Preserving Dualboot

[Seekermeister]

I'm going to replace a defective SATA HD, that was part of a raid 1 array, and do a clean install of MCE on it. The other drive from the original array is still good, and has both x64 and MCE on it, which I thought about disconnecting during the new install so that it would not be effected. But, that would leave the new install without any boot menu to access the old OSs when reconnected. Therefore, I need to know exactly what I would need to do to produce a new boot menu? I could paste the old boot.ini into the new system and edit it as necessary, but would that do it? What else would I need to do?

 

[AMCRambler]

Copying the os loader lines from the old boot.ini should be all that's required. Raid 1 means your disks were mirrored, so either disk in the array should be bootable when not connected in raid. If you ever looked at the boot.ini you'll see it's a fairly simple thing. I used to dual boot two copies of XP because my parents also used my computer. I was sick and tired of having to deal with the spyware they had contracted when I wanted to use the pc, so I just installed my own copy of Windows and password protected it. OS boot line from my ini looks like this

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

So i think depending how you have the disks plugged in will depend how the bios recognizes them. I'd install the new copy of windows on the new drive, then add in the second disk and that would be disk(1) with partitions 1 and 2. Then you just give it the root directory for the OS at the end there and the name you want to show up in the menu for it in quotes. Not sure what the multi parameter does but you could probably google that easy enough and find out.

EDIT: Multi parameter sets which disk controller the disk is attached to. If you've got a raid card with the devices plugged into that, that would probably end up being multi(1) then. I'm sure the onboard controller would get multi(0) assigned to it.

 

[Seekermeister]

If that is all that there is, I can probably handle it. But, I'm not sure about what you mean when you say which disk controller, because I only have one, controlling two SATA ports.

EDIT: Because of incompatability of the two drives, I can't use raid, and they will operate independently. I think that I understand the other portions of the ini, but does "rdisk" mean raid? If so, should that be changed?

 

[AMCRambler]

I think I got things confused back there.Ok the sata controller is the only controller, so multi is always gonna be 0 and disk will always be 0. Rdisk refers to the hard disk you are accessing. So the sata drive on the first channel will be rdisk(0) and the sata drive on the second channel will be rdisk(1). Then partition refers to which partition on the drive. In the case of partition it starts with one and goes up from there.
So if I'm udnerstanding what you've got, you're going to put the new drive on sata channel 1, it will have one partition. The old drive will be on sata channel 2 and will have two partitions. So I think your os ARC paths should look like this:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Media Center Edition New" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP 64 bit Old" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Media Center Edition Old" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Now I don't know what the system directory for Media Center Edition or 64 Bit XP is, so it may not be \WINDOWS, so you'll have to figure that out. And the other thing is, I don't know which partition the old 64 bit install and the old MCE install were on, so I just guessed. You'll know if you have them flipped if the wrong one boots. Here's a link to the site I was looking at for examples. It gets a little confusing with the ide as opposed to sata since ide has a slave and master. And then there's scsi which gets even more complicated.

Arc Path and Boot Ini Info

 

[Seekermeister]

I think that you understood fairly well. I'm not too sure which drive to connect to which port, but that is just a wrinkle for me to iron out. I also intend to creat 2 partitions on the new drive for each of the OS, but that also is a simple crease to smooth. I'm going to have other Linux OSs on the IDEs, but they will take care of themselves, as long a Windows is good.

I'm surprised that all that it takes is to simply creat a boot.ini, without anything else. I guess the MBR points to that, and it completes the path to the selected OS. I think that I have a handle on it now...thanks.

 

[AMCRambler]

Post back if you get stuck, but I think the sata ports are labeled on the board sata1, sata2, etc. Should be straight forward. Good luck!