A program to save and restore boot configuration

[rimmi2002]

Hi I need to do some work with my Windows XP platform where I will be installing other operatings systems on different partitions of the same HD. Last time I did this I messed things up make the wrong partition active and had to recover the HD information and resintall everything.

I was wondering if there is a program out there that can save a system's boot configuration and restore it if things go wrong. Thanks.

 

[Blazer]

with another hard drive you could use it and choose what hd to boot in the bios, or use a boot manager, actually is not that hard to fix boot issues and doesnt require a reload.

 

[yinan]

Do what you need to do in a virtual machine? Snapshots make this real easy.

 

[rimmi2002]

I tried making boot recovery disks using Norton Partition magic, but that things will only make floppies. Any ways I can get the files out and make a bootable CD out of them. Are there any programs out there that will emulate a floppy drive so the files can be copies to a virtual floppy which I can later take and move to a CD.

I don't like using Virtual machines..I just want two isolated installs on two different paritiotions that can be managed easily with a bootloader. If some errors happens, I want to be able to recover my previous boot state...so I don't get the No NTDLR error like last time.

 

[yinan]

What do you not like about virtual machines? They make it easy to avoid scrweing up your real machine. If you dont like what you do in a VM just delete it. They eliminate all of the errors you are afraid of.

 

[heymrdj]

I too have worried about this. Then I found VMWare Server is free. Since version 1.01, I have not looked back to dual booting on serious systems. (I do it for my experimental server cause nothing there matters.).

My brother uses Microsoft Virtual PC, and it seems pretty good. I'd use it if I didn't need to run Debian, Ubuntu, and OpenSUSE.