Can't Boot XP After Vista Install

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
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G

Guest

Before the Vista install, I had a dual boot setup with a single hard drive
with XP on one partition and Suse Linux on two other partitions. Suse was
installed after XP and the Linux Grub boot manager was installed in the MBR
and all was well. To do the Vista install, I deleted the Linux partitions
using the XP disk manager, created and formatted a NTFS partition for Vista.
After seeing several other postings saying that the Vista boot manager would
replace the previous boot manager (whether XP or Linux) in the MBR, I didn't
bother to run the XP recovery console and issue a "fixmbr" command. I've
installed Vista without any problems and it's working more or less OK, but at
boot time I don't have a menu to choose whether to boot XP or Vista. In
retrospect, I think since the Grub boot loader was still in place during the
Vista install, the Vista boot loader couldn't figure out that XP existed in
another partition. So now the question is what to do. Vista can see all the
files on the XP side so hopefully some magic can be worked with the dreaded
Vista boot loader. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
 
Andre,

Understand. A question though. I originally tried to do the Vista install
from XP and the setup.exe wouldn't run (I installed the 64 bit version). Is
there any alternative to installing from XP once the other problems are fixed?
 
Boot from your XP cd and in recovery console, try bootcfg /add to see if it
picks up the Vista and xp ok and if it will add the xp to the vista
bootloader, IF not then issue a fixmbr then re-run bootcfg /add.
 
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