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dual boot attempt: invalid boot.ini ntdetect failed

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First post, by bakemono

Posted on 
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I borrowed an HDD from a system with Win7 installed to try out a motherboard I recently acquired. Win7 detected the new hardware and came up fine. I also wanted to take another crack at running Win2000 on it, but without using a separate drive for it because the board only has SATA ports, no IDE, and I have no spare SATA drives. I also don't want to blow up the Win7 install, since it came from a refurb system which was sold without installation media. So I tried to add Win2000 as an additional option on the Win7 HDD:

bcdedit /create {ntldr} /d "Previous version of windows"
bcdedit /set {ntldr} device partition=C:
bcdedit /set {ntldr} path \ntldr
bcdedit /displayorder {ntldr} /addlast

That creates a menu option. But when attempting to boot it says:
invalid boot.ini
booting from \WINNT
NTDETECT failed

Anybody know what causes this? Obviously the boot.ini and ntdetect.com files have been put in C:\ yet it seems like NTLDR can't read the disk for some reason.

Maybe I'll just have to create a separate partition, but it would be nice to understand the problem so I can avoid it in the future. When I do a web search I get a bunch of results saying "boot from CD/DVD and go to the recovery console and do blah blah blah" but no explanation as to what causes the error.

again another retro game on itch: https://90soft90.itch.io/shmup-salad

Reply 1 of 1, by bakemono

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Did the same thing even after creating a separate FAT32 partition. But then I remembered that my laptop with the bum CPU fan has the exact setup that I was trying to acheive here. It shipped with Win7, then I shrunk the partition, created a separate FAT32, installed Win98 DOS on there, and then installed Win2K (or tried to anyway). The Win7 boot menu comes up and has options for all of the above.

The only problem is that I have no idea how I did that on the laptop (8 years ago). When I was younger I didn't see the need to write things down because I wasn't worried about forgetting it all...

It is apparent that under certain conditions BOOTMGR will actually read BOOT.INI and display those items on its own menu. How to make it do this and which items it will display is a mystery. So in the end I just copied 200GB of files that I wanted off of the HDD to somewhere else and then wiped it. Now everything is great.

again another retro game on itch: https://90soft90.itch.io/shmup-salad

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