First off- thanks for this excellent boot manager, quite useful, amazing work!
Long story short, first partition on internal hard disk disappears and is marked as free space after usage of Plop.
Laptop Dell Latitude E6400, BIOS A27.
16GB USB flash drive, 2 partitions- first large FAT32 primary and second small dummy one, partitioned and formatted by RMPrepUSB.
Internal disk with 4 primary partitions:
1) Dell diagnostic, 0xDE partition ID
2) Active, NTFS, Windows XP on it plus XP/7 bootloaders files
3) NTFS, Windows 7
4) NTFS, data files
Plop version 5.0.11 20101018
grub4dos version 0.4.5b 2010-11-29
Steps how I reproduce the problem:
1) Boot from USB hitting F12.
2) On the 16GB USB stick there is grub4dos MBR code, loading its grldr file, which launches Plop:
title EXPERIMENTAL - Start PLoP boot manager
ls /usbdrive.tag || find --set-root --ignore-cd /usbdrive.tag
kernel /plpbt.bin
3) Plop is loaded
4) In Plop boot menu select the second partition on the USB stick, the dummy one on the USB disk, that's HDA partition 2.
5) Plop complains about invalid boot code, continue anyway
5) PC reboots, F12 to start from internal disk.
6) In Windows 7 boot menu select older operating systems
7) In ntldr boot menu select the original never modified line
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN /FASTDETECT
Result- ntoskrnl.exe missing or corrupted error message.
The first partition, Dell OEM disappeared.
That's broken ARC path, file is there and is fine, but not in that partition.
Add
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional part1" /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN /FASTDETECT
and XP loads again.
Attached are first 16 sectors of the internal disk before and after along screenshot of disk management and Paragin HD manager.
You will note the difference in the MBR code.
How I fix it back- Paragon Hard disk manager finds lost FAT16 partition and restores it. Partition ID is changed manually to DE.
Upon reboot and going through steps 5,6 and 7 the original boot.ini line with partition(2) works again.
If along steps 1-7 Plop is not used, or at least that menu entry is not selected, there is no MBR code change. Here I can fiddle a bit more if you ask me to.
Sorry about the long post, I am trying to be as short as possible and informative enough at the same time.
I've had report for similar issue a while ago, but never managed to reproduce it, until now.
Do you have any clues what and why it's happening?