Brian wrote on Apr 4^th, 2010 at 3:31pm:

Actually, that's perfect for my needs!  And how I prefer to maintain my backups, except in some rather specific occasions, and for those...

Brian wrote on Apr 4^th, 2010 at 3:31pm:

Brian wrote on Apr 3^rd, 2010 at 12:36pm:

Okay, running each partition now.  Starting the first one. 

I tell ya, the more I use it, the more I love this app, Brian.

Brian wrote on Apr 4^th, 2010 at 3:36pm:

Can't triumphantly cross the finish line unless you run the entire race.



And thank YOU, sir - for walking me through this all...

Moving and renaming the .img files is fine. Will you eventually have your backups on another HD? Just in case your current HD fails?

Wow, this thread has doubled in size since I last checked it.  Internet connectivity is infrequent for me this week--it's Spring Break week here, and I'm away in Oregon for several days.  But to tie up a few loose ends . . .


Way back in reply #88, NightOwl wrote:

"Can this be done from a booted Bart PE disc?  In other words (I guess), are there other tools to *remotely edit the XP registry*?"

Yes.  I haven't tried it that way myself, but any way you can get to regedit is sufficient.

If you're not multibooting, you can also remove the HDD, put it in an external case, and edit it from another working system.

"can you be booted to your WinXP and use the WinXP *regedit* program to edit the Win7 registry in a similar fashion?"

Yes.

"I played around with my *regedit* [...] and I found that the *Load Hive* will also be available if you have selected *HKEY_USERS*"

That's correct, but I didn't mention it (in reply #84) because it's not relevant to the task.  The hive you are editing isn't of consequence to the active OS (the one you're editing from), so it doesn't matter under which branch you temporarily put it.

"How do you know you are selecting the correct drive to change?  If you have used the system for awhile, isn't it likely that C:\ will have been re-assigned to some other device as the first available drive letter?"

I was addressing bill's particular situation, in which he knew XP had been on E:, needed to stay E:, and he knew there was no C:.  If it failed to boot because it reassigned drive letters, chances are almost certainly E: would have changed to C:.

FTR, a footnote here is XP needs to have gone through the rediscovery process.  If you are restoring the image to a different location, you might predict XP will end up reassigning E:, but you can't skip ahead--you still have to let it try to boot first.  You can't edit the registry value until XP has given you something to edit.  You see all that stuff following the "\DosDevices\C:" name in the registry?  You don't have that until XP has gone through the discovery process.  Let XP derive that part first, then afterward change the name of the registry value.

(BTW: this rediscovery process will generate a "Found new hardware" balloon in XP.)

"Actually, in a more complex setup, another partition may already be *DosDevices\E:*--so, I presume you would have to change that as well--so it does not conflict with your editing of the incorrect OS *DosDevices* back to E:\!"

Correct.  Suppose you had an OS, DVD, and data partition that had been E:, D:, and G:, respectively.  If everything got reassigned, the data partition would become E:.  In that case, you'd be doing two edits--one to change "\DosDevices\E:" to G:, and one to change C: to E:.  (Note XP should recognize the DVD is the same by its GUID, so it would keep D: as its drive letter.)

"The above registry *DosDevices* are so cryptic--don't know how one can be comfortable in selecting the correct one to edit!"

Well, that's part of why this task shouldn't be routinely recommended for the common user.

But for the techie, it's not really that hard.  For background, see my page on how XP remembers drive letters.

In my illustration in reply 84, I was aware beforehand that the XP disk had a DiskID of "8888-8888".  There was only one partition on the HDD, so there should be only one "88 88 88 88" DosDevices entry.

If there had been more than one partition on the HDD, I could have gone further.  I knew the XP partition started at LBA 63, so double that and convert to hex, and I could have predicted the DosDevices string should start with "88 88 88 88 00 7E 00 00 00".

Aside: On my own systems I have a habit of manually setting the DiskID to something useful to help me keep track of which HDD belongs where.  I choose some four-character ascii string that is meaningful, such as "6823" for my daughter's HP-DV6823 or "R-40" for my IBM R40 laptop.  I set this as the DiskID with a disk editor (ala, de.exe from DOS or SecEdit from Windows).  Either of those utilities let me enter ascii (eg, "R-40") in the right pane and it automatically shows up as hex ("52 3D 34 30") in the left pane.

Brian wrote on Apr 4^th, 2010 at 4:14pm:

How do I run from Windows?

Sweeeeeet!!!!!

Gold star for you!  :)

Dan Goodell wrote on Apr 4^th, 2010 at 4:13pm:

Dan, I like to do this in BING from the View MBR, Edit Sig choice.

Sure is a lot of fun.