Added XP after Vista Install - now Vista is gone

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I have three partitions with OS's on them.
Partition 1: XP Pro
Partition 2: XP Pro
Then I installed Vista in Partition 3.


Everything was fine with dual booting. Now, I reformatted and reinstalled XP Pro in Partition 1 and I no longer have access to boot to Vista. I only get the boot.ini options at start up to boot to either one of my XP partitions.

How can I add the option to boot to Vista?

I can access the files on the Vista partition after booting to XP - so I could change something there, but anything that requires to be run from within Vista is pointless since I cannot boot to it.
 
Assuming that Vista is installed and you can access your Vista Partition:
Note: You will need to be able to boot into Windows XP with Administraitor rights, and you hopefully will have choosen to 'Boot from Windos XP' from the Vista installation. Also: Remember to boot into the XP install with the boot.ini file!



I know theres some boot options somewhere :)
Boot into XP, go to Start>Right click on My Computer>Properties>Advanced>Startup and Recovery>Edit

Now we should have boot.ini opened.
At the bottom of the file, add this: (we will assume that Vista is on Disk 0, partition 3)
mulit(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Windows Vista"

Now you can save and close Notepad. Back in the 'Startup and Recovery' window, make sure the box next to 'Time to display list of operating systems' and set the spinner on the other side to around 10 seconds.

Press OK and reboot. When your computer is starting, you should see a list of operating systems, so choose 'Windows Vista'. Everything will *hopefully* boot from here.
 
timothyb89 said:
Assuming that Vista is installed and you can access your Vista Partition:
Note: You will need to be able to boot into Windows XP with Administraitor rights, and you hopefully will have choosen to 'Boot from Windos XP' from the Vista installation. Also: Remember to boot into the XP install with the boot.ini file!



I know theres some boot options somewhere :)
Boot into XP, go to Start>Right click on My Computer>Properties>Advanced>Startup and Recovery>Edit

Now we should have boot.ini opened.
At the bottom of the file, add this: (we will assume that Vista is on Disk 0, partition 3)
mulit(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Windows Vista"

Now you can save and close Notepad. Back in the 'Startup and Recovery' window, make sure the box next to 'Time to display list of operating systems' and set the spinner on the other side to around 10 seconds.

Press OK and reboot. When your computer is starting, you should see a list of operating systems, so choose 'Windows Vista'. Everything will *hopefully* boot from here.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I had thought about doing that, BUT since that changes the boot.ini file and Vista does not use that, I didn't know if it would work. I guess I could try it. The worst that would happen is that it would tell me it cannot boot to my selected partition.
 
I tried the method above but it does not work. I get the message:
Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
Windows root\system32\hal.dll

Anyone else have any idea how to fix this?
 
Try vistaboot pro install it on your xp pro partition and see if it sees vista. If not try downloading grub and setting it up its linux based but its pretty dang good..
 
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