Vista x64 and XP Pro multiboot

Forums › Microsoft Windows › Vista x64 and XP Pro multiboot

jarims

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

Topic # 17458 27-Nov-2007 21:33

Ok I know this has been discussed alot but I can still not get my dualboot config to work. I will try to describe my problem as verbose as possible.

My hardware is two drives (samsung) configured in RAID 0 (SATARAID) on a Nforce 680 chipset with two partitions, named RAID0 and RAID1.
I installed XP first on RAID0 and later Vista on RAID1.
Everything went well and my dualboot worked but then Vista just dissappeared from the boot options and XP loaded automatically.
If I change the RAID0 partition to active (which it was originally) then it loads NTLDR and XP works fine, however no matter how I try to edit the boot.ini Vista wont load.
If I change the active partition to RAID1 then BCD is used and Vista boots fine but XP dont, I recieve an error message about cannot load NTLDR.
Reading trough a lot of forums about this I guess that BCD is the way to solve the problem but I dont know how to edit the BCD so it boots XP correctly. I've tried everything.
I did solve the problem once when I have the RAID0 active (XP) and use the Vista DVD to repair the startup.
Vista and XP then correctly shows up but just once, at next reboot XP loads automatically again.

This is driving my nuts, please help.

jarims

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

Reply # 97461 29-Nov-2007 00:42

come on, somebody in here must know howto to edit BCD correctly. The EasyBCD cannot edit jackas, just which drive to boot from, nothing else. I need a command that is telling the loader that XP is loading from C: and not E: or whatever Vista put the partition to.

jarims

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

Reply # 97772 1-Dec-2007 10:05

SUCCESS!

FYI. It was easy enough. The problem I had was that I had one extra HD hooked on PATA. For some reason vista put the MBR there and confused everything.

So, to do this right:

* Remove all HD except the ones with your OS
* Use Vista's Boot because that is the only way you can safely dual boot. To install Vista boot (MBR), boot Vista DVD, select repair, console, from the DVD change to boot dir, type bootsect /NT60 ALL. You may have to run the command bootrec with parameters /fixboot and /fixmbr if the MBR points to the wrong partition.
* It will now only boot Vista as default so when in vista download and install EasyBCD and add Entry (XP) and choose C:. Check that everything is correct and exit.
* Copy ntdetect, boot.ini and ntldr from XP partition to Vista partition and put them in root. You may have to edit boot.ini back if you changed it. It should be (assuming that you are running from same HD with two partitions) "default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS"
You can edit boot.ini within EasyBCD.

Everything should now work :-D

This procedure can be done no matter what happens to your boot config, corrupt mbr, lost vista/XP, cannot load ntldr etc. because it rebuild the whole boot process.