Greetings. I have a new HP laptop with OEM Vista Home Premium. I would like to run two sets of the OS on the same HDD. One to use in daily activities and the other to dabble in. It's easier to do this than to hope to recover from a messed up system. I used a partitioning program (Parted Magic) to resize the C partition. Then I used the copy partition feature to the unallocated space, now known as F partition. Changing the flags to make C hidden and F the boot partition renders an error "autocheck program not found - skipping AUTOCHECK". This is the same error I've had on my WinXP OS and was repairable by editing the boot.ini file to point to the correct partition where the duplicate OS was. Opening the Command Prompt window, I've entered bcdedit /enum and the response was "The boot configuration data store could not be opened. Access is denied." I changed my prompt location to the directory where it's suppose to reside to c:\windows\system32\ with the same result. I am assuming that this is where I need to go in order to point the bootloader to the correct partition. I do not wish to make a dual boot configuration as it's unknown by me if anything is shared (common files and/or registery) between them, or have any further configuration issues when I simply delete the extra partition. I would like to continue to change the active(boot) partition manually using 3rd party software. Any help or advise on how to accomplish accessing and setting the BCD, or any other method to obtain the same result, would be greatly appreciated. B.rgds, Kevin
You need to open command prompt as administrator. Start Orb_type cmd_Right click cmd.exe...select run as administrator
You can use Bootitng to do this. In my case the 2nd copy was made by cloning the first copy but I did have to show it the Vista DVD to get it to start the first time. Windows update runs in both copies. You can download a trial copy from: http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html
