hi again,
WOnko, good to get your message.
Steve, you too and thanks because I have enjoyed your site a lot.
So far I only use GRUB Legacy not G4D yet.
RMPrepUSB neither but it looks advanced and convenient at the same time, a virtual work of art.
And of course this site :-)
I'm learning so much from everyone here, so far I just boot the old-fashioned way.
looking again at the korun "Procedure" JPG, appears like the WD Passport consisted of volumes H: & I: at the time within the diskpart screen.
Can not be sure which volume is at the beginning of the HDD and which at the end. They are nicely labeled though, so I will soon make a guess.
I must also assume these are both primary partitions, or maybe I overlooked some posted confirmation.
I have a WD Passport 1TB which I declined to do boot work since it is a Passport version having an included SES (SCSI Enclosure Services) device which requires installing a non-native Windows driver (plus installed windows app to control), while at the same time the regular Windows USB storage driver for the remainder of the HDD loads automatically upon plugging in to USB. One cable, two functional devices inside, similar to the USB controllers having a sometimes seen USB-CDROM section in addition to USB-HDD section.
I have never installed the SES driver from WD or WU on any PC's so far, and info from WD is confusing enough so that it is difficult to be sure whether a virtual CD would appear (or be optional and configurable with the WD Smartware which I do not install to Windows either) after such an SES driver was added to any Windows.
With many of the "My Passport" SES models there are corresponding similar models having no SES property.
In my use on W81preview there is still no native SES driver and I do not connect to WU, and never see a VCD either.
Only one little suffusion of yellow in Device Manager for the non-installed SES device :-)
And I am happy to just use the USB 3.0 1TB of factory NTFS storage like noobs are expected to do ;-)
And even happier with the now discontinued USB 2.0 IOmega eGo Helium 1TB which boots wonderfully.
This was purchased after the sad Passport as consolation to myself.
eGo Helium was as low as $39US when first discontinued before "Singapore flooding" price-rise.
Both of these were obtained early, and have non-AF HDD's inside therefore sectors are 512B although both controllers are rumored to function with at least 2TB HDD's. And perhaps 4096B sectors, which I would rather not have.
Anyway, The factory label for the WD preformatted USB storage volume is "My Passport".
So I now assume korun has shrunk the factory NTFS volume, then partitioned and formatted
the final space as NTFS and labeled it USBOS.
strike that last sentence, while I was typing, korun has now confirmed this by posting his partition table.
also looking at the newly posted RMPrepUSB panel, on all but a vey old PC I prefer FAT32 over FAT16, and I always keep my FAT32's below the original 32GB, and FAT16's below the original 2GB, but that's just me being old-fashioned.
Cluster size can be also be a consideration that was not as important then.
there's also this:
Beginning a volume at 390GB away from sector0 does require the "standard" MBR be a really good one, as well as the bootloader itself.
For instance the "standard MBR" of Ranish will not boot DOS further than 8GB away from sector0.
W8 can provide this 1TB capability but the the BOOTSECT.EXE command would then be:
bootsect /nt60 i: /force /mbr
there would then be a double message in the Win32 console, with possibly two opportunities for failure
even with "Bootcode was successfully updated" being reported.
Naturally none of these considerations would be visible in the Korun "Output" JPG, since that is just a decent
looking BCD.
But if korun volume G: was a WD virtual DVDROM I would think that may be a variable I have not tackled yet as I mentioned.
This detail I would like korun to clarify also. It shows no media so I hope its real. Looks like he is booted to a real
DVD (x:\windows\system32\cmd.exe) so probably no worries about that in this case.
Also I don't boot any .VHD yet either so what do I know anyway.
hope this helps
ztron