I am having a very strange problem with a laptop that is dual booting Windows XP. Without getting into the technical details of why, the two partitions are nearly identical except for one application, which is installed in different configurations in each partition.
The partitions were created using Partition Magic 7.0. Xp was installed in the first partition, then the partition was copied using Partition Magic. There is also a shared data partition. (However all the following problems have been observed with the shared data partion deleted.) Disk Manager sees the existence of all partitions, but lists the one hidden by Partition Magic as unknown, and there is no function available except delete.
Now, when I add a user account in partition 1, that user account appears also in partition 2. I had to make a registry change for an application to change the path it uses to store data, and that change appeared when I loaded regedit in the other partition. I need this registry key to be different in each partition.
User settings, such as desktop, startmenu, etc., are not carried over, even for user accounts which exist on both partitions. It seems that XP is somehow copying registry data from one partition to the other. But how?? And how can I prevent it from doing this?
The only MS articles I have found on this indicate that cloned partitions need to have unique SIDs for security reasons, mainly in cases where they are on a network at the same time. This is not the case here, as only one partition can be booted at a time. Would changing the SID on one partition make a difference?