David Wilkinson

John Barnes wrote:

> Don't stay out of responding. The sources I have read indicate the mbr is
> different so I suggested adding that step. Very little information about
> the Vista boot process seems to be available still, let alone authoritative.
>

When XP alone is installed, the MBR on the first bootable disk points to
the boot sector of the XP partition. If you now install Vista on another
partition (perhaps on a different hard drive) then (as I understand it)
the boot files on the XP partition get modified, but the MBR still
points to the boot sector of the XP partition (as it has to, or nothing
would boot). Now there may be technical differences in the MBR after
Vista is installed, but the key information on where to look for the
boot files must be the same.

Otherwise, boot managers like Ranish ot BootIt NG (BING) would not work,
because they operate by modifying the MBR to a "standard MBR" which
points to the boot sector of the selected OS. Any other info in the MBR
(except the partition table of course) cannot therefore be crucial.

BTW, all these things are much easier to do if you use a third party
boot manager. I highly recommend BING. You can just forget about NTDLR
and the Vista boot loader and all that stuff. Each OS is installed
separately, and you can install or reinstall them in any order. I'm not
sure if BING can recover from a situation where both XP and Vista are
already installed, but it is possible. Certainly you can use it if you
already have one OS installed.

David Wilkinson