About NTLDR manipulation

[soimmore]

Hi, i've been trying to come up with a way to install XP on a logical partition. However, i've found that i cannot install XP onto anything but a primary partition. My conclusion was to work around this by creating an about 8 mb primary partition that would just hold boot.ini, ntldr, and ntdetect.com, and then have the WINDOWS directory reside on a separate, logical partition. My main problem is manipulating the files, since i'm not really sure how exactly this works. Does anyone have any kind of guide, or any advice for me to follow that i can do this? Thanks in Advance

[T D]

You can't hold boot.ini, ntldr and ndetect.com on another partition and boot into a logical partition.

Why a logical partition?

[JuMz]

Not exactly a solution to your problem, but perhaps very helpful

http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/unknownref...cles/12284.aspx

[pmshah]

I had a strange situation once. The basic installation refused to boot even in safe mode. Wanting to do repair install I by error booted off a cd that had winnt.sif set for auto partition. The installation process completed automatically & I did not interrupt the istallation & from fear that it might ruin the system entirely. What I ended up with was the boot.ini, ntldr & ntdetect on the primary partion & the rest - windows, documents & program folders on d drive - very definitely a logical drive since there wasn't enough space on the original c: drive. There was also an additional entry in the boot.ini for this second installation. I think this is one of the ways to have multiple windows installations on a single HDD, win98 + xp. Since it picked up all the settings from the original installation - desktop, programs & what have you I simply deleted the old boot.ini entry & the windows folder on c: drive & I was in business. I did not actually plan it but I did end up with installation on logical drive.

What you can try is start off with a resonably small primary partition & a sufficiently large logical drive & see how it goes. It might even prompt you to select a logical drive if you have more than one. You can always resize the c: drive later on using partition magic or the like.

[soimmore]

@ T D Actually, you can, i think. the article i link to below describes being able to separate the system and boot partitions, and while the article doesn't say explicitly that you can keep the /WINDOWS on a logical partition, it feels implied by the article's tone.

Also, the reason i'm doing this kind of partitioning scheme is because i desire to have my OS spread across several different points of failure, much like a Linux box. therefore, i'm trying to have the equivalent of a / , /root/, /usr, /tmp, /home, etc. (though in actuality there will only be four partitions, 1) the system partition which will have ntldr, ntdetect.com, and boot.ini, 2) the boot partition with the /WINDOWS information, and a junction point to the 3) Program Files dir which will be on another partition, and to the 4) Documents and Settings dir, which will also be on another partition. The way i accomplish this is with something called Junction Points, i don't know if you are familiar with them, but they are basically the equivalent of symbolic links in linux (directories that, in actuality, are just pointers to another directory, but are transparent to the OS)

Anyway, all of this brings me to my main point, i want these last 3 partitions to be logical so that i can resize them as i please with Partition Magic, that way i can maximize the efficiency of space i have remaining. Also, I intend on sharing the partition with Documents and Settings with Linux using the EXT2FSD project, so in actuality, it will be an ext2 partition, but still readable/writable in windows. This accomplishes something very important to me: it gets rid of having multiple copies of the same file for my Linux and Windows OSes, since i dual-boot. So, now i can have all my music files on one partition, which is accessed by both of my OSes.

So that's the short version, sorry if its a little unclear at times, just ask and i'll clear up whatever questions ya got

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314470/

@ JuMz thanks for that link, it's helping me a little, now that i've found ntldr, ntdetect.com, and boot.ini, i can actually give this a whirl. i need to make some back ups, but that link was interesting. thanks.

@ pmshah Are you sure? i once encountered a similar situation myself, but after i did some digging, i found that the installer had just created a partition of some free space i had intentionally left unformatted, and installed there (figures...). I thought i had something that was similar to what you describe, but it turned out to be two primary partitions, not one primary and one logical. I'm also curious if you used a customized installer, and if you did, do you have a link to a torrent or something? thanks man

Cheers

[pmshah]

@ pmshah Are you sure? i once encountered a similar situation myself, but after i did some digging, i found that the installer had just created a partition of some free space i had intentionally left unformatted, and installed there (figures...). I thought i had something that was similar to what you describe, but it turned out to be two primary partitions, not one primary and one logical. I'm also curious if you used a customized installer, and if you did, do you have a link to a torrent or something? thanks man

Cheers

As I said this happened by error & not by intention. Firstly I had no extra free & unpartitioned space on the hdd. The CD happened to be an autoinstall cd with autopartition set to on & install drive set at c:. As a rule I only create one single primary fat32 partition of 8 gb as C: drive to keep cluster size at 4k & easy excess to it in the event of some problems. Subsequently I create other logical drives & move my temp, & my documents folders plus the pagefile to them to maintain maximum free space on c: drive.

Edited June 24, 2006 by pmshah

[Mordac85]

FWIW, if the partitions are on the same physical drive I don't see where seperate partitions necessarily provide much "safety" for a Windows install. If you're going to be dual booting, why not just use grub or lilo to point to your Windows partition and set up an EXT2/FAT32/whatever data partition? IMHO, multiple partitions makes more sense in linux where you can choose to mount them, not necessarily the same benefit is seen in Windows tho.

[pmshah]

If my data is off my c: drive it is a simple matter to simply restore a ghost image in the event of non-repairable corruption, virus infection or any such disaster. Most of the clients use outlook as their contact & email software. At shutdown a batch file automatically copies the .pst file to a location on one of the logical drives.

The idea is to do a fast fix without having to Worry about retrieving data which can reduce one's lifespan. By the way I am using a boot manager which has allowed me to have 6 different vesrions of windows & over 9 different flavours of Linux - each in their own independent partitions without encroaching on each oher or sharing except the extended partition. This also allows me to test my unattended CDs in actual working environment - not in vmware or so. Using ext2fs on my personal machine would be ok but never on a client's machine. Should the driver be corrupted they would be absolutely miserable. They practically never use dual booting option.

I can set absolutely any volume as hidden volume, which shows up as free space under "disk management". Although I tinker with Linux I am no giru. I have never been comfortable with grub & stick to lilo in the root partition itself & never in the MBR.

Edited June 24, 2006 by pmshah

[jaclaz]

Please find the info you need about BOOT.INI and the NTLDR in my posts here:

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=25365

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=33030

About the logical partition prroblem, also have a look here:

http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=17144

jaclaz