Dual Boot with two Hd's

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Guest

Hi,
If I have Win XP installed on my C-Drive and I have Vista installed cleanly
on another drive (D-Drive) is there any way I could edit the boot.ini file on
my C-Drive and make it a dual boot configuration. I switched my sata cables
around and made my D-Drive the C-Drive and then installed Vista on it. I
played around with it for awhlie just to make sure it was somewhat stable and
had drivers for all my hardware and that most of my software would run on it.
I have all my development tools on my C-Drive so I didn't want to take any
chances. Vista ran and is running fine but in order to use XP now I have to
keep switching my cables back and forth.
So hence the question, is there any way I can edit the .ini file I know
vista uses BCD and not boot.ini but I figured if I could point to Vista from
the boot.ini that it would work. Thanks in advance and sorry for the long
post......Eric
 
Ribeye said:
I know
vista uses BCD and not boot.ini but I figured if I could point to Vista from
the boot.ini that it would work.
Click to expand...

No one seems to know the answer to this yet. Officially, it's not possible.

To solve your problem, the official way to do it would be to use the
Vista boot loader as the default, and simply point it to your other
Microsoft based operating systems regardless of which disk/partition
they're on. You may also be able to switch the boot drive order from the
SATA BIOS.

(I use SCSI, and I can just change the SCSI ID if I need to).
 
Hi Eric,

I posted a reply earlier today which addresses the multi-boot scenario; but
first here's what's really going on:

Windows Vista's BCD automatically (by default) enumerates partitions based
on partition and cabling sequence from those in BIOS. What this means is,
whatever drive is PRIMARY/MASTER ends up having the partition letters C, D,
E (and so forth)... then Primary/Slave, then Secondary/Master, then
Secondary/Slave, then SATA 0, SATA 1, etc...

KEEP IN MIND, Vista's partition lettering is *independent* from XP's. So a
partition letter of "F:" in XP might translate to "K:" in Vista (hey, i have
tons of partitions spread across 5 HDDs, hence my experience). Also,
partitions are re-lettered upon OS boot; they are not hard-coded anywhere.

SO, once you have the cables in a proper position, use the steps below to
modify the Partition boot sequence as the BCD would see them, usually with
System/Active = C: [as with XP]. For my config, Vista has "Partition=G:\"
even though the actual partition letter is C:\ once I'm within the Vista OS.

Here's the step-by-step for BCD editing:
"BCD EDITING USING VISTA INSTALLER DISC/RECOVERY CONSOLE"

a) In BIOS, verify that CD-ROM is the first device booted
b) Using the Vista installer CD/DVD, insert it; reboot
c) When it prompts to load from CD, press any key
d) When Vista's installer is loaded (you can "install"), select the
"recovery" text-link at the bottom-left part of the screen
e) After it loads the drivers, you can ignore any prompts to get to the menu
options
f) Select the COMMAND PROMPT choice (not sure the labeling), and there you
can run BCDEdit.exe commands
g) For help, run "BCDEdit.exe /?" ... or simply type "bcdedit.exe /enum" to
see what's there.
h) Standard commands are "bcdedit.exe /set {ntldr} Description WindowsXP"

- naseru
 
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