System hangs booting from cloned disk

[Guest]

I have a somewhat strange setup and am finding it difficult to clone.

I had Windows 98 and added Windows XP and Linux so now I have

disk 1:

----------------------------------------------------------------
| C: WIN98 BOOT (FAT32)| J: XPHOME BOOT (NTFS) | K: DATA3 (NTFS) |
| PRIMARY PARTITION | LOGICAL PARTITION | LOGICAL PARTITION |
----------------------------------------------------------------

disk 2:

-------------------------------------------------------
| LINUX BOOT | D: DATA (NTFS) | LINUX SWAP | LINUX ROOT |
| PHYS PARTN | PHYS PARTN | PHYS PARTN | PHYS PARTN |
-------------------------------------------------------

disk 3:

-----------------
| E: DATA2 (NTFS) |
| PHYS PARTN |
-----------------

My main drive (disk1) is throwing up some errors every now and again so I
got a new drive (same size 120GB) and wanted to copy the data. I have
successfully copied the C: partition but am having problems copying J:. I
have tried doing a restore to an NTFS formatted partition from my Maxtor
Onetouch II backups (files only), I have booted to Linux (Mandrake 9.0) and
done a dd and I have bought Ghost 9.0 and copied the partition whilst booted
into XP (Ghost 9.0 apparently supports copying the boot partition for XP). It
all seems to work until I try to boot from the new drive. It seems to start
up and then just hangs at the screen saying that Windows is starting (just
before the login prompt/screen appears).

The problem seems to be that I cannot assign the drive letter J: to the
newly copied partition and so when it starts it tries to assign it a new
letter (which isn't J the boot process then just halts at that screen.

I've tried booting in safe mode (which I would think avoids using drive
letters for the important stuff) but it just hangs. I'm anxious to complete
the transfer before my main drive dies.

I have also installed XP on another disk and then went in and change the
drive letter for the normal XP boot partition.That doesn't help (I presume
because the drive letter is associated with the XP installation rather than
the partition itself)

Any ideas?

L

 

[Hans-Georg Michna]

It all seems to work until I try to boot from the new drive. It seems to start
up and then just hangs at the screen saying that Windows is starting (just
before the login prompt/screen appears).

The problem seems to be that I cannot assign the drive letter J: to the
newly copied partition and so when it starts it tries to assign it a new
letter (which isn't J the boot process then just halts at that screen.

Leonov,

maybe, maybe not.

I've tried booting in safe mode (which I would think avoids using drive
letters for the important stuff) but it just hangs. I'm anxious to complete
the transfer before my main drive dies.

I have also installed XP on another disk and then went in and change the
drive letter for the normal XP boot partition.That doesn't help (I presume
because the drive letter is associated with the XP installation rather than
the partition itself)

This is correct. You can change the drive assignments in the
registry, by loading the SYSTEM hive into REGEDT32.EXE, for
example into HKEY_USERS, then changing the entries in
MountedDevices.

But it could be something else, like an old BIOS unable to boot
from a 120 MB partition. In that case you just make a very small
(20 MB, for example), additional partition and boot from that by
putting the few boot files and a boot record there.

Some background information can be found at
http://www.michna.com/kb/WxMove.htm .

Hans-Georg

 

[Walter Clayton]

This is not going to be easy.

I know what your problem is, and it's why I avoid using NT kernel
multibooting.

First the problem. Unless you're using a tool that copies volids unchanged,
the volumes are being reenumerated. The"J" partition is being enumerated as
"F" as near I can tell, and that due to the fact that I don't know what kind
of removable media you have mounted. As you surmised, this is problematic
and centers around the mounteddevices key in the registry. Hacking this is
possible, but it's a challenge.

What you can try, is to disconnect all but the problem drive and the new
drive and use the HD vendor supplied disk imaging tools. If that fails, then
as Hans-Georg mentioned, you're going to have hack the mounteddevices key
which is far less than fun.