My HDD that has my XP installation has failed. The chances of retrieving any
data from the drive are very remote. Therefore I am going to have to
re-install my XP on a fresh partition. What I need to know is what
alterations I am going to have to do to the BCDEDIT to make the new XP
installation be recognised at start up? I cannot afford to buy a new drive
so I am going to be installing XP on a partition on the same drive as my
Vista installation. Then Boot.ini file was fairly straight forward to edit
but this BCD setup seems a bit more complicated. Why can't the two work in
conjunction with each other.

If allowed I would like to comment that my S.M.A.R.T. detection has let me
down big style. I thought that the idea behind the S.M.A.R.T. technology was
there to advise you that your drive was about to fail to give you the option
of backing up your drive before total loss occured. My drive has failed in
the space of a couple of hours while using XP and I had no advance warning
that a failure was about to occur.

LeeG wrote:

> My HDD that has my XP installation has failed. The chances of retrieving any
> data from the drive are very remote. Therefore I am going to have to
> re-install my XP on a fresh partition. What I need to know is what
> alterations I am going to have to do to the BCDEDIT to make the new XP
> installation be recognised at start up? I cannot afford to buy a new drive
> so I am going to be installing XP on a partition on the same drive as my
> Vista installation. Then Boot.ini file was fairly straight forward to edit
> but this BCD setup seems a bit more complicated. Why can't the two work in
> conjunction with each other.
>
> If allowed I would like to comment that my S.M.A.R.T. detection has let me
> down big style. I thought that the idea behind the S.M.A.R.T. technology was
> there to advise you that your drive was about to fail to give you the option
> of backing up your drive before total loss occured. My drive has failed in
> the space of a couple of hours while using XP and I had no advance warning
> that a failure was about to occur.

VistaBootPro will probabaly do what you need. But IMHO a third party
boot manager such as BootIt NG (recommended) is a much better way to
deal with these multi-boot issues.

David Wilkinson