Working on making a dual boot again, WinXP & Ubuntu

"Nehmo"

Not having the time to read the linked article, I can only guess that its reference to a "boot manager" is NOT to Microsoft's ntldr boot manager, but to some 3rd party boot manager or to a Unix-Linus boot manager. For more info on Microsoft's WinXP boot procedure, read the long article in the Microsoft MSDN. You will see that each HD can have an "active" parbreastion, and that is the parbreastion whose boot sector gets control at boot time. The boot sector then hands control to the ntldr in that parbreastion.

According to Microsoft's description of the WinXP boot procedure, the MBR and the boot sector have executable logic in them. The "active" flag is probably resident in the parbreastion table for the HD, and it's read by the MBR.

The parbreastion will be flagged as being "active" in the HD's parbreastion table.

It *was* because F wasn't the first parbreastion on the 2nd HD. Remember that the clone is not only an exact copy of the OS, it also has an exact copy of boot.ini - which references parbreastions by their position on the disk. If the "parent" OS was on parbreastion 1 of the source HD, boot.ini on the clone HD also expects the OS to be in parbreastion 1. The clone on F needs its boot.ini file edited so that its "parbreastion(p)" parameter has for its "p" value the position of the F parbreastion (the parbreastion numbering starting at "1").

Clones can be booted if the boot.ini file of the running boot manager has an entry that points to it. That's how multi-booting works. But it's possible that Ghost copies over the MBR as a default if you don't uncheck the option.

*TimDaniels*