Interesting set of events after restore of image(s) to spare drive & a question as to why...
Hello,
Today 10/2/14 I made an image of my main drive 640GB drive that has XP, Win 7 and Ubuntu on it.
The images were installed, as a test, onto a smaller 240 GB and I had room to spare, the drive space was unallocated.
NB: Note that the Grub bootloader on the main drive is NOT in charge of the MBR of Windows 7, I can boot to each one separately. Grub controls only Linux and the MBR boots only Win 7 and XP.
When I rebooted the drive to see how the restore went, I was presented with the Grub bootloader screen, NOT the Boot Manager Screen that shows me XP, 7 & Linux.
Grub allowed me to boot to Ubuntu and it worked fine.
I restarted and this time I chose Win 7 from Grub, since it showed it on /dev/sda2. After I made that choice I got the black "Boot Manager Screen" that showed XP 7 & Linux/Ubuntu
So I chose XP, and nothing happened. So I chose 7 to try that. After a looooong delay it booted and worked fine. Looking at the directories in 7 I can see that all of XP is there and it's there in the Disc Management of 7 as well as all the other partitions
So the question is how did lose the ability to boot XP from the Boot Manager?
Prior to doing all this I have had many attempts to image Linux and they all failed.
I had a feeling that if I was to image all 3 partitions and restore all 3, then my Linux install would boot and run, and it did. But I never thought I'd lose XP in the process and I'm not sure why.
Addendum to the previous:
Now 10/3/14 I tried to boot the machine and got the message BOOT MGR IS MISSING hit CTrl +Alt Del to restart. I ended up using the Win 7 install disk to repair the boot manager in Win 7 now it seems that's the only OS I have. It makes no sense at all to me.
The way it is normally on the main drive, XP was installed first, then 7 then Linux. The 7 boot info was written into XP and I have EasyBCD in XP to show the MBR where to find Grub so I can boot to Linux.
Thanks to all in advance :D
