Boot-It NG : Computer Hardware Buyers’ Glossary

The current version is 1.86 Last revised: 2008-10-26 Verified: 2008-10-26

It lets you have more than 4 primary bootable partitions if you use Boot-It exclusively for boot and partition management. It will back up the MBR. Boot-It will modify the MBR for each OS so that it gets to see the MBR in its preferred order with a partitions hidden it is not supposed to touch. This lets you shift partitions around without having to manually edit all the boot.ini files. It will also see the MBR as if it were originally the primary boot partition. It can also create images of partitions for backup. It is not a full blown backup, but it gives you the basic operation needed.

The competition is Acronis, a much slicker product, but which failed on my Vista machine. The venerable Partition Magic has not been updated to handle Vista.

Pros

• I chose it after experimenting with many to use myself both for partition and boot management.
• It is pedestrian, but solid. I find it fairly easy to understand what it is up to.
• It has a free trial. You get to prove to yourself it works before you spend any money, though you will of course spend considerable time.
• Works with Vista.
• You create a boot CD which will let you repair damage even when your machine is not bootable.
• You optionally can install it in its own partition where it won’t get clobbered. Before you can install Boot-It boot manager on your hard drive in its own partition, you must have a empty slot for it in the 4-slot MBR bootable primary partition table. If you don’t, you have to use the bootable CD to copy a partition to an extended slot to free up a primary slot.
• TeraByte did an excellent series of videos that explains boot.ini and its numbering scheme among other arcana. I got quite a kick out of watching the expert cheerfully editing partition table without any sign of terror or trepidation.
• It worked where others failed.
• It lets you edit the Vista BCD multiboot configuration using a low-level GUI (still daunting).
• If you buy it through this link, I get $8.74 USD .

Cons

• It will not resize Linux partitions. You must delete and recreate them, or use GPart under Linux. Literally it can resize partitions, but it does not reshape the file system. You must do that within Linux, so for all practical purposes you must use Linux to resize Linux partitions.
• It will not format Linux partitions. You have to do it in Linux. The Boot-It people consider this a feature, figuring it is best to leave this up to the OS which is most expert.
• It will not format NTFS partitions. You have to do in it W2K/XP/W2K3/Vista. Again the Boot-It people consider this a feature.
• It will not remember the names you assign partitions between runs.
• It cannot split partitions.
• It can’t grow a partition unless there is free space directly after the partition to receive the growth. You must get the rearranging effects you want with many primitive operations. You can’t copy or move a partition other than into free space. You can’t easily swap or reorder partitions. It won’t directly steal a little space from other partition to create new one. You must grow the extended partition and copy the partition into some free space there. You must get the net effect like a sliding square puzzle with atomic slide, shrink, grow, and copy steps.
• It will not directly convert a partition from primary to extended and back. This is less important that in was. Originally a bootable partition had to be near the beginning of a disk and had to be primary. It is still preferable for simplicity.
• You can’t queue partition moving operations up then run them unattended the way you can with GPart or Acronis. Rearranging disk partitions is a tedious process since each partition slide takes perhaps 15 minutes and you can’t do anything else on the machine while it copies. The copy operation seems very slow. The reason it is so slow on some systems is because Boot-It uses BIOS I/O and those systems use PIO instead of UDMA. A 32 or 64 bit O/S only uses the BIOS to boot and load storage drivers, after which, it bypasses the BIOS and directly accesses the hardware using UDMA. BootIt includes a third party UDMA driver that can be used with standard (non-RAID) PATA drives to increase the speed. You can see they are included on the CD by ticking off the SATA/PATA driver options when creating the CD.
• It was not clear if you could boot to extended partitions while staying within the 4-primary partition limit. I could not managed to add Linux without grub to the list of bootables. I spent days trying to get Boot-It and Ubunto Linux to coexist, wiping out my Windows partitions twice and eventually gave up. The problem was mostly with Ubuntu’s partition manager stomping over data that were none of its business. However, I could not get Boot-It to humour it. It may be possible, but it certainly is not obvious. The Boot-It people don’t see this has a con for their product. In their view, by lack of success is 100% my own failing even though I had 45 years of computer programming experience, including experience patching partition tables with my own software. The documentation I had at the time did not seem to describe the behaviour of the version of Ubuntu/Grub I was using. There is now a considerable amount of documentation available on the problem, so some day I may make another stab at it, though I think it will wait until I can dedicate an entire computer to Ubuntu. The experience left me traumatised.
• The documentation and prompts presume you already know how partitioning works on a low level. You even must understand how to manually edit boot.ini when you change the number of partitions before the current one.
• It does not have an install program. You must unzip, then follow the complicated instructions in the 50-page bootitng.pdf file to create bootable floppies or CDs. It turns out that in the ordinary case all you need to is insert a blank CD and run makedisk.exe. It is included in the bundle, even though the manual says you must download it separately. If you are methodical, you will get through, it but probably the most complicated install you will ever see, largely because all manner of unusual conditions are described with equal weight to the ordinary ones. It was not designed with convenience of the user uppermost. The install process is necessarily more complex than most software since you must burn a CD then boot from the CD and install the software on a partition, possibly a newly created one.
• The boot disc you create appears to be totally empty. Not to worry. It will boot fine.
• It does not touch dynamic disks, Microsoft’s proprietary partitioning scheme.
• Bad sectors are not properly handled. To understand the problem I need some definitions of various types of bad sector on hard disk.
  • Severity 0. a sector detected as bad or iffy by the drive hardware, and is remapped transparently, so that all software, including Boot-It, is totally unaware of it.
  • Severity 1. a sector marked bad by the OS. It may well actually be perfectly ok.
  • Severity 2. a sector marked bad by the OS. Once in its career a test program such as Spin-Rite determined that it had errors that were corrected by the hardware ECC logic.
  • Severity 3. This as sector marked bad by the OS. If you were to test it today, it would frequently have read errors correctable by the hardware ECC logic.
  • Severity 4. I sector marked as bad by the OS. If you were to test it today, you would not be able to read from it. It is so badly damaged, that ECC logic cannot correct the problem.
  Boot-It handles severity 0 bad and iffy sectors just fine. There is nothing to do, other than copy empty bad-track tables. The problem is Boot-It treats the bad sector tables as if they were ordinary relocatable data rather than treating them as offsets to absolute sectors. This means after a slide, it marks severity 1 through 4 sectors as bad when they are good, and fails to mark the real bad and iffy sectors as bad. You have to retest chkdsk /r or spinrite to find them. I consider this dangerous. You should never put data in known iffy sectors, even temporarily. You should never throw away your history of a sector behaving badly. It should never be given a second chance to screw you. I asked the Boot-It people to correct this. They told me:
  • If you have any severity 1 through 4 sectors, you should just throw your disk away and get a new one. It is a sign it is on its last legs. I can’t afford that.
  • That if Boot-It tries to copy something onto a severity 4 sector, the whole copy will fail, and roll back. They consider this safe, acceptable behaviour. I don’t. You are stuck unable to finish your partitioning because their program does not understand bad sector tables. If Boot-It properly handled bad sectors, it would never attempt to copy data onto a known bad or iffy sector. It would copy data around them.
  Correcting this problem is a non-trivial task. Boot-It would need to understand the way each OS maps bad sectors, maintain a global map of them, and when it copies or slides partitions make adjustments to the file system to avoid the bad sectors that appear at different offsets in the location after the copy or slide. Currently, Boot-It does not need to get very involved with file system format details. I can understand Terabyte’s reluctance, especially given that Boot-It wants to remain OS-agnostic. However, I think they could at least implement bad track preservation for Linux and Windows and throw up their hands for the others. They don’t have to implement every possible wrinkle. They could throw up their hands on the rare difficult cases.

Tips

• It insists on creating EMBRs, even if you don’t break the 4 slot limit. This is normal.
• Give your partitions temporary names by right clicking properties. It help you keep track of what you are doing.
• The question it asks “move data only?” refers to the fact it is rarely necessary to move the literal contents of empty space between files. It always moves the full MFT and directory structure and hidden files.
• You need a fair chunk of free space to work. When you are done, you can shift the working free space just after some partition, the grow that partition to absorb it.
• You need to carefully map out your plan of attack in advance to avoid wasted time-consuming shuffling. Print out a map on paper of the planned order of your partitions and their sizes to guide you.
• To back up to DVD, select the partition and right click image. Then click the DVD drive you want to back up to. Then right click its name on the right and right click paste. The process is extremely slow compared with OS disk to DVD writing, so don’t panic. It is clever and does not back up empty clusters, or possibly it compresses them down to almost nothing.
• To restore from DVD, create a partition big enough to hold the data. Click the DVD drive containing the backup, and right click image. It will ask you to put the last then the first disk in place. Once that is complete, you can select the partition you want to restore to, and right click paste. The result is a partition the size of the DVD data, with some empty space following.