bill wrote on Mar 31^st, 2010 at 2:09pm:

Just to explain what's going on there:

Drive letters are always assigned by the OS that is booting, so the letter designations may change depending on which partition or OS you are booting from.  (You're already aware of that from your previous experience of the MS-style multiboot, wherein the letters of the same partitions changed depending on whether you booted into XP, Vista, or Win7.)

It's the same principle here.  When you boot XP, it assigns E: to its own partition.  When you boot from the CD into the recovery console, you are not booting into the XP installation, so it can assign letters any way it sees fit.  And the default way is to assign C: to active primary on the first HDD.

Thus what the installed XP sees as E:\windows and the RC sees as C:\windows are one and the same.


(I see Brian is walking you through how to get the OS's to be seen from each other when you want them to.  So I'll have more to comment on this "E:" business when I get another break later on . . . but gotta run now.)

When you use unlimited primaries in BING, the primaries that aren't in the MBR show as unallocated space in Disk Management. So don't use Disk Management or any partitioning app apart from BING to manage your partitions.

Dan Goodell wrote on Mar 31^st, 2010 at 5:03pm:

Thanks Dan. I suspected that was the case but I wasn't certain.

Bill, just for your information but you can also create and restore partition images from BING. Very easily too. You indicated you like redundancy.

Here is an example of how to remotely edit the XP registry from Win7.

First, you need to make XP visible from Win7.  Brian has already covered how to use BING to do that.  Make sure XP has a drive letter when seen in Win7.  (It happens to be E: in the illustrations here.)

Next, launch regedit in Win7.  In regedit, click once on "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE" to select it, then click 'File', 'Load Hive'.  (Note: 'Load Hive' will be grayed out unless you are on "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE".)

Navigate to the "windows\system32\config" folder on the XP partition, and select the "system" hive.  Click 'Open', and you will be asked to give an alias to the hive.  In this example, I called it "XP-System".

Now you'll have the XP registry's system hive open as a branch called "XP-System" under "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE".

Select the "MountedDevices" key in regedit's left pane, and you'll find the drive letters XP has "remembered" in the right pane.  If XP lost track of E: and failed to finish booting, you'll probably find that it reassigned its own partition as C:.  Right-click "\DosDevices\C:" and rename it to "\DosDevices\E:".

Finally, select "XP-System" In the left pane, then 'File', 'Unload Hive', to disconnect the XP hive.

Now the "new" partition XP had rediscovered as C: will be E: instead when XP boots.

NightOwl wrote on Apr 1^st, 2010 at 12:00pm:

Yes, that's what it did.  While pqboot/pqboot32 were command-line utilities that merely unhid/activated the desired primary partition and hid all the rest, BootMagic had a few more bells and whistles.  It operated from the MBR (ie, pre-boot rather than post-boot), it had a graphical menu for the boot choices, and it could be configured to selectively hide/unhide each non-active primary.

Though it continued to be bundled with PartitionMagic through version 8, BootMagic essentially ceased development after PartitionMagic 5, so obsoleted itself with several limitations that made it unsuitable for continued use.

Unlike most respectable boot managers, it had to be installed inside a Windows installation--which meant Windows was no longer a true standalone partition.  While PM7 gained NTFS compatibility, BM did not and was restricted to FAT16/32.  (How many people nowadays still have a FAT16/32 Windows installation on their system?)

Cloning BM/Windows from one partition to another meant you ended up with two BM installations and conflicts.  Because of that, I switched to System Commander in the late-90's.  But System Commander also had its own limitations, it was expensive, and you had to keep buying a new version every time a new version of Windows came out.  So about 2002 I switched to BING, and have never looked back.  I haven't seen anything as powerful, yet lightweight as BING.

I'm always on the lookout for new alternatives, but if it costs money it can't compete with BING.  If it's free, then it has to compete with XOSL, which is hard to beat (though not as powerful as BING).

Dan Goodell

I'm going to play *devil's advocate*--asking some questions that may impact the information you outlined in your reply #84 above:

Quote:

Can this be done from a booted Bart PE disc?  (In case you do not have a multi-boot setup and can use the *regedit* program on another booted OS of the multi-boot!)

In other words (I guess), are there other tools to *remotely edit the XP registry*?


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(Aside note: 

Quote:

if it were the Win7 that was the non-booting OS with an incorrect drive letter assignment as the cause--can you be booted to your WinXP and use the WinXP *regedit* program to edit the Win7 registry in a similar fashion--i.e. is WinXP's *regedit* forward compatible with Win7's registry?)

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Quote:

Just a note of caution--I played around with my *regedit* just to see how the steps show up--and I found that the *Load Hive* will also be available if you have selected *HKEY_USERS*--so if that's critical--then need to be sure you have selected *HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE*.

Quote:

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?

But, I guess the example is assuming that *all* HDD devices have lost their assigned drive letters and are being *re-assigned* drive letters and because of the sequence drive letters are assigned, it will *always* be C:\--but, what if the system had assigned an optical drive the letter C:\--would that still be remembered as C:\--because its device ID will not have changed (hard wired?)?

Well, I guess one would know that they had been using C:\ for an optical drive letter!  If it's still remembered--at least in the above example the next available drive letter would D:\--unless that was an assigned device that does not get a re-assigned drive letter too!

See my dilemma--if the *simple* set up does not exist--what are the other possibilities--and how do you know which *DosDevices* in the registry is the OS partition for your XP that you want to edit?

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:\!

Seems simple as an example--but, may be really complicated if your setup is *complex*--sure seems a better choice to avoid the Microsoft method of multi-booting--and doing multiple previous installs that ended up making one of your retained OSs having a drive letter assignment other than C:\!!!

I don't know if any of my ranting above makes any sense--being as I'm just trying to imagine what's going on and what one might find in a more complex setup!  The above registry *DosDevices* are so cryptic--don't know how one can be comfortable in selecting the correct one to edit!