Boot problem on cloned dual-boot SSD

dg1261 said:

First, though, that Disk Mgmt screenshot contains an oddity. Both partitions 3 and 4 are marked "Active", which should normally be a fatal boot condition. There should only be one Active partition, and in your case that appears to be the third partition. Maybe Disk Mgmt is wrong, or maybe you really do have two Active partitions.

I manually made partition 4 active just to see if it made any difference, it didn't. My previous screenshot was in that state. I have since turned of the active state of that partition, it now looks like this:

The two regedit screenshots reveal what may be the main problem. The values of C and D should be similar between the two registry hives (the 7 hive and the XP hive).

The values shown indicate the original HDD had a DiskID of "4f be a1 0f" while the new SSD's DiskID is "6c 73 52 e0". (The remaining 8 bytes of each entry are the starting sector number of the specified partition on that disk.) You'll note the XP registry hive is still looking for C and D on the original disk, not the SSD. It can't find itself, so it's failing to boot.

Yup. that makes sense. The cloning process apparently did not touch the XP partition's registry, so it still has the old data from the HDD. It seems to have fixed Win7's registry to match the new DiskID.

Before correcting, it's relevant to know which partition you want XP to see as C and which D. The fourth screenshot suggests the old XP system saw itself as D: rather the more typical C: when it was booted. Is that correct? (IOW, 7 and XP both saw the 3rd partition as C: and the 4th partition as D: regardless of which OS you booted.)

Yes, both OSes saw partition 3 as C: and partition 4 as D:.

If XP is supposed to see itself as D: then DosDevices\C and DosDevices\D should be exactly identical between the two MountedDevices branches.

Load the XP hive again and carefully edit those two entries in XP-System so they're identical to what you see in Win7's MountedDevices. Then unload the hive and see if XP will now boot correctly.

I did this to make the DosDevices\C and DosDevices\D under the XP-System hive match those in HKLM\System\MountedDevices. Unfortunatey, that didn't fix the problem. The XP boot splash appears followed by a reset back to POST.

I noticed that there were other Volume entries under the XP-System hive that also had the old signature. In fact there were a couple that matched the old DosDevices\C and DosDevices\D entries exactly. So I edited those too. I left the others with the old DiskID signature alone, as they seem to pertain to other drive letters that aren't being used. This is what it looks like now:




But XP still doesn't boot -- same symptoms. What else should I look at?

SIW2 said:

They are inverted in your XP hive.

\DosDevices\C should have 4d 00 00 00 at the end

\DosDevices\D should have 02 00 00 00 at the end

Really? Shouldn't these match those under Win7 exactly? The respective partitions' drive letter assignments are the same whether I boot Win7 or XP. I.e., C: is the Win7 partition and D: is the XP partition no matter which OS I boot.

SIW2 said:

If XP os letter is D in the software hive, it looks ok.

It should be D:, but how do I check this? Where is the XP software hive that I could load from Win7?

OK, it is indeed D:\WINDOWS



XP still doesn't boot. What else to look at?

SIW2 said:

dg1261 said:

The fourth screenshot suggests the old XP system saw itself as D:

What makes you think that?

I went by the fact the partition signatures in the XP System hive showed D was behind C, further toward the end. (The format of the partition signatures is detailed on my webpage.) Presuming XP was also the 4th partition on the old HDD as it is now on the SSD, that implied XP must have seen its own Boot partition as D.

amblabs said:

I noticed that there were other Volume entries under the XP-System hive that also had the old signature. In fact there were a couple that matched the old DosDevices\C and DosDevices\D entries exactly. So I edited those too. I left the others with the old DiskID signature alone, as they seem to pertain to other drive letters that aren't being used.

No, the Volume entries should not be edited.

Those are a history of every partition or device the OS has ever seen attached, such as external drives, usb flash drives, other CD/DVD drives, etc. The Volume entries are some kind of conversion of device IDs to GUIDs, perhaps for use in the areas of the OS that reference devices by GUID. I'm not sure what those areas would be, but manually editing them might create GUID conflicts. The system generates the GUIDs as necessary, so don't try to edit them.

In fact, you can even completely delete the Volume entries and the OS will regenerate them as needed. I routinely delete all Volume entries (and all stale DosDevices entries) when I'm imaging an OS to move to another partition or hard disk. That way, there won't be detritus carried over when the OS is restored, and the restored OS will regenerate GUIDs for just the devices it sees in the new restoration. (Upon first boot you'll see some "Found new hardware" balloons.)

But your post does make me think of a possibility I had not considered before. Curiously, I noticed your 7 and XP hives don't share any of the same GUIDs. I presumed they would since some of the devices (like CD/DVD drives) weren't being changed. I don't sufficiently understand GUIDs or how they're generated, but I wonder if 7 and XP use different algorithms to generate GUIDs for the same devices. If so, the GUIDs you edited could be causing a problem.

We're getting to the limits of my knowledge here, but I think I would try deleting all entries from the XP [MountedDevices] hive except for DosDevices\C and DosDevices\D. Make a backup of the [MountedDevices] key first, just in case you need to put them back. Then reboot. XP should regenerate just the GUIDs it needs, and will associate drive letters based on the partition signatures.

Aside: the reason I normally recommend leaving the DosDevices entries for the OS's "System" and "Boot" partitions is because, when left to makes its own decisions, the OS will regenerate/reassign drive letters in a prescribed sequence, which depending on the system may or may not be what you want. In your case, if there were no DosDevices entries I would expect XP to assign C to partition 3 (because it's the Active partition), D and E to partitions 1 and 2, and F to partition 4. That's the default sequence for assigning drive letters, but it would create havoc for all the programs and parts of the system expecting partition 4 to be D. By predefining DosDevices\D you prevent the OS from giving away that drive letter to something else.