Dual Boot Problem

.Griff. · 1 Jul 2008 at 17:28

In the past I've installed Vista onto a new partition alongside XP (My original OS) and Vista automatically created a boot menu to allow me to select which OS I wanted to boot into. I guessed Vista being the new OS recognised XP was on another partition and created the dual boot menu automatically.

However my cousin has installed XP onto a new partition alongside Vista (His original OS) and each time he restarts the PC it loads in XP with no boot loader in site.

I'm not surprised as XP is the older OS but is there anything I can do to give him a dual boot menu?

Greenlizard0 · 1 Jul 2008 at 17:30

I remember reading about this a while back and apparently you had to install XP first. It's really hard/impossible to do it the other way?

SimonC · 1 Jul 2008 at 17:53

Read this http://apcmag.com/how_to_dual_boot_vista_and_xp_with_vista_installed_first__the_stepbystep_guide.htm

You need to use a program called easybcd that will change the boot loader as xp overwrites the vista one and it doesn't recognize vista, i think thats right its just from what ive read.

.Griff. · 1 Jul 2008 at 18:24

Cheers mate.. I'll have a read through it later.

bluetech · 1 Jul 2008 at 18:26

SimonC said:
Read this http://apcmag.com/how_to_dual_boot_vista_and_xp_with_vista_installed_first__the_stepbystep_guide.htm

You need to use a program called easybcd that will change the boot loader as xp overwrites the vista one and it doesn't recognize vista, i think thats right its just from what ive read.

I too can vouch for this, however I installed XP before Vista and THEN installed easybcd in Vista to set XP as the default. It may however work things out for itself and have it's settings to be system wide default. Try installing it and trying it on Vista first.

Please post back the results as I am sure there are many others who would like to see the results going forwards.