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Brian Quote:I'm looking forward to you replicating my steps. It's nice when someone else confirms the steps are reproducible.
Okay, I'm back. Been doing some testing to try to figure out what's what--this has not gone *smoothly*!
Quote:Booted to WinXP and the partition was visible. We must have different hardware.
I'm suspicious that it's *different software* rather than hardware--but, haven't ruled it out as yet!
Quote:Edit.... PM wouldn't let me make a 8 MB FAT partition at the end of the 40 GB HD. But 16 MB was OK.
Weird--my PM had no issue with the 8 MB FAT--what PM are you using--the boot to DOS version, or the Windows version--my version # is 8.02--and I used the DOS version to create the test 8 MB partition.
Quote:Edit again... In BING the FAT partition that PM said was at the end of the HD wasn't. It was immediately after the WinXP partition at about the 5 GB mark on the HD. BING called it a FAT12 partition, Type 1h.
What?! FAT12 is what's on floppy disks! Something tells me BING and PM don't play nice with each other--don't the beginning and ending addresses have to be specific--how can there be a difference?
So, here's what I've found so far:
DOS PM's default behavior is to not allow more than one primary partition to be visible at one time. If I selected the *Advanced* option to *unhide* the DOS partition while the WinXP partition was still visible and active, I got the following warning:
Quote:Making this partition visible may cause drive letters to change. Are you sure you want to unhide this partition?
After clicking *Yes*, then a second warning pops up:
Quote:OS/2 and Windows 95/98 do not support multiple visible primary partitions. If you unhide this partition, and then boot OS/2 or Windows 95/98/ME, data loss can occur. Continue with unhide?
Once it was *unhidden*, now a reboot allowed it to be assigned a DOS drive letter *C:/* (it's the first DOS partition seen). And, once booted to WinXP, it was now visible and in Disk Management, I could manually assign a drive letter to it so I could access it while in WinXP to do file copying, etc.
So, started making the partition changes you had outlined above, but I added to the TeraByte batch files for the *mbr* program a line to hide the OS partition that's not in use--similar to what the PartitionMagic (PM) program does when used to switch which partition is being booted. The PM program *automatically* hides the previously *active* partition when you use the command to change the *active* partition to a different primary partition (I assume because of the above warnings regarding drive letter changes and possible data corruption).
I labeled my WinXP batch file *batch32*:
mbr32.exe 0 0 /h
mbr32.exe 0 1 /u
mbr32.exe 0 1 /a /reboot
Ran this batch file and booted to the DOS partition without any problem.
Then ran the batch file to get back to WinXP (I labeled it *batch16*):
mbr.exe 0 1 /h
mbr.exe 0 0 /u
mbr.exe 0 0 /a /reboot
Rebooted and about 2/3 of the WinXP boot processes occurred and then this:
Quote:Autocheck program not found--skipping autocheck
And then immediately a BSOD!
Well, that wasn't good! What I eventually discovered was the WinXP partition was still *hidden*! (It's amazing that 2/3 of the WinXP boot process occurs without needing to actually access the partition data through *normal* channels before that error occurs!) Once the partition was *unhidden* again, all was back to *normal*.
What I further discovered is that both the *mbr.exe* program for DOS and for Windows (mbr32.exe) do not have the ability to use the *unhide* command! When run in DOS, or for the mbr32.exe program--in a DOS window (command box), you get the following response to *mbr.exe /u*:
Quote: unknown option /u
So, why was I able to initially boot to the DOS partition successfully above? Well, it was *unhidden* while I was working with it in WinXP--so it did not need *unhidding*--but, once it was hidden, then the TeraByte *mbr* program could not *unhide* it, and rebooting to the DOS partition failed!
(As a side note: I'm now getting an error in my Windows PM interface--it fails to launch saying there is a *partition table error*! I don't know if that occurred when I first created the 8 MB partition, or after subsequent manipulations--I have not yet attempted to troubleshoot that--but, I do not get that error when using the DOS version of PM.)
So, I will have to not *hide* anything--because if I do, I can't *unhide* it using TeraByte's *mbr* tool. I may insert the *MasterBootWizard* tool instead.
Just about ready to try the next step using the TeraByte tool to create a boot file--but, out of computing time for now......more to come!