Dual Boot

  • Thread starter Thread starter elziko
  • Start date Start date
E

elziko

I have two disks on my machine, Disk 0 Partition 0 contains Vista, if I boot
from this disk, Vista loads up just nicely.

Before I installed Vista I use Ghost to copy my old Windows XP to Disk 1
Partition 0, where Disk 1 is in a removeable drive bay. The first time I
installed Vista, I had my removable drive in the system but that caused
Vista to choose annoying drive letters for everything when installed so I
re-installed Vista with the drive removed.

However, when I try and insert and boot from Disk 1, it loads Vista from the
other disk rather than Windows XP. I think I may have a boot manager on both
disks that tell the computer to load the OS on Disk 0 Partition 1 always but
I'm not sure how it all works!

How do I set everything up so that if I boot from DIsk 1 it loads XP or at
least get a menu to choose which OS to load?

TIA
 
The BIOS can't read you mind. If you want to boot from the second
drive, you have to set the BIOS to boot from it by changing the hard
disk boot order (Hard Disk Drives or Hard Disk Boot Priority setting)
in BIOS setup. If your motherboard is of recent vintage, there may be
a function key you can press during POST that will let you select the
drive to boot from.
 
The BIOS can't read you mind.

Sorry, I didn't make it clear but I *am* booting from Disk 1 (the disk with
XP on), I already know how to set the BIOS up.

The problem is that I believe that I have ended up with a boot manager on
both drives. The boot manager on Disk 0 says load the OS on Partition 0 of
Disk 0 (which is Vista). The boot manager on Disk 1 says loas the OS on
partition 0 of Disk 0 (which is, again Vista).

After a bit of playing around I think I have managed to add another OS entry
in the Boot Manager for Drive 1 so that it boots from Drive 1 Partition 0
but it complains theat boot.ini is missing. So I have since tried to restore
the boot.ini using the recover console but when I do this the command the
restores the file fails saying that it can't list the availables Windows
installtions - I don't have the exact error message with me.

If anyone can help, I'd very much appreciate it!

TIA
 
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