Re: FIXMBR redux
From: William B. Lurie (billurie_at_nospam.org)
Date: 06/02/04
- Next message: Tom Porterfield: "Re: Programming point of view.."
- Previous message: Will Denny: "Re: Help and support"
- In reply to: *Vanguard*: "Re: FIXMBR redux"
- Next in thread: Sharon F: "Re: FIXMBR redux"
- Reply: Sharon F: "Re: FIXMBR redux"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ]
Date: Wed, 02 Jun 2004 07:40:05 -0400
*Vanguard* wrote:
> William B. Lurie said in news:40BCF5C8.90002@nospam.org:
>
>>Sharon F wrote:
>>
>>>On Tue, 01 Jun 2004 06:50:13 -0400, William B. Lurie wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>I think this leads back to my discussions with, and
>>>>advice from, Michael Solomon a while back.......
>>>>
>>>>Since 'solving' the problems of creating a drive image
>>>>of my master hard drive with Drive Image 7, and creating
>>>>a clone of that drive with its PowerQuest Recovery
>>>>Environment software, I've been living is a fool's
>>>>paradise. I discovered this when I went to create the
>>>>monthly Drive Image yesterday, and create the clone on
>>>>a newly purchased hard drive.
>>>>
>>>>I've been living with my Master drive booting to a
>>>>choice between normal start-up and Recovery Console,
>>>>a minor annoyance because after a ten-second countdown
>>>>it goes to normal boot, automatically. No problem there.
>>>>
>>>>I believe that the main part of the problem is now that
>>>>the new exact clone does not have Master Boot Record
>>>>correct, because the 'Normal Boot' path leads to the
>>>>choices of Safe Mode or Normal etcetera, and no choice
>>>>gets to anything other than a repeat of that set of
>>>>choices. If I select Recovery Console, I get a short
>>>>DOS-type message saying that file 'xxxxx.dll' is missing,
>>>>and to reload it somehow from somewhere. I suspect that
>>>>more than one '.dll' file will be in the list of what it
>>>>needs. I tried selecting Recovery Console, hoping that I
>>>>could somehow do a FIXMBR there, but I can't get to RC.
>>>>
>>>>Incidentally, in running Drive Image, I've repeated the
>>>>whole image-and-recreate process, with and without the
>>>>'keep the MBR' option, with no apparent difference in
>>>>results. I've tried to solve the problem without going to
>>>>you experts, but what I've considered all logical paths
>>>>haven't solved it.
>>>>
>>>> William B. Lurie
>>>
>>>
>>>Something about your saga keeps nagging at the back of my mind but I
>>>can't put my finger on it.
>>>
>>>When you create an exact image to second drive, the target purpose
>>>is to be able to yank a non-functioning drive and drop the imaged
>>>drive into place. (A restorable image is something different. It's
>>>usually compressed and can be restored to any drive that is large
>>>enough to hold the uncompressed image.)
>>>
>>>Have you tried booting with only the imaged drive placed as master
>>>on the main controller? At this point, those recovery console fix it
>>>thingies should be able to help with rebuilding the bootconfig and
>>>boot record. Or, if PM will restore it, give that a try.
>>>
>>>Or are you trying to maintain two bootable drives and trying to
>>>switch between two separate XP installations? If this is what you're
>>>doing and XP's boot manager is failing to handle this, you might
>>>want to try a third party boot manager.
>>>
>>>I no longer use Drive Image, stopped with Drive Image 6. The newer
>>>version may offer alternatives that I'm not aware of - meaning that
>>>the above may not apply.
>>>
>>>For a drive to boot, there are some requirements. There has to be an
>>>active partition, for one. On that partition the boot records and
>>>files have to be available to get past the initial boot strap and
>>>let it move on to the actual loading of the operating system.
>>>
>>>I don't know the answer to your problem, William. Just typing some
>>>thoughts "out loud" that may or may not help. It sounds like you're
>>>so close to getting this to work but a step is missing. Just can't
>>>put my finger on which step and since I don't use Drive Image can't
>>>give specific advice.
>>>
>>
>>Thank you, Sharon. You speak the truth, of course, and I'll simplify
>>your thinking by making it clear that when I've spoken about what
>>I do with the 'cloned' hard drive, I mean that I physically shut
>>the system down, and pull out the Master, and insert the Clone
>>exactly in its place, electrically and physically. There should
>>be no conflict there. BTW, D-I 7 is, I believe, the only version
>>for XP. The D-I 2002/6 version is expressly not for XP.
>>
>>Yes, the drive onto which I Recover the Image is Active and Primary.
>>It is brand new and not even partitioned.
>>
>>As an aside, and not pertinent here, I have another completely
>>separate drive with WIN ME on it, and I am able, through a
>>simple manipulation of the BIOS, to boot to HDD-0 (these XP
>>alternates) or to HDD-1 (the ME), should I care to go that route.
>>
>>I think the next step will be for you, or Michael, to instruct me how
>>to deactivate the RC altogether, after which I will first test my
>>Master Drive (and pray that it will still work), and then repeat
>>the D-I Image creation followed by trying to create the clone from it.
>>W B L
>
>
> Haven't had time to read everything (and still don't) but wanted to
> inject a couple of points.
>
> One,
>
> A disk image is a set of files used to restore to the same or other
> partition or drive. The disk image fileset is not itself usable to boot
> from the partition where that fileset was stored. A *cloned* drive is
> completely different. DriveImage will do both. You can have it create
> a fileset containing a logical description of the physical definition of
> a partition, or you can have it clone a drive (via "Copy Drives"
> function).
>
> A cloned disk can be swapped in for the source drive to look and behave
> just like the source drive as long as you connect it the same way (as
> you mention by moving it to the same port in the same physical scan
> order). To a degree, a cloned drive is something like a one-shot
> mirrored drive: the target disk is an exact copy of the source disk but
> only at the time the target disk got cloned. A disk image fileset
> cannot be used by itself to bring up a system but instead requires
> running the imaging program to restore that image.
>
> Two,
>
> As far as the boot menu asking whether to select Windows XP or Recovery
> Console, that has nothing to do with the boot sequence for starting the
> operating system. The BIOS loads the bootstrap program from the first
> 460 bytes of sector 0 (MBR) of the first physically scanned hard disk
> which then runs and loads the boot sector of the primary partition
> marked as active which then starts the load of the operating system
> which then reads (in the case of NT-based Windows) boot.ini to see which
> parallel installed operating system to load, Windows XP or the Recovery
> Console. The OS has already loaded its initial loader program and is
> running and the boot process (from BIOS and hardware) is over.
>
> You could uninstall the Recovery Console if you don't want to get the
> menu to choose. Or you could shorten the menu timer to expire quicker.
> Or you could edit boot.ini to remove the entry defining where to find
> the Recovery Console interface (but that won't eliminate the Recovery
> Console's files).
>
Thank you very much, Vang, for taking the time to enumerate
those facts explicitly. They make sense and I agree but am
unable to do what I'd like to try. For one thing, I'd like
to take Recovery Console out of the picture, and not by
reducing its delay time to zero, but just remove that option.
If any of the MVPs told me how to do that, I missed it.
For another thing, your interpretations of the *image* of a
drive, and a *copy* of a drive, make sense but are different
from what some MVPs led me to believe. Of course Drive Image 7
creates a file called an *image* which is a string of code
which its Restore software will convert back to something
like the original hard drive's code, but which itself is not
executable code. To me a *copy* of every bit and byte of
the code on the original source, an identical copy,
indistinguishable from the original, should be called a copy.
I was led to believe that that is not what I want.
It would be nice if it were possible to communicate with the
perpetrators of Drive Image 7 (PowerQuest, now Symantec) but
they have buried their tech support so deep that it just
isn't practical to try to get them to sort it out. And
the record speaks for itself with Microsoft. Well, I don't
know where to go from here. And thanks again.
--
William B. Lurie
- Next message: Tom Porterfield: "Re: Programming point of view.."
- Previous message: Will Denny: "Re: Help and support"
- In reply to: *Vanguard*: "Re: FIXMBR redux"
- Next in thread: Sharon F: "Re: FIXMBR redux"
- Reply: Sharon F: "Re: FIXMBR redux"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ]
Relevant Pages
|
|
