Dual Boot: XP and Vista. How?

  • Thread starter Thread starter SacredHeart
  • Start date Start date
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SacredHeart

I have originally XP installed. Then I installed Vista to another
drive hooked up as C drive. Now when I attach both drives, XP is C:
drive and Vista is in D: (or G:) drive. I edited Boot.ini to point
to the Vista partition in the Boot menu. But when I select Vista it
goes out to never never land and nothing happens. The problem is
drive letter for Vista installation is totally wrong, all paths are
looking for "c:" but they are actually in D: or G:...How do you get
around this problem? Anybody have any pointers / ideas. Can I run a
script to reassign Drive D: as Drive C: before invoking Vista?
 
Hi,

You're using the wrong boot manager. XP's boot file, boot.ini, cannot load a
Vista installation. You need to use Vista's bootloader for the dual boot.
You can edit it with bcdedit, but most find it easier to just use
Vistabootpro from the .org of the same name.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com
 
I used EasyBCD to start with Vista first. I added the entry into the
boot manager. When I selected XP at boot time it did not work it
said "ntldr" was corrupt or something like that. The problem I see is
that both OS's were installed as C:\ drive. ( I had to do it because
Vista came as in image on the drive). When I had both drives hooked
up, one of them has to become D: drive which confuses the system
during boot. So I am not sure what else I can do???
Thanks for the info by the way.

halex
 
Hi,

Doesn't matter if each of them sees themselves as C:\, as whichever one is
loaded will just reletter the other in its file manager. Make sure only one
is listed as active in the disk manager, and that this is the drive being
loaded by the system BIOS. In your case, you should make the drive housing
Vista as the active one. If you make the one holding XP active, then you
will need to do a startup repair with a Vista DVD.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

I used EasyBCD to start with Vista first. I added the entry into the
boot manager. When I selected XP at boot time it did not work it
said "ntldr" was corrupt or something like that. The problem I see is
that both OS's were installed as C:\ drive. ( I had to do it because
Vista came as in image on the drive). When I had both drives hooked
up, one of them has to become D: drive which confuses the system
during boot. So I am not sure what else I can do???
Thanks for the info by the way.

halex
 
ok, I was able to use EasyBCD and "Write" the Master Boot Record to
enable to Vista Booting. It worked great. However I saw that the
Drive letters were changed around (i.e even though XP was on SATA -0
it became Drive G) and Vista was on SATA-2 as Drive G: it became Drive
C:. So far so good but when rebooted and tried to load XP it
croaked. So I had to go back to Vista and re-write MBR for XP as the
Default OS. I guess this solves my problem but it's not quite as
smooth as I hoped. Thanks for the info.
halex
 
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