Multiboot HDD-W7 + HDD-XP + SSD-W7

Thanks - that sounds interesting - may be a few days before I get time to work through it - but I will - and I'll report back on what progress I make.

I followed the example "Repairing XP ..." but came unstuck because BOOTCFG /REBUILD would not completely scan all the drives without error. The first time it happened I checked a few and they were good. After another try I returned to W7 and ran chkdsk on all 10 partitions - all returned good. Tried BOOTCFG /REBUILD and it continued to complain there were errors and that it could not proceed until all scanned ok. Gave up at this point.

Downloaded and installed Macrium including as offered at download time the winpe image.

Now onto the topic of the recovery disc. My understanding is Macrium will make an image file of whatever partition or whole disc you want - stored wherever you choose, and then I boot the recovery disc that enables me to read the image file and write it onto whatever partition you want. That said I need the recovery disc. Located the huge winpe.wim file and identified my CD/DVD as destination, clicked all the right buttons, progress bar appears, rises fairly rapidly to 24%, spins up DVD writer to high speed, sits there for about 10s, dvd stops, disc ejected "An error occurred creating the rescue media" That's it.

I have a Windows Repair disc - would this do for the recovery exercise?

Mmmmm has my dvd writer died? Ran my fav video s/w, and successfully wrote a short dvd movie.

Pretty much stuck at this point........