multiple-XP's

[Hildegard]

This happend so far:
bought a new PC with Windows XP Media Center Edition.
Installed Partition Magic 8.1
Copied the XP partition (lets call it PROD) to create a 'test'
partition (lets call it TEST)
Created Fat partition for BootMagic
Created Extented Partition for logical partitions
Installed some application programs on PROD
Installed some application programs on TEST
Now, after installing another program on TEST, the connection
to the internet didn't work anymore. So I booted PROD.
Surprise: also no connection to the internet !
Checked the device manager and found identical conflicts for the network
interface on *both* partitions !
Removed the last installed program on TEST.
Internet works on TEST again and on PROD.
What might be the reason for this behaviour ?

 

[I'm Dan]

This happend so far:
bought a new PC with Windows XP Media Center
Edition.
Installed Partition Magic 8.1
Copied the XP partition (lets call it PROD) to
create a 'test' partition (lets call it TEST)
Created Fat partition for BootMagic
Created Extented Partition for logical partitions
Installed some application programs on PROD
Installed some application programs on TEST
Now, after installing another program on TEST,
the connection to the internet didn't work anymore.
So I booted PROD.
Surprise: also no connection to the internet !
Checked the device manager and found identical
conflicts for the network interface on *both*
partitions !
Removed the last installed program on TEST.
Internet works on TEST again and on PROD.
What might be the reason for this behaviour ?

Sounds to me like you don't truly have two independent installations, so the
two OS's may be tripping over each other. Often, a quick test for this kind
of thing is to change the wallpaper in one OS and see if it also changes in
the other OS. Does that happen, or is your wallpaper changing properly?

 

[Hildegard]

Sounds to me like you don't truly have two independent installations, so the
two OS's may be tripping over each other. Often, a quick test for this kind
of thing is to change the wallpaper in one OS and see if it also changes in
the other OS. Does that happen, or is your wallpaper changing properly?

The wallpaper changes correctly.
Your assumption that the two installations are not independent must be
correct,
the question is *why*.

 

[I'm Dan]

The wallpaper changes correctly.
Your assumption that the two installations are not
independent must be correct, the question is *why*.

If your wallpaper didn't behave properly, I'd have more confidence I knew
what was going on. But since it changes correctly, I can merely say, "I'm
not sure." Here's a couple things I'd check, though. I suspect the first
three, below, will be normal and not the source of your problem, but they're
easy to check so it's worth ruling them out first.

First, check each boot.ini file. There should be one in each partition, and
each should point to a different ARCpath (IOW, one might say
"...partition(1)..." and the other should be "...partition(2)..." or
something else.

Are you hiding the primary partitions from each other? That would be in the
BM configuration for each boot item. I believe that BM does this by
default, hiding both the FAT and alternate XP partitions under each boot
item.

When you boot each XP, check your disk in the Computer Management service.
The FAT and alternate partitions should show as "Healthy (Unknown
Partition)" with no drive letters. The "system drive" under each boot
should be different and labeled "C:". If you've got them named "TEST" and
"PROD", it should be easy to track which is which. Remember that Comp.
Mgmt. lists partitions in alphabetical order, not in physical order. The
bar graph below the list, though, shows physical order. Click on each entry
in the top list and notice which box on the graph below turns "shaded".

Finally, it's possible the partition signatures in the registry are
scrambled, though I'd anticipate this only in the cloned XP (TEST), not the
original (PROD). (You said you noticed the crossover when installing to
TEST, as I might expect, but I'm guessing there wouldn't be any crossover
from PROD installs showing up on TEST.) To fix the partition signatures in
TEST's registry, boot into TEST and run regedit. Navigate to the key
[HKLM\System\MountedDevices]. Delete all entries under this key except for
the default entry. (There should be two types of entries: some start with
"\??\Volume{...}" and the others start with "\DosDevices\...", but delete
both types.) Now shutdown and reboot into TEST, and XP should regenerate
the partition signature table, with the system partition assigned first
(C. Hopefully, this will fix any registry scrambling. It won't resolve
the conflicts from that problem program on TEST, but I think it should
prevent the conflict from bleeding over into the PROD partition.

Hope this helps.

 

[Hildegard]

As I didn't change the boot.ini file after cloning, the boot.ini file for
TEST contains the same partition number as PROD namely 1.
According to the MAP command on the recovery console,
the PROD partition is number 1 and TEST is number 2. I believed that there
is no need to change boot.ini as the other primary(alternate) partition is
hidden by bootmagic/bootmanager, therefore there would be no way that files
of the
other partition could be accessed.
What actions are now probably necessary to get a clean environment ?
Is there any documentation (cookbook) on cloning XP-partitions available ?

The wallpaper changes correctly.
Your assumption that the two installations are not
independent must be correct, the question is *why*.

If your wallpaper didn't behave properly, I'd have more confidence I knew
what was going on. But since it changes correctly, I can merely say, "I'm
not sure." Here's a couple things I'd check, though. I suspect the first
three, below, will be normal and not the source of your problem, but they're
easy to check so it's worth ruling them out first.

First, check each boot.ini file. There should be one in each partition, and
each should point to a different ARCpath (IOW, one might say
"...partition(1)..." and the other should be "...partition(2)..." or
something else.

Are you hiding the primary partitions from each other? That would be in the
BM configuration for each boot item. I believe that BM does this by
default, hiding both the FAT and alternate XP partitions under each boot
item.

When you boot each XP, check your disk in the Computer Management service.
The FAT and alternate partitions should show as "Healthy (Unknown
Partition)" with no drive letters. The "system drive" under each boot
should be different and labeled "C:". If you've got them named "TEST" and
"PROD", it should be easy to track which is which. Remember that Comp.
Mgmt. lists partitions in alphabetical order, not in physical order. The
bar graph below the list, though, shows physical order. Click on each entry
in the top list and notice which box on the graph below turns "shaded".

Finally, it's possible the partition signatures in the registry are
scrambled, though I'd anticipate this only in the cloned XP (TEST), not the
original (PROD). (You said you noticed the crossover when installing to
TEST, as I might expect, but I'm guessing there wouldn't be any crossover
from PROD installs showing up on TEST.) To fix the partition signatures in
TEST's registry, boot into TEST and run regedit. Navigate to the key
[HKLM\System\MountedDevices]. Delete all entries under this key except for
the default entry. (There should be two types of entries: some start with
"\??\Volume{...}" and the others start with "\DosDevices\...", but delete
both types.) Now shutdown and reboot into TEST, and XP should regenerate
the partition signature table, with the system partition assigned first
(C. Hopefully, this will fix any registry scrambling. It won't resolve
the conflicts from that problem program on TEST, but I think it should
prevent the conflict from bleeding over into the PROD partition.

Hope this helps.

 

[I'm Dan]

As I didn't change the boot.ini file after cloning, the boot.ini
file for TEST contains the same partition number as PROD
namely 1. According to the MAP command on the recovery
console, the PROD partition is number 1 and TEST is
number 2. I believed that there is no need to change
boot.ini as the other primary(alternate) partition is hidden
by bootmagic/bootmanager, therefore there would be no
way that files of the other partition could be accessed.
What actions are now probably necessary to get a clean
environment ?

Is there any documentation (cookbook) on cloning
XP-partitions available ?

Okay, there's a clear problem. The ARCpaths have to be different.

A "hidden partition" is something of a misnomer; a more appropriate term is
"disguised partition". Each entry in the partition table is a pointer to
the physical partition elsewhere on the disk. Each entry includes a
"partition type" byte to specify whether the partition it points to is FAT,
FAT32, NTFS, linux ext2, et al. What BootMagic (and many other similar
utilities) does is alter the "type" byte to something Windows does not
understand. The rest of the entry in the partition table remains intact so
that disk utilities (as well as Windows) don't get confused - IOW, they're
allowed to know there's a partition there, but don't understand what kind it
is and (hopefully) won't touch it. Thus, it's disguised, not really hidden.

The ARCpath in boot.ini refers to the sequence of partitions in the
partition table - not the actual partitions themselves, and not just the
partitions Windows understands. The boot.ini in your TEST partition has to
be changed to tell Windows to boot from itself - that is, the partition
listed second in the partition table. As it is, TEST is now telling XP to
boot from the partition listed first in the partition table, even though
that partition is disguised and not given a drive letter. That's clearly
going to cause problems.

There are a lot of "cookbooks" on cloning on the internet (just do a google
search on "multiboot"), but some aren't particularly accurate and many rely
on you using the same tools the author used and having the same goals as the
author. If your goals are slightly different from the author's (such as,
you want 1 HD instead of 2, or you want to install in a different order,
different sequence, different OS's, different boot manager, etc.), then you
have to try and read between the lines. That's hard to do if the author
doesn't explain what's going on and essentially just says, "don't ask why,
just do it this way." Even the Microsoft site is guilty of this; for
example, the MS site will falsely tell you there is no way to dualboot Win98
with WinME. To help fill this knowledge gap, my webpage at
www.goodells.net/multiboot is oriented toward the "why" rather than the
"how". I also include several links to info elsewhere on the internet that
I consider reliable or useful. It requires a certain amount of technical
background to get through, but perhaps you may find it helpful.