Dual Boot- XP/Vista

S

SmartTart

New Member
So I've come across a bit of a problem here...
After having network problems with Vista (can't get a wireless signal), I decided to install XP SP2 to a seperate HDD. Everything is going pretty well overall until I realized that when I boot XP, there is no boot menu- there's no way I can get back to Vista. I have looked at the M$FT website, among others, and found that everyone recommends installing XP from Vista and using Vista's new-and-improved boot.ini (which isn't really a boot.ini at all) to manually add-in XP. Well I did it the other way around and XP's boot.ini won't recognize Vista since it doesn't even have such an entry. I've looked all over and can't seem to find any way that I can either a.) boot to Vista so I can set all this up from that end or b.) manually add-in Vista to the boot menu from the XP partition.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Frustrated and :confused:,
Ben
 
Run a Startup Repair using the Vista installation disk. That should create a boot menu that will allow you to boot between the OSes.
 
download EasyBCD. its a dual booting program that lets you modify the boot registry. i used it when i was dual booting vista/xp, and it worked well.
 
luckyedboy66 said:
download EasyBCD. its a dual booting program that lets you modify the boot registry. i used it when i was dual booting vista/xp, and it worked well.
Click to expand...

I downloaded the program you recommended, but where do I go from there?
Thanks a lot you guys, you have no idea how much I appreciate this! :)
 
I'm currently working with a beta tool for protecting the Vista system restore points when booting into XP with a dual boot configuration. That works with or without the EasyBCD tool mentioned with the 1.7.2 as the latest release. http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

In order to see XP added into the Vista boot loader you first copy the XP boot files onto the root of the Vista primary itself. You need the boot.ini, NTDETECT.com, IO.sys, MSDOS.sys files present. If XP is installed last you then obviously have to boot up with the Vista dvd as mentioned before and look in the repair tools section with the link seen on the first splash screen.

The repair tool will instantly rewrite or restore the mbr and other boot information/files with a quick restart to see Vista load right up. You then follow the WiKi instructions for adding XP into the boot loader. http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Bootloader+Management

The process is easy to follow where you select the add/remove entries option to proceed to select the drive, OS, and even renaming Windows XP to something like XP Home or Pro drive 1 etc. there. Hopefully soon the Beta #1 of the other tool will be readily available for those that want to try it out when a public download link is available. That protects the Vista restore points by actually hiding the Vista primary from XP when booting into that version.
 
PC eye said:
I'm currently working with a beta tool for protecting the Vista system restore points when booting into XP with a dual boot configuration. That works with or without the EasyBCD tool mentioned with the 1.7.2 as the latest release. http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

In order to see XP added into the Vista boot loader you first copy the XP boot files onto the root of the Vista primary itself. You need the boot.ini, NTDETECT.com, IO.sys, MSDOS.sys files present. If XP is installed last you then obviously have to boot up with the Vista dvd as mentioned before and look in the repair tools section with the link seen on the first splash screen.

The repair tool will instantly rewrite or restore the mbr and other boot information/files with a quick restart to see Vista load right up. You then follow the WiKi instructions for adding XP into the boot loader. http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Bootloader+Management

The process is easy to follow where you select the add/remove entries option to proceed to select the drive, OS, and even renaming Windows XP to something like XP Home or Pro drive 1 etc. there. Hopefully soon the Beta #1 of the other tool will be readily available for those that want to try it out when a public download link is available. That protects the Vista restore points by actually hiding the Vista primary from XP when booting into that version.
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Well the Vista DVD I have (which came with my Velocity Micro) doesn't even have the repair option! Is there an alternate route?
 
tyttebøvs said:
io.sys and msdos.sys sounds like something from the old 9x and dos days
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Think that is surprising Vista now sees the return of the autoexec.bat file when you look at the root directory! :eek: The primary thought for still seeing the old dos files is for being able to log onto older Fat based networks. XP has those also for installation on Fat 16/32 primaries.

SmartTart said:
Well the Vista DVD I have (which came with my Velocity Micro) doesn't even have the repair option! Is there an alternate route?
Click to expand...

It's hard to say with a branded recovery disk since I still don't have anty time with Vista there. You would likely need to see Vista go on last rather then having the option adding XP into in unless using a manual edit with BCD editor in the event you don't get anywhere with the EasyBCD tool itself.

The other tool mentioned before will soon be one I can refer you to that uses the Grub4Dos boot loader set usually to 0 seconds for the display time when in use with EasyBCD. The latest builds were inquired on for seeing availability widened to generally anyone who will try it out and even provide some feedback on it.
 
It was actually a bit of a rhetorical question :) Neither vista nor xp uses those files for anything. XP uses ntldr as its loader, though.
 
Without them present regardless of XP's ntldr and Vista's new boot loader seen a working dual boot still requires those to be present at the Vista root. If even one is lacking you will see Windows stall when selecting XP with a missing system file error.

One thing to note on that is this for seeing XP added after Vista is already on. For simply seeing XP added in automatically Vista being the newer version will detect and add XP as the option for previous version. There's no worry that way on copying XP's files from primary to primary, drive to drive there.
 
PC eye said:
Without them present regardless of XP's ntldr and Vista's new boot loader seen a working dual boot still requires those to be present at the Vista root. If even one is lacking you will see Windows stall when selecting XP with a missing system file error.

One thing to note on that is this for seeing XP added after Vista is already on. For simply seeing XP added in automatically Vista being the newer version will detect and add XP as the option for previous version. There's no worry that way on copying XP's files from primary to primary, drive to drive there.
Click to expand...

Ahh! Ok, well I managed to get hold of a Vista disk and while XP was running, I put in the disk and got the autorun menu which still doesn't have any "recovery" option available. Do I need to run the Vista disk on startup to get to the menu you are referring to?
On another tangent, what do you mean exactly about copying files from one drive to the next and so forth? I have a basic understanding of computers but this is getting a little over my head.
 
It depends if both versions are installed on the same drive or you are setting up a dual boot with one version on a second. The Vista disk has to be booted from in order to see the initial splash screens come up with the link for the repair tools seen on the bottom half of where it show the install now button.

The MS page on this can be seen at http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/5c59f8c1-b0d1-4f1a-af55-74f3922f3f351033.mspx#EX

When first booting with a regular full install disk you will see the option to first choose the language following the intial loading screen with the scrolling bar. Once you are the repair option screen and select the repair startup you select the installation shown. If more then one edition of Vista is installed you would simply choose the one having a problem.

The image here will show what files are seen copied over from the XP drive here along with the Vista boot files changed by a beta tool being worked with. You can plainly see the config.sys(not included earlier), IO.sys, msdos.sys, and ntldr files are present and actually required to be present What they do besides sit there? When selecting XP from the Vista boot options any missing will be pointed out.

 
A hint about those sys files: try and check their conents. And no, they are not used for anything. I don't have them on my system either.
 
When you are dual booting the two versions especially between two separate drives the ntldr will expect to see those files present. Those are copied when XP is installed after Vista adding that in not when XP is already on and then detected by the Vista installer. When you select XP the ntldr is then initialized and looks for those along with the information in the modified boot.ini file.

I give the Mandriva installer more credit for seeing all OSs on a system and automatically adding them into it's own boot options. Here that saw C:\Windows, C:\Windows1, and C:\Windows2 with the last being XP. The first and then second were for Vista there while Mandriva made itself the default OS.
 
I've only been dual booting XP along with Vista for almost a year and a half now with multiple drives along with the EasyBCD program and another about to see a general beta release to answer that one.

Having reinstalled both versions for varying custom installs I've run right into the "missing system error" a few times when simply forgetting to copy the config.sys or io.sys files over to the Vista root. The image above shows how the boot files will look once and if you actually use the new program when that is available seeing the modified Vista boot files as well as those for XP.
 
I've been using dos, win 3, 9x, nt, 2k, xp, 2k3, vista. And no, those sys-files is not part of booting neither xp nor vista.

I know xp likes to create them, depending on your setup. But I gave you a hint about checking them out. They contain zero bytes, and are not used for anything. So deleting them won't make any difference.
 
Hes been told this numerous times. He still claims/thinks the 8mbs of unallocated space left by the XP installer is a design flaw of the installer instead of by design to convert to dynamic disk. He will never relent even if hes wrong. I consider that a design flaw within itself.
 
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