Running 2 systems

  • Thread starter Thread starter William
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William

I had to replace my motherboard and when I did I was able to start up on
Vista with a SATA hard drive but when I tried to start up WinXP on an IDE
hard drive I get the message "NTLDR is missing". Can someone offer help. I
have downloaded a dual boot program I found on this newsgroup but would
rather not install if I don't need it. Thanks.
 
I had to replace my motherboard and when I did I was able to start up on
Vista with a SATA hard drive but when I tried to start up WinXP on an IDE
hard drive I get the message "NTLDR is missing". Can someone offer help. I
have downloaded a dual boot program I found on this newsgroup but would
rather not install if I don't need it. Thanks.
Click to expand...


One of the first things your BIOS needs to do to load any version of
Windows is read the first sector on the primary hard drive's boot
partition. This is where it will find the Master Boot Record. If the
BIOS can't find it, likely because it is trying to boot from a non
bootable source, hence you get an error saying what it needs is
missing or damaged.

If I understand correctly you want to be able to boot either XP or
Vista. This is why you need to have some switching program that
present a menu so in effect you tell the BIOS what partition to go to
from which it can boot.

There are many how-to dual boot web sites. Use Google to find another
if the following I picked at random doesn't help:

http://apcmag.com/how_to_dualboot_vista_with_xp__stepbystep_guide_with_screenshots.htm
 
Three files are needed to boot XP: NTLDR, NTDETECT, AND BOOT.INI
Use XP disk to go either do a repair install, or go into recovery console in
there, and fix the Master Boot Record!
 
I ran Vista system repair from the DVD on a dual boot system with XP and
Recover Console installed. I ran it two or three times before it got Vista
booting again. It found Recover Console but it deleted XP from boot.ini. I
wasn't impressed.

I read a TechNet article on Boot Manager and figured out how to fix the
system myself. Next time it will probably take all of fifteen minutes.
Knowledge is power.

Cheers,

Earle
 
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