Multi-booting oddity

[Brian K]

Bob, before starting a new copy I delete the Win Test partition and I delete the Win Test Boot Item along with the Boot File folder. As recommended. It's been successful every time.

[Bob Coleman]

Yes, on a quick test it seems to work.

I had to re-establish the proper hidden states in both boot items after the copy, but they seemed to stay intact across multiple boots of both partitions.

I'll experiment more with various combinations of restoring in the next few days.

[Brian K]

It is interesting.

[Bob Coleman]

One other thing and I've seen this before. When the copy finishes with Partition Work still visible, actually with the "Completed" message still visible, the computer hangs with the message "Unable to open BOOTIT.DAT" displayed in the upper left corner of the screen. Only choice seems to be a hard re-boot, but Partition Work seems to have finished dooing what it needs to do.

[Brian K]

I used to see that message too. Some time ago but not lately.

[Bob Coleman]

Well, I thought last night I had successfully created a copy of the partition I’m calling Win Main by copying it in BIU Partition Work. I still think I did, but I decided to repeat the exercise today and now completely unable create a bootable parition. I have absolutely no idea why.

In addition to the error messages already discussed and before them, I got something different which I wasn’t completely able to capture b before it vanished. I think it said something like “Your computer encountered a problem and needs to restart. We’ll gather some error info and then we’ll (I don’t know what).

After this error, either immediately and/or after re-booting,the same three messages that have been mentioned before appear.

I’m flailing around here and not really understanding what I’m doing, but I then tried restoring an image of Win Main to Win Test with IFL checking “Change GIUD” the result of which was “Performing Automatic Repair” and so forth.

That probably didn’t even make sense. I have a huge knowledge gap here.

[Brian K]

deleted

[Brian K]

This worked on the second attempt but not the first. I don't know what I did differently. Beware.

Bob, using BIU is the easiest. As discussed, delete Win Test partition and delete the Boot Item before commencing the copy.

If you want to use IFW, delete Win Test partition and delete the Boot Item before commencing the copy. Use IFW and select Change GUID.
In BIU, use fixboot.tbs to create a Microsoft.xxx. Then create a Boot Item.
Restart
Check Boot Items

It's obvious which is the easier method.

Both methods work.

[Bob Coleman]

It's obvious which is the easier method.

Maybe, but my experience so far is that it's inconsistent and unreliable

This worked on the second attempt but not the first. I don't know what I did differently. Beware.

Yes, beware. As best I can tell, neither of us is getting consistent results.

Also, neither method is particularly convenient.

[Bob Coleman]

Possibly some progress if it holds up.

I went through the whole exercise of deleting and re-creating the partition and boot item again as the simplest way that I currently know to get a partition and a boot item which points to it.

An unfortunate side effect of that is the the partition ends up in a different slot in the partition table than where the original partition was, but the partition table can rearranged in Partition Work to put the partition back "where it belongs". That's what I did.

I then added /utg to a preexisting IFW command that I've had to copy Win Main to Win Test and ran it.

That created a bootable Win Test presumably identical to Win Main.

I then formatted Win Test in Part Work, ran the command again and still had a bootable Win Test.

This gets me a long way toward what I was trying to achieve if it holds up.