Make Disk Bootable
mm2005
Using the free version of XXClone, when using Cool Tools, 4 problems:
When trying to run Make Disk Bootlable, the first 3 of them:
1 NTLDR file not found in source volume
2 NTDetect file not found in source volume
3 Box never competes, must press Cancel or Exit to get rid of box.
4 Error? Messages when making disk bootable.
5 When Adding Test Boot, it does more than modify my current boot.ini.
When making disk bootable, errors 1 to 4:
WRT 3, I'm guessing is normal, that the cancel box becomes an exit box, and that means it is done.
WRT 1 and 2, is the absence of these important?
WRT 4, I get two message boxes, NTLDR file not found in source volume; and the same message regarding NTDETECT
I get the same two messages when running the Clone itself.
A scan shows that I do have the files in the source parttion, but they are not where I think they should be.
Both are in ServicePackFiles\i386 and another copy of NTLDR is in
SoftwareDistribution\download\30-or-so-digit-stream-of-hex-numbers
But plainly these are not readily usable by windows. They are 245K long.
How come these files never got "extracted" from either of these two places and put where xxclone expects to find them. Don't I already need them?
Should I manually put them somewhere so that xxclone will find them and not give the message?
When Adding Test Boot:
Will Kan read this item 5, or should I write him directly somehow?
WRT 5, XXClone does more than modify my current boot.ini. I already have dual boot, and instead of adding another boot entry for test boot, it deletes the line that refers to one of my two current boot options. That's bad. I can imagine that someone wouldn't know how to get back into his other OS after this. Fortunately I happened to notice this, and I do know how to edit the file, and I had a prior copy of the unchanged file, so I knew what line to reinsert (though I haven't tested it yet.)
Also, the help file says
"A knowledgeable user may use a text editor (e.g., NotePad) and manually change the contents of the BOOT.INI file in the current system volume, this (Add Test Boot) feature helps you do just that automatically.
The line that corresponds to a boot menu entry has two parts;
- Invisible part
- It specifies the disk number, the partition number and the name of the Windows system directory.
- Visible part
- The text appears in boot menu (for human consumption). "
- This was confusing to me. I thought it meant if I tried to edit boot.ini, there would invisible information there, but everything there is visible. It just isn't necessary to insert them in the "Add a text entry in the boot menu" screen.
- (I can't get rid of these dots, which didn't even exist in the xxclone help file I copied the above text from. There they were numbers, but here they are dots.)
foxidrive
> 1 NTLDR file not found in source volume
>
> 2 NTDetect file not found in source volume
copy them to the root of the source folder. They are hidden and system
+ archive + read only files in a standard NT installation.
> Should I manually put them somewhere so that xxclone will find them and
> not give the message?
Maybe that will work. Kan had obviously assumed every NT system would
use NTFS.
> *Will Kan read this item 5, or should I write him directly somehow?
I dunno if he reads here.
I think that xxclone is not going to provide Kan with an income stream
into the future because it does not support Vista or Win7, unless Kan
develops it further. If it provides little income then there not a
financial incentive to release any fixes.
I am a registered and paying customer but Kan didn't reply when I sent a
support request via his business email support address. Make of that
what you will.
Dan Anderson
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Xxclone Forum" group.
To post to this group, send email to xxc...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to xxclone+u...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/xxclone?hl=en.
tvhawaii
I don't know how long it's been since you requested support, but if he
isn't going to support it any longer, then he should take down the
site IMO.
foxidrive
Maybe I should clarify. I posted two messages to support and got a
reply to one of them.
This was the message I didn't get a reply to.
"I have drives mounted to C: in junction points and XXclone faithfully
wants to copy the data on the other drives onto my clone drive (and of
course it won't all fit) - can XXclone exclude the junction points?"
mm2005
>On 23/09/2010 17:06, tvhawaii wrote:
>>
>>
>>On Sep 21, 9:05 am, foxidrive<foxidri...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>On 22/09/2010 04:54, mm2005 wrote:
>>>I am a registered and paying customer but Kan didn't reply when I sent a
>>>support request via his business email support address. Make of that
>>>what you will.
>>
>>I am glad you posted that before I purchased the paid version.
>>I don't know how long it's been since you requested support, but if he
>>isn't going to support it any longer, then he should take down the
>>site IMO.
I see it a bit differently. I think there is a lot of good software
out there that is not supported, but it's still good.. I don't know
if Kan has stopped supporting this or not, but he will
eventually. Everyone does. But just two weeks ago I installed a
program that was written 15 years ago and isn't supported, and it
works well. I will find an address for Kan, but if he doesn't fix
this problem, and I think it is xxclone that did this deleted the
line from boot.ini, I'll just remain aware of it. (Actually, I
already had a backup of boot.ini, so I took it and the line xxclone
added, and I figured out the proper result.)
And I might still buy it even if there were no support. Just like I
might buy a car that is out of warranty, or something which parts
aren't made for, if it is worth the money to me.
Whether it is free or costs money, it still might well be worth
having and I'd hate to see something like xxclone not be available.
>Maybe I should clarify. I posted two messages to support and got a
>reply to one of them.
>
>This was the message I didn't get a reply to.
>
>"I have drives mounted to C: in junction points and XXclone
>faithfully wants to copy the data on the other drives onto my clone
>drive (and of course it won't all fit) - can XXclone exclude the
>junction points?"
So, what are junction points? Maybe that's why he didnt' reply. :-)
Mike
foxidrive
When you mount a local hard drive in a folder on c: drive, rather than
using a drive letter to access it, I believe it's called a Junction point.
So I have a 320 GB drive that I can access when I go to c:\media\photos
and when xxclone copies the partition it tries to also copy the entire
320 GB hard drive mounted on that folder.
See http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=205524
If Kan doesn't understand what I mean by a junction point then surely he
can ask.
tvhawaii
On Sep 23, 3:28 pm, mm2005 <mm2...@bigfoot.com> wrote:
> But just two weeks ago I installed a
> program that was written 15 years ago and isn't supported, and it
> works well.
I'm old and I'm tired of working on all this stuff. I just want to
back up my drive and have the backup -function- if my HD crashes, not
spend any time troubleshooting why ntldr is missing or why boot.ini is
hosed.
If this isn't the program that will do that -for sure-, then I'll keep
looking.
Thanks to everyone for taking the time to respond.
--Michael
mm2005
Hi mm2005,
Some additional considerations further to foxidrive's comments:
1. Missing ntldr and ntdetect.com ... I always get these messages because in my configuration I have a very small C primary partition and several larger logical partitions that contain alternative installations of the XP operating system. The C partition contains those two files as well as the boot.ini file, so when I execute xxclone from one of those larger partitions xxclone doesn't know to look in my small C partition. That's okay. I can either manually copy over the files into my target partition, or set up a similar "small C partition" approach on my target drive. I expect you have a similar situation, and it might be one of those systems where your version of my C partition is not readily accessible by the user. Anyway, I think ntldr and ntdetect.com are standard XP files that you could source from the internet or another computer.
2. Boot.ini ... With regards to "visible" and "invisible" parts of lines in a boot.ini file, when you look at boot.ini you see something like the following line:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(5)\WINDOWS=" blah blah blah my target partition D1 P5" /fastdetect
The section in quotes could be referred to as the "visible" part because that is what is displayed on your screen menu when you boot up and can contain whatever info you want it to show, whereas the front part of the line, particularly "rdisk(1)partition(5)" is what the system actually uses to determine which hard drive and partition you are saying contains the XP operating system that you want to boot into. Confusion can occur when the visible part says one thing and the invisible part, under some circumstances, is changed by xxclone or is simply not consistent with what you entered into the "visible" part of the line. So whenever running xxclone, if you encounter boot problems, check to see that the contents of boot.ini are correct and pointing to the correct partition.
Xxclone provides an option to create a bootable test floppy containing ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini, and that can be useful if the boot.ini on your hard drive gets messed up. I recall some postings about a bootable CD as another test option ...