Are you running the Vista Upgrade ? From what the MVPs have said, if you
have the upgrade version of Vista, then by license agreement, it will
disable XP, Since you're not suppose to be running it any longer.
I have the full installs and have not had a problem dual booting. Once I
choose Vista or Earlier version, I then get the normal XP bootmenu which
would let me choose which XP to boot.
There have been a few reports (search the group for dual booting) about
people with multiple boots (odd drive configs) that get screwed. Carl F
wrote a guide on how to resolve the issue.
I actually like that Vista makes it's drive C:, regardless of what drive it
is. I'm sure the recovery console, just reports the disks it knows about in
the order it sees them
"amenx" <amenx@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:7A257CF2-D611-4029-8675-C595DC6AA3D2@microsoft.com...
> Prior to installing Vista, I was dual booting XP and XP. So I installed it
> as
> a 3rd OS in a tri-boot system. It didnt even recognize my installed XPs
> there
> and went thru the installation as if no other OS existed, so no bootloader
> or
> option to choose the OS to boot from. This I could not accept, so I
> proceeded
> to removed Vista by rebooting with the DVD and go thru restoring my PC to
> its
> earlier state. When I got the 'repair' option, there was only the Vista
> partition to choose from, no XP to go back to. So I inserted my XP cd to
> repair the boot process from the recovery console which it supposedly did,
> but when booting into XP I got the NTLDR missing error.
>
> I'll fix it sooner or later, but I why did Vista not detect the other XP
> installations? I've installed Vista on another PC also in a dual boot
> config
> and it worked fine. I suspect its something to do with the drive numbering
> in
> the BIOS, I added a 3rd HD recently to install Vista on, but it seems ro
> have
> been numbered before the other drives with the XP installations. So did
> Vista
> just assume that since its on drive 1, then nothing else matters or exists
> on
> drives 2 and 3?
>
> Another thing, Vista scrambles the drive letters and makes things more
> confusing and insists on being in C, but when you go into the recovery
> console it may be somethign else.