked if you want to make
recovery floppies for BootMagic. Do so! You will also find a shortcut
under the BootMagic start menu group to create the recovery diskettes.
This will make it much easier to replace the bootstrap code in the MBR
and to change which partition gets used for booting.
Although I've used BootMagic off and on for several years, the demand
for a FAT partition is a nuisance (and that part of its code in in the
MBR bootstrap area and part is in the FAT partition). Symantec bought
Powerquest and so now the PartitionMagic and DriveImage products are
under Symantec's umbrella. This doesn't bode well for the survivability
of those products. If I ever need to replace PartitionMagic and/or
DriveImage, I might end up going with BootIt NG ($50) which includes the
functionality of PartitionMagic, DriveImage, and BootMagic.
