Vista Xp Dual boot system Issues

Pandorasghost · 18 Sep 2008 at 17:54

Hello, I have just re-built my Xp and Vista.

I have two seperate HDD's one for Vista and one for XP,

I installed XP no issues, and then installed Vista, Now for some reason I cannot get the Boot menu up so i can select witch OS I want to use. With both hdd's connected it defaults to Vista and does not even offer me to use Xp any Ideas?

thanks!

Sel · 18 Sep 2008 at 21:23

Your setup my be different to mine as I have two versions of XP on separate drives, all I do is press f11 on boot up and I get boot menu screen. My motherboard is designed that way, on my other motherboard I had to press escape at boot up and the function wasn't listed in the manual.

Pandorasghost · 19 Sep 2008 at 14:06

I see where your coming from, but what Im saying is that the Vista BCD or what ever it is, the Vista version of the Boot.ini file is not working and seeing that I have an XP HDD

Nanobot · 19 Sep 2008 at 19:56

Try looking for BCDEdit, it might let you recreate your boot menu...

Pandorasghost · 22 Sep 2008 at 13:26

Yea I found that, But i do not know what Im supposed to do with it, to tell it to show the boot menu and to give me the choice between Operating systems!

thanks any help would be nice!

Nanobot · 22 Sep 2008 at 16:39

Sorry for the confusion PG, I'm too used to command line tools. I should have said look for EasyBCD as well as, its a gui tool that lets you view add or modify the vista bootloader so you should then be able to add XP to your boot menu. I have Vista and XP on different drives and EasyBCD shows:

There are a total of 2 entries listed in the Vista Bootloader.
Bootloader Timeout: 30 seconds.
Default OS: Microsoft Windows Vista

Entry #1

Name: Microsoft Windows XP Professional
BCD ID: {ntldr}
Drive: D:\
Bootloader Path: \ntldr

Entry #2

Name: Microsoft Windows Vista
BCD ID: {current}
Drive: C:\
Bootloader Path: \Windows\system32\winload.exe
Windows Directory: \Windows