XP Home: boot hangs at welcome screen after cloning

[Th. Hitzemann]

Hi there,

using a bootmanager, I can make visible different combinations of
(primary) partitions on my master HDD1 (so-called configurations):

conf1: part1 as C:
part2 as D:

conf2: part1 invisible ("not allocated")
part2 as C:

Being in conf1, I have cloned C: to D: (with ghost); as ghost modifies
boot.ini, I copied it over again afterwards. Chkdsk shows all fine on
D:.

Then when I boot conf2 (no matter if normal or save), I only can reach
the 2nd screen (welcome) just before logon or the desktop should
normally appear. When I compare the bootlogs, I can see that bootup is
about 3/4 complete. Then machine hangs (mouse moveable, but no keys
accepted, even Alt-Ctrl-Del).

I have noted that surprisingly the swap file (pagefile.sys) gets
re-allocated on another attached HDD2 (slave), so maybe the problem is
related to the XP disk manager getting confused??? If so, how can I
realign my disks when booting conf2 from CD (recovery console)???

Any ideas are very welcome, TIA.

THn

 

[Ken]

I would do it all over, putting everything exactly where
I wanted them the first time (ref: cloned c: to d
Third party software is problematic enough. The programs
aren't perfect and what your asking it to do is very
complicated to begin with. If your operating system is a
Ghost image from the company you bought your PC from,
that also makes it less flexible in my experience.
Operating systems bought seperately are easier to modify
and play with. Try doing what you want with just your
boot manager and forget about ghost for now. Partition
Magic is very good with partitioning on the fly.

 

[I'm Dan]

using a bootmanager, I can make visible different combinations of
(primary) partitions on my master HDD1 (so-called configurations):

conf1: part1 as C:
part2 as D:

conf2: part1 invisible ("not allocated")
part2 as C:

Being in conf1, I have cloned C: to D: (with ghost); as ghost
modifies boot.ini, I copied it over again afterwards. Chkdsk
shows all fine on D:.

Then when I boot conf2 (no matter if normal or save), I only
can reach the 2nd screen (welcome) just before logon ...

You left out some vital information -- what boot manager are you using?
Additionally, we'll need to know what your partition table shows and
what your part2 boot.ini shows.

To capture partition table info, use partinfo.exe. PowerQuest has their
own version buried on the CD somewhere, or if you're not using PQ then
download TeraByte Unlimited's version free from www.bootitng.com --
different programs from different companies, but they do the same thing.
(Note: we only need the partition table info at the top of the printout,
not all the boot sectors info.)

 

[Th. Hitzemann]

Thanks a lot for the first reactions / questions / infos.

Which OS? As mentioned in the title, I'm on XP Home Edition (OEM)
Which BootManager? http://www.star-tools.com/bootstar/english/

This S/W installs in the MBR and maps selected partitions to the
partition table within the MBR (depending on the chosen
"configuration"), so max. 4 partitions can be visible at any one time;
the sorting order of the partitions can be defined, so you could
imagine to have a

conf3: part2 as C:
part1 as D:

I know that the assignment of drive letters to partitions is performed
by XP's disk manager, but I usually have the "logical"
Win9x-compatible assignmnents (1st is C:, 2nd is D: and so on). And
playing around with the mappings (show/hide partitions, change sorting
order) didn't help.

Addtl. info: The filesystem is NTFS; with FAT32 I get the same result.

Thanks again.

THn

 

[I'm Dan]

Which BootManager? http://www.star-tools.com/bootstar/english/

This S/W installs in the MBR and maps selected partitions to the
partition table within the MBR (depending on the chosen
"configuration"), so max. 4 partitions can be visible at any one time;
the sorting order of the partitions can be defined ...
...(snipped)...

Okay, that's what I was looking for. Make sure that the order of the
partitions is the same as what your boot.ini wants to see. I'll assume
that in your conf1 XP1 is on part1, part1 is listed first in the
partition table, and boot.ini references it as "...partition(1)...". If
you copied boot.ini over to part2, then it still says
"...partition(1)...", which means that under conf2 you want part2 to be
listed first in the partition table. It wasn't clear what you meant
earlier by 'part1 invisible ("not allocated")', but I'm guessing you
meant that part2 is listed first and part1 isn't even listed in the
partition table when XP2 is booted. That should work. If you're saying
part1 is listed but marked 'invisible', then that's a different matter.

If you've confirmed that boot.ini is pointing to the right partition (in
the right slot in the partition table) and XP2 is still not booting,
then the next thing to check is partition signatures. If you previously
booted XP1 with both partitions visible (did you run Ghost from within
XP instead of from floppies?), then this problem can occur. Without
getting into details (which you can find on my webpage at
www.goodells.net/multiboot), the solution is to make XP forget the
previous drive letter assignments and regenerate them. A simple way to
do that is to boot from a Win98 boot floppy and execute "fdisk /mbr".
This will disable your boot manager, so you'll need to then
restore/reactivate your boot manager. Note this has to be a Win98 boot
disk (see www.bootdisk.com if you don't have one) -- booting the XP
recovery console and running the similar "fixmbr" isn't sufficient.
Then boot into XP2 and see if it works.

 

[Th. Hitzemann]

Hi DAN,

thanks and you're on the right track.

I would only like to mention that the bootmanager hides/unhides
partitions and in conf2 only part2 is visible to XP; the rest of the
drive appears as unallocated and XP is not aware of any other
"virtual" partitions that are known only to the bootmanager.

It is also important to mention that boot.ini on part1 is like this:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="BlaBla" /fastdetect

After cloning to D:, the copied boot.ini is modified by ghost to
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="BlaBla" /fastdetect
which is logical because ghost thinks that both partitions will be
visible the same way when I boot the clone; but when I do, I get stuck
immediately because there is no partition(2) in conf2 and XP doesn't
find anything; that's why I have to copy boot.ini after cloning in
order to have it identical. Now I can at least start to boot as
described in the beginning.

I have meanwhile installed Recovery Console on part1 and repeated the
cloning, which enabled me to also run Recovery Console when booting
conf2. I found out that part2 is not mapped to "C:" as I expected but
is maintained as "D:" (thank you, XP). I guess that causes the trouble
later in the bootup process, because some drivers or programs may not
be smart enough to work with relative paths ("%systemroot%) but with
absolute ones ("C:\WINDOWS"), and as there is no "C:" this time they
screw up.

So what I will have to do is either
- correct the mapping of partitions to drive letters after booting the
Recovery Console in conf2 (map command - but seems to be display-only)
- try to do that natively within the registry of part2 while being in
conf1 ("remote" regedit if that exists)
- have some tool to modify the registry from batch and/or recovery
console

Any ideas?

CU,

THn

 

[I'm Dan]

...(snipped)...
I have meanwhile installed Recovery Console on part1 and repeated
the cloning, which enabled me to also run Recovery Console when
booting conf2. I found out that part2 is not mapped to "C:" as I
expected but is maintained as "D:" (thank you, XP). I guess that
causes the trouble later in the bootup process, because some drivers
or programs may not be smart enough to work with relative paths
("%systemroot%) but with absolute ones ("C:\WINDOWS"), and
as there is no "C:" this time they screw up.
...(snipped)...

Okay, you did all the right stuff with boot.ini and we're beyond that
issue (so I've snipped that discussion from above). As I said, the next
possibility to check would be partition signatures, and indeed you have
just established that is exactly the problem. If you want to understand
why this occurs, read my webpage (reference above), specifically the
Notes page. There are several ways to fix this -- the easiest is to use
the Win98 boot disk as I outlined above. If you'd rather not
disable/restore your boot manager, then another alternative is to delete
the [MountedDevices] registry key -- see my webpage for details.

 

[Th. Hitzemann]

Hi Dan,

yeah, that's what I'm gonna try (didn't have a chance last night);
found a similar hint (point 6) in the following tutorial:
http://www.praezisa-gotha.de/clonexp.htm
(sorry, it's in german).

Thanks a lot for your helping hand.

THn