New
#1
Problems moving 4-partition HD to a new one
I just got an Intel X24-M 80GB SSD for booting XPSP3 and Win 7 faster, and it looks like the hardware works fine. Here's my situation:
My system was initially a two-drive one where the first, older 40Gb Maxtor IDE drive has two partitions, and the first is System|Active|Primary, starting out as C: that has the BCD, and is formatted to FAT32, since I have an old 98SE installation there to edit a MIDI module's hardware with an old 98SE app that won't run under XP or 7. So, if I want SE, I F8 during XP startup, select 98 SE, and XP does its old sleight of hand with BOOTSECT.DOS, which then loads IO.SYS & starts DOS, and the usual stuff after that to start SE. It's of course oblivious to the NTFS volumes such as its own D: drive, but I can work with the MIDI module when I want.
The second drive is a Maxtor (now Seagate) SATA unit whose first two partitions have no OSes, but the third has XPSP3 (partition E, and the fourth Win 7 (partition F, both of which start up flawlessly from the BCD multiboot menu with system drives relettered to C: (first | active), D:, E: (XP SP3) and F: (Win7), and the old IDE drives' C: & D: partitions becoming H: & I: via the BCD — I guess...
So, I wanted to multiboot XP and 7 from the new SSD, made four partitions on it, and copied the SATA drive's C:, D:, E: and F: partitions to corresponding partitions on the SSD, so they're clones of C: through F:; but, of course, neither XPSP3 nor Win 7 will start from. Windows will not allow me to do a system image of 7 because of I: (boots to begin with as partition C being FAT32, which it has to be in order for 98SE to start there, that OS being NTFS-ignorant, right?
I copied E: and F: over to the SSD with EASUS Partition Manager, which worked great, but now startup comes up with "corrupted startup" messages. I messed around with drive letters in DISKPART to ensure they're right, but something (BCD?) resets them. How can I get multiboot from the SSD SATA drive to work as it did from the rotary SATA drive? I finally got it to work kind of by doing a startup repair, but then when I try to load profiles, they sit with a rotating circle for a LONG timek, and things crash. I think something low level is wrong. Do I have to do something by hand with BCDEDIT? I can use BCDEDIT /import to get a previous BCD backup, and restore boot to work as it did before, in order to post this.
I'd like to get the SSD setup working, and use this rotary SATA for back & etc. Thanks.
I hear people going <GROOOAAN!!!!>... I'll bet what I want to do might be pretty simple to implement for a multiboot guru. If I need to re-think what I'm doing, tell me. I'm pretty technically competent. Thanks!!