Re: El-Torito and HD partitions

From: Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\) (sbrcin_at_ptt.yu)
Date: 09/15/04 

Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 00:20:11 +0200

Konstantin,

You believe to everything that ms writes? :-)
And this doc is not even for Win XP.

I don't remember that I saw valid document on this topic, but simple experiment is always the best way to see the real behavior.

In our case we have scenario similar to one that I know that work.

Test hardware: 2 HDD's
First have XP.
Second have pre FBA XPe .

We swap in BIOS HDD boot order.
And XPe partition will be given volume letter C: before FBA starts.
Drivers load order is independed of BIOS settings, so this probably mean that link you provided is not accurate for Win XP.

What do you think?

Regards,
Slobodan

"KM" <konstmor@nospam_yahoo.com> wrote in message news:OVA7US2mEHA.3480@TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl...
> Slobodan,
>
> Well... You are absolutely right about the disk.sys but (there is always some but's :-) ) according to the
> http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;93373:
> This process is repeated for all hard drives in the system. Please note that if you have multiple controllers in your system,
> the drive letter ordering is based on the order in which the device drivers are loaded by Windows NT.
>
> I assume CD-ROM could sit on a different controller (it is often the case). Would it be primary controller? or secondary? I don't
> know. But if it is the secondary one and there is a HDD on primary - HDD would probably take C:\.
>
> Again.. it is up to an experiment.
>
> --
> Regards,
> KM, BSquare Corp.
>
>
> > Konstantin,
> >
> > > > Even if you remove all entries including C:. It should work since during the boot C: and other letters will be autoassigned.
> > > I never tried this. But I guess it would only work if you don't have a HDD in the target device when you boot from El-Torito
CD,
> > > right?
> > > Otherwise, HDD (active partition) will probably take precedence and would be assigned with C:\.
> >
> > I have not tried it either, but. To higher level drivers el-torito and HDD are same thing, they are both handled trough disk.sys
> > driver.
> > ntldr pass along with ARC names disk id and MBR CRC. Then kernel match this signature with same disk signature calculated trough
> > disk.sys driver.
> >
> > From that point forward (this is time before volume letters are assigned) OS knows what partition belong to the OS itself.
> > So OS partition should take precedence to all other partitions in volume letter assignment algorithm.
> >
> > This mean that it should be C:, right?
> >
> > Best regards,
> > Slobodan
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>

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