Vista / XP dual boot

[EvilCabal]

Hi,

I have been running on vista for a while but yesterday I decided to reinstall XP on another partition because of some annoying problems in Vista. But now I cannot boot on Vista anymore... I tried editing boot.ini like that:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows Vista" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect


The choice shows up when I boot but if I select Vista I get a black screen and I need to reset. What did I do wrong?

Thx,

Fred

 

[Circle9]

Try looking on PC Magazine's web site for some info on how to dual boot XP and Vista.

 

[EvilCabal]

I looked already. All the articles are about installing XP then Vista, which works great. I installed Vista before XP and it does not works. I could not find an article discussing this problem.

 

[smah]

Installing previous versions of Windows on top of Windows Vista

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555852

 

[linney]

I recommend this program for sorting out dual boot problems concerning Vista Boot Manager and the Boot.ini of XP.

VistaBootPRO

http://www.vistabootpro.org/

 

[EvilCabal]

Hey,


I tried the software and it managed to get Vista running but somehow the files NTDetect, ntdlr and boot.ini got deleted from the XP partition... so it stopped working. Copying those files from another computer and editing boot.ini fixed everything though. I read a few posts on the internet and this happened to many poeple using VistoBootPro... I am not sure why it happens thought. Anyway, it's working.

Thanks.

 

[tlcscousin]

Had the same issue installing XP on a laptop after Vista was installed. I started in Vista showed hidden files and copied ntldr and ntdetect.com to the XP partition. Then ran
EasyBCD and folowed its steps to fix the Vista boot and was able to dual boot without issues.

http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1