Dual boot mystery.

Hi everyone,

Before anyone thinks "Oh another person asking how to install two OS's!!" Please take a seat and keep reading as I have spent literally hours trying to search other forums and sites for an answer to my problem.

This is the deal.....

Upon upgrading my mobo + gfx card + ram + cpu my xp didn't want to boot.
I found out the reason for this and took the following steps.

1 - Installed Vista Home premium x64 on a brand new Sata HDD.
2 - Transfered files from old hard drives to new Vista HDD to, in a sense, return my files programs etc to how they were before the "hardware misshap"
3 - All is fine and dandy
4 - First and only x64 compatibility issue has occured. (Roland printer driver wasn't compatible with x64 system)
5- Formatted one of my old hard drives (Sata) and then, installed xp home onto it, with my new vista drive still intact in my system (simply booting from cd rom and selecting where to install OS.

Both operating systems work fine BUT..........

My computer stalls after post bios with flashing cursor, UNLESS i have an OS installation disc in my cd-rom drive(xp or vista, doesn't matter). If I turn on computer with OS cd in drive, it will then proceed to show "Press any key to boot from cd..." I do not press any key and then i can, as expected, pick which OS I want to boot. I want to know if it's possible to get rid of this rediculous glitch and hav my computer just boot to the OS selection screen.

System is as follows

Asus P5N-D Mobo
intel E8400 3.0ghz dual core cpu
Nvidia 8800GT
4 gb ram
750gb SATA HDD (Vista)
160 gb IDE HDD (MISC FILES AND FOLDERS)
80 gb SATA HDD (XP)
DVD/RW IDE Drive


So....
Any comments ??

in your bios do you have the cd or harddrive as first?
it should be the harddrive .
scrooge

I had this last year, from what I remember you need to change your sata boot device priority in your bios.

Yeah I have tried alternating boot settings in Bios.
Have tried both cd-rom boot 1st and HDD boot 1st and still stalls.

The basic boot order menu allows you to tell which device to boot from; however, there's another menu which lets you select which SATA drive should boot first. Try re-arranging these. It's not real clear how to go about switching them, but you highlight one and then use your arrow keys to change them around.

I have also alternated the hard drive boot priority, No change.



**edit**

obviously not enough times huh..

I have just looked through the manual and below is the section I messed with to fix the problem.

Hmmm I can't say I remember having removable set as 1st. Will try this, and report.

chewbarka08 said:

I have also alternated the hard drive boot priority, No change.

Click to expand...

I have to ask. What exactly went on with that first aborted attempt? Am I assuming correctly that you upgraded your chipset and, without doing a clean install of XP, tried to get the old installation working on the new hardware... which didn't go so well... then transferred everything on that drive, errors and all, to you new Vista install?

I am unsure what settings to mess with in the boot configuration settings. I will post my options shortly.

But to answer Fumz....The conclusion I came to was that my origianl XP didn;t recognise the new hardware setup therefore had an abortion, so i needed to use the install cd to repair/reload xp.
I had lost my origianl OS install disc for XP, so i aquired a copy of vista (would have prefered xp but the new vista was 'cheaper' than a new xp. I then installed vista onto a new HDD then proceeded to install fresh programs and transfered only documents.

These are my current settings in the Boot Settings configuration menu...

Case open Warning - Disabled
Quick Boot - Enabled
Boot up Floppy seek - Disabled
Boot up Num-Lock - On
Typematic rate setting - Disabled
OS select for Dram > 64MB - [OS2]
Halt on - All, But keyboard

Hi to all!

I have a dual boot setup with XP on a 40 GB IDE HDD and Vista on a 160 GB SATA HDD.

I dont get any OS selection table. If I want to use XP, While POST screen is being showed I press F8 to "Enable BBS Pop-up" [BBS: Boot BIOS Selection] and select my 40 GB HDD.

Also, since you have installed XP after Vista you may try VistBootPRO from here:
VistaBootPRO - Go PRO with Microsoft Windows Vista Boot Manager

Have you tried disconnecting your optical drive and then seeing what happens?

Good Luck!

Hi I tried installing this program - didn't help my situation though.
I'm thinking it's Bios realted. I'm gona try and update my bios - maybe with a flash drive, as i don't have a floppy. Will also play around with boot config settings will elt you know how i get on tommorrow.

chow 4 now

well how about that.

after about 1/2 an hour of disabling, enabling and re aranging I think the setting that finally solved my problem was the hard drive boot priority

The order that I currently have is
1 - 160 GB IDE (misc. files and folders)
2 - 750GB SATA (Vista)
3 - 80 GB SATA (XP)

I will return all of my other settings to what they were originally and hopefully the next post will = solved.

SOLVED!!!

I also changed my boot device priority to

1 - HDD
2 - HDD
3 - HDD
4 - CD-ROM

Thanks for the info guys.
Hope this thread helps someone else!!