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Need a little help… with “boot” problem.

First off, it is not my main machine or a “Production” machine, but I would
like to get it working correctly.

Background:

Here is the set up. It is a Fujitsu Laptop; it was dual booting the original
XP and Vista Beta2 with no problems. I am using Symantec Boot Magic and that
was working with no issues. Enter Vista RC1. I could not simply do an upgrade
of the Beta2 because there is not enough space allotted on the partition;
since there were no files that I needed to keep, I just formatted the Vista
Partition and did a clean install to that partition. What happened (I now
know) is that the Boot Magic partition was disabled which hid the Vista
partition and after the coping files reboot it booted straight into the XP
partition. That did not work very well. The installation failed and Vista
tried to roll back and rebooted. After that happened when the PC was booted I
got the “Please chose an operating system to start.” However, there was only
one choice “Windows Installation Rollback” once that started it would look
like it was going to start Vista but instead of a log on screen I got a
screen with “this installation was not successful” and the PC would reboot.
It would continue this as long as you let it.

By using the rescue disk I booted to partition magic and set the Vista
Partition to active and, once that was done I booted from the VistaRC1 DVD
and installed it to the blank active partition this netted me a working
(quite well I might add excepting USB devices, but that’s another subject)
Vista RC1 installation. I then used the rescue disc to unhide the XP
partition and based on reading and searching a wide variety of online sources
found and renamed the file “bootsect.bak” on the XP drive. Then once again
set the XP partition to active and rebooted. This netted me a screen n with
“Windows Installation Rollback” and “Older Version of Windows” and I can
start the XP installation by choosing “Older Version of Windows”, so I then
repaired the Boot Magic installation and set it to active.

Problem:

Now when booting the PC I get the boot magic screen. If I chose Vista I get
the working copy of RC1, if I chose XP Professional, I get the screen with a
choice between “Windows Installation Rollback” and “Older Version of Windows”
and I can start the XP installation by choosing “Older Version of Windows”.

Searching various forums and tech net I find two solutions, one involves
renaming “boot.ini” and then renaming “boot.bak” to “boot.ini”. Problem is no
amount of searching in windows explorer will locate the “boot.ini” file. I
can access it from the XP installation by running msconfig. I also know it is
there somewhere because any attempt to rename “boot.bak” to “boot.ini” is
greeted with “already exist”. The other involves running a command from the
Vista DVD to remove the Vista boot sector. I am concerned that this may
remove both of them (I believe there is one on the XP partition and one on
the Vista partition). I have also considered opening the “boot.bak” file and
then copy/pasting the contents into “boot.ini” in msconfig, but that seems a
bit strong-armed and more than a little reckless.

Solution:

Presently is to live with it as is but would rather fix it if someone has
some suggestions. I apologize for being so long winded, but I thought that
the background might help.