Dual Boot Problem

[MobTel]

hi,I have/had a dual booting system, running XP pro 32bit on one disk and Vista Ultimate 64bit on another disk. having upgraded my system,

i needed to reinstall a clean Vista 64.After what seemed like a lifetime, i finally got it updated with windows update and all required drivers. It looks good but Ive lost my dual boot screen, it just loads Vista direct on booting...

within Vista it sees my vista disk as C: my XP disk as E: and my Storage disk as D:

Prior to reinstall it was Vista C: ,XP D: Storage E:,

i could change these in windows but not sure thats the problem.

How do i get my Dual boot back , as i love XP and really hate Vista.

Will I have to reinstall XP, I hope not ..

Hope you can help....

 

[zak4994]

You need to go into the BIOS and change a couple of settings so that it shows the "dual boot screen" as you say.

Alternatively, there should be a button you can press before/after the POST that shows this screen.

 

[Olly_K]

Vista does away with the boot.ini file, so you'll need to use something like this :

http://www.vistabootpro.org/

There is no option in the BIOS to do this, it is software specific, not hardware

 

[°TheMadDutchDude°]

I believe to fix this, all you have to do is sort out the XP boot.bat file.

To do this, load the XP CD.. hit the repair option, it'll go into a DOS format. Select which drive you want (the one with XP on it, either C or D) and load that one. Following that, type "fixboot", hit enter. Exit the console and you should be good to go

 

[MobTel]

Thanks for the feedback.

As it sounded the easiest I tryed XP CD option, on select drive it came up

D: Windows

C: WINDOWS

both asked for admin password,, (I dont have any set)

On trying C: hiting the return key would not work

but did on the D: drive...

did a dir to look around and was convinced it was the correct disk, so went ahead

message received, are you sure you want to put a boot on D drive, i answered yes, it did it....

unfortunately this did not solve the problem...

Looked at the reviews etc on vistabootpro, they are very mixed, some peeps say its free some that you have to buy it, so working out where to download it from

As so no sure whether putting boot on the D drive is going to affect it.... we will see

 

[Olly_K]

the xp method wouldnt work, im suprised you can still boot from your vista partition. Vista removes the boot.ini file from xp, so using anything based around XP will never work for you.

 

[MobTel]

Thanks for the info particularly Olly_K...

Sorry for the delay but other problems occuring...

I downloaded a copy of vistabootpro, and after reloading Vista, this worked fine (not the easiest of programs to use, spent hours on their forum)

Then decided to reload XP, bit of a mistake, as not sure what disk is what ( both op system HDs both the same) thought id just leave the XP disk on and unplug the others

XP loaded fine, can boot from either disk from bios, great, but lost my dual boot, as im now recasing my rig, ive stopped playing with dual boot, but am sure, I solve it soon..

Thanks for all the help

Will post when all working again