Vista - Yet another new Dual Boot issue....

Hello,

I installed Vista yesterday on a seperate 160GB SATA drive only to realize
it decided to try and install on my existing XP drive which is lacking the
total space needed to install. So after all the confusion Vista finally
placed itself onto the correct 160GB SATA and not my 200GB SATA which houses
my XP Pro. So at first I had the option to dual boot but I reinstalled a
fresh install of XP Pro back onto the 200GB as more space was being used by
hidden Vista install files when it tried to install initially over my old XP.
Well the XP install went well but now I directly boot into XP without even
getting an option to choose Vista or XP. Any reasons or clues why this is?
Cheers for the help all!!

"CHOUT" wrote:
>
> I installed Vista yesterday on a seperate 160GB SATA drive only to realize
> it decided to try and install on my existing XP drive which is lacking the
> total space needed to install. So after all the confusion Vista finally
> placed itself onto the correct 160GB SATA and not my 200GB SATA which
> houses
> my XP Pro. So at first I had the option to dual boot but I reinstalled a
> fresh install of XP Pro back onto the 200GB as more space was being used
> by
> hidden Vista install files when it tried to install initially over my old
> XP.
> Well the XP install went well but now I directly boot into XP without even
> getting an option to choose Vista or XP. Any reasons or clues why this is?
> Cheers for the help all!!

I know why it happens but not how to gracefully correct the problem. I have
a similar two harddisk setup with XP on disk 0 and Vista installed in a 15GB
partition on disk 1. Sometime ago I used Partition Magic to move the then
existing two partitions toward the back on the second disk and install the
third 15GB partition as the first partition which made it the primary. Then
over a few months I installed Vista builds on the second disk without any
problems.

When installing Vista as a dual boot from XP it is the Vista installer that
sets up the dual boot manager which I understand is specific to Vista.

Anyhow about a week after I installed beta2 my XP system went bonkers and
became unreliable which caused me to "repair" XP using it's install DVD and
when doing so I got a warning message that a dual boot was detected and most
likely would become inoperative. The repair over-wrote the dual boot manager
just as it had warned it would do.

I tried to find a way to rebuild or reinstall the Vista dual boot manager
but without success and after fooling around for way too long a time I
decided to reinstall Vista so I reformatted the Vista partition and had done
with it.

It would be nice to have a fix that is more elegant that a complete
reinstall of Vista...

"I.P. Nichols" <nospam@nocorp.com> wrote in message
news:uZgr3qSkGHA.4104@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...
> "CHOUT" wrote:
>>
>> I installed Vista yesterday on a seperate 160GB SATA drive only to
>> realize
>> it decided to try and install on my existing XP drive which is lacking
>> the
>> total space needed to install. So after all the confusion Vista finally
>> placed itself onto the correct 160GB SATA and not my 200GB SATA which
>> houses
>> my XP Pro. So at first I had the option to dual boot but I reinstalled a
>> fresh install of XP Pro back onto the 200GB as more space was being used
>> by
>> hidden Vista install files when it tried to install initially over my old
>> XP.
>> Well the XP install went well but now I directly boot into XP without
>> even
>> getting an option to choose Vista or XP. Any reasons or clues why this
>> is?
>> Cheers for the help all!!
>
> I know why it happens but not how to gracefully correct the problem. I
> have a similar two harddisk setup with XP on disk 0 and Vista installed in
> a 15GB partition on disk 1. Sometime ago I used Partition Magic to move
> the then existing two partitions toward the back on the second disk and
> install the third 15GB partition as the first partition which made it the
> primary. Then over a few months I installed Vista builds on the second
> disk without any problems.
>
> When installing Vista as a dual boot from XP it is the Vista installer
> that sets up the dual boot manager which I understand is specific to
> Vista.
>
> Anyhow about a week after I installed beta2 my XP system went bonkers and
> became unreliable which caused me to "repair" XP using it's install DVD
> and when doing so I got a warning message that a dual boot was detected
> and most likely would become inoperative. The repair over-wrote the dual
> boot manager just as it had warned it would do.
>
> I tried to find a way to rebuild or reinstall the Vista dual boot manager
> but without success and after fooling around for way too long a time I
> decided to reinstall Vista so I reformatted the Vista partition and had
> done with it.
>
> It would be nice to have a fix that is more elegant that a complete
> reinstall of Vista...
>
>
>
Haven't had to try it on Vista Beta 2 (yet), but would imagine that there
will be a Console Repair facility as on XP Pro somewhere in the Vista Beta
Set Up. Until installing Vista Beta 2, I had a three-way boot to Win98SE,
Win2000 or Win XP Pro and have lost count of the times I have had to
re-install Win98SE and use the Console Repair facility to reconstruct the
Boot Manager and avoid re-installing XP. Currently have a four-way boot
configuration, which is running just as it should but no doubt it won't be
long before I have to find out the hard way hw to reconstruct the Boot
Manager with Vista.

HTH

Geoff