Dual boot Vist 64 + XP Pro

sdfuk

sdfuk

sdfuk

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Hi

Just built a new rig and was running Vista 64 on it - looks goods but problem is compatability with some games so I put Win XP pro on a separate HDD and that booted no problem (I'm in XP OS now).

Problems I have now are:

1) There are no dual boot options when I start pc so boots WIN XP
2) Missing NTLDR file in VISTA If I detached all HDDs bar the Vista 1 it cant boot from that anymore

Any idea on how to fix these problems? Do I need to do a clean install of Vista? Will that then make Win XP not boot? HELP!

Cheers
S
 
Hi

Thanks - thats annoying as I had that ready to use. I was deciding between that 1 and vistabootpro

It's going to be a long afternoon!
S
 
Well,

Xp is loaded up ok and now vista is loaded ok (installed in that order) but inorder to boot from either OS I have to go into the Bios and manually select the HDD to boot from which is a bit long winded.

Do oyu think I should load up the Neosmart software and see if that can see winxp?

Cheers
S
 
OK update time-got it to work but after a lot of messing around when really the answer was simple..

XP and Vista are on different drives so I'm not sure if this will work for a single partitioned drive.

1) install Win xp pro
2) install vista 64
3) go into xp pro (for me i had to keep change boot sequence in BIOS) and copy ntldr, ntdetect and boot.ini to the Vista drive (c:\)
4) boot into Vista (again I had to change boot up in BIOS)
5) install Easybcd and add win xp OS to the bootup sequence (its obvious)
6) reboot pc but making the drive with Vista on it the 1st in the sequence in the BIOS.

you will now see two options

1) Vista boot
2) XP boot

For me Vista would always boot up but I had the following problem when booting from 2) XP boot:

"MISSING NTDLR" FILE - an error like that and trying to fix this lead to other problems that I wont go into. A simple solution was this

make changes to the 5th line in the boot.ini :

from "rdisk(0)" to "rdisk(1)"

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

basically what i think is happening is that vista is on disk 0 and therefore you must tell the pc that xp is on disk 1. I was trying for hours to sort this out until I found something on the net.

Also to note is that I copied the boot.ini file whilst I was in win XP (do that from BIOS). I tried to change the boot.ini in vista but it wouldn't let me save any changes.

Anyway - hope this helps someone - it seems to work for me. The only caveat is that when I choose the option to boot into win xp i get another option to boot into MS Win XP or default XP, the latter just reboots the pc - I'll work on a solution for this.

Cheers
S
 
What I did.......

Format two paritions
Install XP
Install vista, using the custom install option to make sure it goes on the right partition and doesn't try to upgrade your XP.
use vista's bootloader, which it installs automagically.

I can't grasp why you're having all these problems.
The vista installer can see the XP partition can't it?
 
It works ok now but Vista didn't see XP Pro until I loaded Easybcd.

The whole problem for me was knowing to change a 0 to 1 - about 3 hours of messing about - DOH!
 
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