Vista Dual Boot doesn't see XP

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Guest

My installation of Vista is screwy (only works in Safe Mode) and I cannot
reboot into XP. They are on different physical HDs. When I try and boot to XP
is gives a boot.ini error and says it cannot locate /ntldr. I looked at
ECDedit and it is looking for ntldr on my E: drive, but my XP installation in
on my F: drive. My screwy Vista installation says that the E:/ntldr directory
exists, yet it doesn't appear even if I have the directory set to show
invisible and system files. I was going to try loading VistaBootPro, but my
installation is not stable enough... it aways crashes before I can install
it. I am hoping there is an easier by than trashing the Vista Boot Manager
and repairing the XP MBR.
 
Usually safe mode boot yes - normal boot no - indicates a driver problem.
XP must boot from the active partition on drive 0 (usually always C). A
boot manager, boot.ini for pre-Vista OSs and BCD for Vista installations,
is necessary in a multi-boot setup to have XP boot from other than drive 0
(C).

You do not elaborate on how XP and Vista were installed - clean or upgrade -
XP installed first followed by Vista and so forth.
 
TomKo said:
My installation of Vista is screwy (only works in Safe Mode) and I cannot
reboot into XP. They are on different physical HDs. When I try and boot to
XP
is gives a boot.ini error and says it cannot locate /ntldr. I looked at
ECDedit and it is looking for ntldr on my E: drive, but my XP installation
in
on my F: drive. My screwy Vista installation says that the E:/ntldr
directory
exists, yet it doesn't appear even if I have the directory set to show
invisible and system files. I was going to try loading VistaBootPro, but
my
installation is not stable enough... it aways crashes before I can install
it. I am hoping there is an easier by than trashing the Vista Boot Manager
and repairing the XP MBR.
Click to expand...

See if using VistaBoot Pro can help in setting up the dual boot.
http://www.vistabootpro.org/
 
My XP installation was a clean install on my E: drive and is at least 1 year
old. Vista is also a clean install on my G: drive (which Vista has re
designated G:). The only way for me to get back into XP was to boot with the
XP CD and run FIXMBR and FIXBOOT. I installed VistaBootPro from within XP and
it didn't automatically find the XP installation, it did, however, find some
sort of "Longhorn Pre-Install" version of Windows. Not sure if that is
normal. My E: drive is a 75gig EIDE drive and the G: drive is a 250gig SATA
drive. The Vista install is only stable in Safe mode, otherwise I get every
imaginable BSOD... from IRQL_THAN_OR_EQUAL to MEMORY MANAGEMENT. I think I
have seen at least seven different BSOD's so far!
 
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