Vista - Dual boot trouble

I'm running XP Pro on my primary hard drive. Yesterday I installed 64-bit
Vista on my secondary hard drive. I expected to be able to dual boot, but not
so: I lost the ability to boot into XP after installing Vista. No OS menu was
displayed during the boot process. XP was not even listed as a startup option
in Vista.

I tried running bootcfg /rebuild in the XP repair console, but it wouldn't
run (ever after running chkdisk). Then I used bcdedit to make the boot menu
appear. I set {legacy} as the default OS. This caused the OS menu to appear
during the boot process. However, I still wasn't able to boot XP because
ntldr was corrupted.

I finally managed to restore XP by playing around with the XP repair console
but, to be honest, I'm not sure how I did it, and in the process I lost the
ability to boot Vista.

Is this expected behavior? I have an AMD Athlon x2 3800+, an nForce 4 Ultra
chipset, two SATA hard drives and a PATA DVD burner.

Try EasyBCD http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

It's a gui based application for modifying the Vista bootloader, which is
totally different from XP's bootloader. It's easy to add, remove, or modify
the OS boot selection options. It saved me when I had to re-image my main
XP partition, with a pre-Vista image. I was able to quickly and easily
re-create the bootloader in about 2 minutes.

--
"Hurricane" Andrew

Jean Salvati wrote:
> I'm running XP Pro on my primary hard drive. Yesterday I installed
> 64-bit Vista on my secondary hard drive. I expected to be able to
> dual boot, but not so: I lost the ability to boot into XP after
> installing Vista. No OS menu was displayed during the boot process.
> XP was not even listed as a startup option in Vista.
>
> I tried running bootcfg /rebuild in the XP repair console, but it
> wouldn't run (ever after running chkdisk). Then I used bcdedit to
> make the boot menu appear. I set {legacy} as the default OS. This
> caused the OS menu to appear during the boot process. However, I
> still wasn't able to boot XP because ntldr was corrupted.
>
> I finally managed to restore XP by playing around with the XP repair
> console but, to be honest, I'm not sure how I did it, and in the
> process I lost the ability to boot Vista.
>
> Is this expected behavior? I have an AMD Athlon x2 3800+, an nForce 4
> Ultra chipset, two SATA hard drives and a PATA DVD burner.

Hi Andrew,

Quote "/ I was able to quickly and easily re-create the bootloader in about
2 minutes. /" Unquote

Can you please inform what exactly should be done to add Xp to the Vista
Boot Loader. As Jean has written, merely adding a legacy OS entry via
EASYBCD will only add the XP to the Boot Menu but if you choose the XP
option in the boot menu while booting, we get a "\NTLDR not found" error.

Thanks in advance
Simha


"Hurricane Andrew" <hurricane_andrew@nospam_verizon.net> wrote in message
news:OKOxHko3GHA.3508@TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl...
> Try EasyBCD http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1
>
> It's a gui based application for modifying the Vista bootloader, which is
> totally different from XP's bootloader. It's easy to add, remove, or
> modify the OS boot selection options. It saved me when I had to re-image
> my main XP partition, with a pre-Vista image. I was able to quickly and
> easily re-create the bootloader in about 2 minutes.
>
> --
> "Hurricane" Andrew
>
> Jean Salvati wrote:
>> I'm running XP Pro on my primary hard drive. Yesterday I installed
>> 64-bit Vista on my secondary hard drive. I expected to be able to
>> dual boot, but not so: I lost the ability to boot into XP after
>> installing Vista. No OS menu was displayed during the boot process.
>> XP was not even listed as a startup option in Vista.
>>
>> I tried running bootcfg /rebuild in the XP repair console, but it
>> wouldn't run (ever after running chkdisk). Then I used bcdedit to
>> make the boot menu appear. I set {legacy} as the default OS. This
>> caused the OS menu to appear during the boot process. However, I
>> still wasn't able to boot XP because ntldr was corrupted.
>>
>> I finally managed to restore XP by playing around with the XP repair
>> console but, to be honest, I'm not sure how I did it, and in the
>> process I lost the ability to boot Vista.
>>
>> Is this expected behavior? I have an AMD Athlon x2 3800+, an nForce 4
>> Ultra chipset, two SATA hard drives and a PATA DVD burner.
>
>