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Old February 1st 05, 11:06 PM
Harvey Gratt
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Bob H wrote:

Harvey Gratt wrote:

Rod Speed wrote:

"Harvey Gratt" wrote in message
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Bob H wrote:


Harvey Gratt wrote:


I'm trying to verify whether PartitionMagic 8.01 will
automatically "fix" the boot.ini file and the partition boot
sector where it resides during the rearrangement of disk partitions.

Specifically, say I have an XP primary, active partition as the
third partition on my HDD. The first two partitions are logical
partitions. Initially, the boot.ini file would point to the third
partition.

If I now delete the first two partitions so as to make the XP
partition the first partition, will PartitionMagic automatically
rewrite the boot.ini file to make it point to the first partition
so as to make subsequent boot-ups possible?

Thanks,
Harvey




I wouldn't have thought so. You are in fact delting the boot.ini
file when you delete the first 2 partitions, so where will the
boot.ini file be? Deleted as well, I say.
You will have to create another boot.ini file on the same partition
you want to boot from.



I appear to be mis-understanding something. I thought the boot.ini
file resided in the "partition boot sector" which, in the original
setup, would have been located in the third partition (active,
primary).

If not where does it reside? Are the "partition boot sector (PBS)",
boot.ini file always located at a specific location on the HDD - I
thought this was true only of the MBR, which in turn pointed to the
PBS (which is located at an arbitrary location). Is my understanding
incorrect - it would appear so.




Sounds comprehensively mangled to me.

The boot.ini file is a file in a particular partition, it wont even
fit in a PBS.

More likely something works out which is the bootable partition
on a particular physical drive and something works out where the
boot.ini is from that and reads it from the appropriate partition.

Dont know the answer to your original question, I'd personally
ghost the entire physical drive so you can recover gracefully
of PM didnt handle the deletion of the logical drives properly.
Cant see why it shouldnt.

I guess this gets down to understanding the boot process. My current
state of confusion is:

1. The MBR is read from a fixed location on the HDD.

2. The code in the MBR eventually points to a bootable partition
(there may be more than one, but I guess only one is active at a time)
and jumps to the PBS of the active partition.

3. Code in the PBS then starts to load the OS, eventually reading the
boot.ini file located in that partition's root directory (as you
indicated)

4. Now, if the boot.ini file contains lines for mutiple OS's, a menu
appears. A selection here would then cause a jump to the approriate
partition for the loading of the selected OS.

My head hurts. Does the above seem correct? If not, what does happen?

Thanks,
Harvey



Where is NTLDR? Which partition is that on?



Well, if my understanding is remotely correct, I would think it's
located on the active partition pointed to by the MBR. I guess the MBR
points to the PBS which contains code to start the loader function
(NTLDR). NTLDR is probably located on the active partition and it would
access the boot.ini file.

Harvey