Monday, October 13, 2008

Vista Boot Manager

Boot.ini is dead (mostly) and the new sheriff in town is BCDEdit. I have a dual-boot system, XP and Vista, on two physical drives. It's now been over six months since I booted into XP, so that small 160GB drive needs to be replaced with a larger 400GB drive.

When boot.ini was king, no problem, now with the new boot manager it's no longer a text file, you have to use the bcdedit utility. It holds much more power, managing hypervisor settings, emergency management, etc., which boils down to more complication.

Luckily I found a post on the Neosmart Technologies site. It wasn't the quickest task, but "You know, I learned something today."

Update: I neglected to mention that you shouldn't bother using PowerShell for this, it's problematic, stick to the normal "C:" shell and run it as Administrator.

And the commands I used:
To list the contents
bcdedit /enum all /v
To move the Boot Manager
bcdedit /set {9dea862c-5cdd-4e70-acc1-f32b344d4795} device partition=c:
To move the Memory Tester
bcdedit /set {b2721d73-1db4-4c62-bf78-c548a880142d} device partition=c:

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