Problem solved. As mentioned in my first post, I suspected it was the drive
numbering in the BIOS. When I installed my 3rd drive to put Vista on, the
BIOS set it as the first drive, or ahead of the other drives already there.
So my Vista install (from the DVD) seems to have assumed there are no other
OS's on the other drives. I simply switched the SATA cables to reflect the
proper drives order and booted into XP with no problem. Then re-installed
Vista again, this time it detected the other OS's and put them in the boot
loader. So lesson learned, Vista will not check for other OS's if they're on
drives numbered after the Vista drive.
I simply reconnected the SATA drive cables so
"Rock" wrote:
> "amenx" <amenx@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote
>
> > 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.
>
> If the install is started by booting the DVD, then it will take the
> partition it's installed on as C. If the install is started from the XP
> desktop it will take whatever drive letter is next.
>
> Use Vista Boot Pro to straighten out the dual boot.
> http://www.vistabootpro.org/
>
>
> --
> Rock [MS-MVP User/Shell]
>
>