Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 19:48:25 -0800 (PST) From: Matt Hanson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [LIB] Question on W2000 & partitioning
Well, I've ended up with W2000 on the 1st primary partition, W98 on a 1GB primary partition after it, and the remainder of the drive space on logical drives. I had to install EZ-Drive in order to get Partition Magic and PTBoot to even think about installing. I thought PTBoot would be a more direct, simple way of going over BootMagic. But it's being finicky. Ironcially, they wouldn't install without EZ-Drive, but PTBoot doesn't see the drives correctly without EZ-Drive removed! It sees the W98 primary drive as well as all logical drives as being formatted 'EZ-Drive', and not 'FAT32' until I uninstall EZ-Drive. But now I discover that many of the 20GB worth of MP3s I had to restore from backed up files last week are corrupted. After Partition Magic crashed on the Lib converting the >8GB primary partition to a logical one last week, I had to put the HDD in the desktop, create a >8GB logical partition there, and copy back my MP3s. But I noticed that some MP3s didn't play, so I ran Scandisk on the drive and discovered that a huge number of MP3s were damaged copying them over. With so many MP3s, it was easier to just delete them all, put the HDD in the desktop again, and copy them all over again rather than hunting for the damaged files individually. But still, the process resulted in a large number of corrupted MP3s. I thought maybe XP on the desktop may have been involved, as it wants to write partition info to each new HDD it discovers when it boots. So I repeated the process, only booting the desktop to W98 instead, and copying the MP3s from there. But the process still resulted in a large number of corrupted files. So I'm now in the process of copying the MP3s over to the Libretto via a network connection in small groups, and running Scandisk on the Libretto to confirm they're not corrupted. This is taking forever at 500KB/sec. Wish I knew what the problem was when copying them in the desktop directly. Philip Nienhuis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > All windows versions I know of can run perfectly from any logical > partition. But... they all need to *boot* from a primary partition. > And that's where you must look out - Win9x/ME can't boot from a > primary NTFS partition, it must a FAT type -something to keep in > mind if multibooting W98 & W2K. (BTW such a primary partion can be > very small, 7.8 MB (i.e. just one cylinder) should do to keep all > boot files for Win2K + Win9x.) I have Win2K on a primary (+ another > IE-free on a logical >8GB) and Win98 on a logical <8GB. What are you using as a boot manager Philip... something in W2000? > As for a restore, I doubt whether you can simply restore a Win2K > from one partition to another one. It is not quite enough that the > drive letters are the same (as the registry is pervaded by it), but > you must also restore its boot manager + boot files on C:, > irrespective of where Win2K is going to end up. The entries in > c:\boot.ini are not drive letters but refer to partition > enumeration, and must match the physical partition layout. Okay... so tell me if you think this will work: Drive 0: 3GB FAT32 Primary [W2000] Drive 1: 1.5GB FAT32 [Hidden] Primary [W2000] Drive 2: 1GB FAT32 [Hidden] Primary [W98] Drive 3: 2.5GB FAT32 Logical [Data] Drive 4: 70MB FAT32 Logical [Libretto hibernation] Drive 5: 30GB FAT32 Logical [Data] If I can get BootMagic to install on the existing 1st FAT32 W2000 partition, it should hide the two partitions following it that have bootable OSs. When I 1st installed 2000, I made an image of that 1st partition when the drive was set up like this: Drive 0: 3GB FAT32 Primary [W2000] Drive 1: 2.5GB FAT32 Primary [Data] Drive 2: 70MB FAT32 Primary [Libretto hibernation] Drive 3: 30GB FAT32 Primary [Data] I would think that if I restore the W2000 image to Drive 1 as in the 1st example of partitions above, and have BootMagic hide Drive 0 and drive 2 when running the restored image from Drive 1, I would think the restored copy of W2000 shouldn't have any problems. > In addition, Win2K uses Logical Volume Management, which is an > abstraction of Win9x's partitions and drive letters, and a > restored Win2K might complain bitterly about missing drive letters, > missing paging files, and GUIDs (=volume indicators which are on > cyl. 0 track 0 somewhere in an undocumented place beyond the MBR). > You also run the risk of seeing it log in and log out immediately > again, a consequence of Win2K not being able to find userinit.exe, > which in turn is a consequence of not finding its mount points. I'd think the approach I suggested above would get around those problems... no? > Maybe you are lucky, you can try to restore to a partition with > the same drive letter and then do a FDSISK/ MBR from DOS (yes DOS) > - this will reinit the LVM info (don't forget the boot stuff on > c:\). Oh man... running FDSISK/ MBR on a Libretto with or without EZ-Drive loaded always scares me. The world of MBRs, how many backup copies of them PM, EZ-Drive and who knows what else creates, has caused me a world of problems in the past. Jim Drouillard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Normally Win98 will run on any partition except that > io.sys, msdos.sys, autoexec.bat, config.sys, etc. must > be on first partition of first hard drive. If Win2k > is installed then boot.ini is used to select which OS > to run. You guys are talking about a W2000 boot manager. I'm lost there. Does W2000 have a "Bootmagic/lilo/System Commander" like function that can be used to boot multiple OSs on a number of partitions? This is all new to me. >If Win98 is selected then msdos.sys tells it > where to look for the rest of the OS. Not sure if > Win2k bootloader will allow you to put entire Win98 on > a logical partition but it should allow you to have > multiple installs of Win2k on different partitions > (also selected on boot from the options in boot.ini). Well, as Philip outlined above, W2000 gets really finicky about how those partitions are set up. Last summer I had to go through all kinds of gymnastics to get a 2nd hard drive to multi-boot W2000 from the promary HDD with WinME installed on it. Matt __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
