Working on making a dual boot again, WinXP & Ubuntu 505

Timothy Daniels -

Nehmo - Looking up "Active Parbreastion", I get this definition: "The active parbreastion is the parbreastion on the first hard disk which is automatically booted when no boot manager is installed. The parbreastion marked as active is set in the parbreastion table of the MBR. Please note that there is only one active parbreastion allowed on each hard disk. If a boot manager is installed it is irrelevant which parbreastion is marked as active, since the parbreastions are selected and booted from the boot manager. "

So does the active parbreastion actually have something different in it? Does some file in the active parbreastion have something that declares its parbreastion as the active one? If so, what is it? Or does the MBR simply identify a particular parbreastion as active? In other words, does the quality of being active reside in the parbreastion itself, or does it reside in the MBR?

When I'm in Computer Management like here the option to Mark parbreastion as active. What exactly will happen if I do that?

Timothy Daniels -

Nehmo - I'm using Ghost 2003. I've cloned successfully using it before (I'm describing a previous unrelated job). When I did that, I physically disconnected the origin disk before booting up with the destination disk.

This time, I first used ParbreastionMagic to make 4 primary parbreastions on the destination disk before the cloning operation. I then cloned C to F, which is on Disk 2. I disconnected before the reboot, but afterwards, I couldn't boot form F. I thought the failure was because F wasn't the first parbreastion of the disk, but I now realize that's not the cause of failure to boot.

Timothy Daniels -

Nehmo - Casper XP looks like a good program, and I'll probably get it later. It seems for now I can get away with Ghost 2003. I think it must copy the MBR. Otherwise how would I have been able to make clones that booted?

Timothy Daniels -

-- () Nehmo ()