Booting Vista from another drive using lilo on gentoo

[jesnow]

I have two disks in my sytem, an IDE on /dev/hda and a SATA on /dev/sda

Vista until now has lived on /dev/hda1, but now I want to move it to /dev/sda1. I've done the easy part correctly (I think), creating a bootable nt partition on /dev/sda and cloning vista to it via ntfsclone run from gentoo. Unfortunately, there's no way to make the BIOS boot from /dev/sda directly, so I have to use the bootloader on /dev/hda to do it.

Easier said than done! All of my lilo-fu that has worked through years of the dance of the hard drives has failed, and I'm in need of greater skills.

I've tried:
map-drive 0x80
to 0x81
map-drive=0x81
to=0x80

and so forth. And also
disk=/dev/sda
bios=0x80

None of these have any effect on Vista, which somehow blithely boots from what it perceives to be drive C: (/dev/hda), and sees but refuses to boot from the parition on drive /dev/sda. If I make /dev/hda1 hidden, the Vista kernel boots but fails quickly with "Autocheck.exe not found" and reboots itself. All I can figure is that Vista hasn't gotten the word form the BIOS (or doesn't care) that the disks are now swapped.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I need to free up the space on /dev/hda to install gentoo.

Cheers,

Jon.

[nerdbert]

I'd do the following:

Since Vista doesn't need its bootloader on the same drive you can install Vista's bootloader on hda. I don't know how much has changed since XP, but to archive this you basically have to boot from the Vista install disc and get into the console. There should be two commands which are called something like fixmbr and fixntldr (the help command is your friend). Use them to install ntldr on hda. Don't worry, it will not delete any data on the disk.

After that you should be able to boot into Vista. From there on you could give Bootpart a try. It adds Linux to Window's bootloader. Seems like it hasn't been updated since I last used it (2003), but even if it doesn't support Vista it might just work and there is no harm if it doesn't (then you end up with a misconfigured entry for Linux.


BTW: Have you really checked that there is no way to change the boot order in your Bios? And if you did: ntfsclone most likely doesn't copy the first sectors of the disk, so there simply is no bootloader on sda1 to boot from. If that's the case you could install Vista's bootloader to sda1 directly - leaving hda1 completely to Gentoo


edit: M$ has an article about the procedure in their KB: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392/EN-US/
If I were you I'd try to install the bootloader on Vista's hard drive first, because then you can still use Lilo without any hassles.
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I'm really wondering what Lovechild is doing nowadays...

[jesnow]

I think you're going in the right direction. I have the following progress to report: By following the instructions here:

http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/partsigs.htm

I was able to erase all the partition signatures from the Vista registry. *Then* mark the source partition hidden (actually, I marked it linux) and re-clone. The motto is: don't ever let the source Vista see the new partition once cloned, and don't ever let the target partition see the source partition.

Changing the boot order as described in my original post then worked. I can now boot from the target partition.

Interesting point: I marked the source partitition 83 (linux) figuring Vista would then ignore it. No such luck! Even though it's marked linux in the partition table, Vista recognizes it as a NTFs partition. I will try 16:DOS (hidden) and see if that works. Eventually /dev/hda1 will go away completely and be used for something sane, like /home.

Aha. Now if I try to boot from the source partition (marked 83), it boots from the target partition anyway. Curiouser and curiouser.

[nerdbert]

Maybe I was on the right track, but I don't have a clue what you are talking about

I'm convinced that the procedure described in the KB article will solve your problem right away.

But if you're still into hiding flag it as Amiga
_________________
I'm really wondering what Lovechild is doing nowadays...