XP/Vista dual boot with a twist

[george12]

Hi

I've gone rather wrongly about setting up a Vista/XP dual boot, in that both OSs were installed not knowing about the other. I have two hard drives. I installed Vista one the first one, then later on, XP on the second one - without the first drive connected.

Both OSs see their drive as C:, so they can boot if they're the first boot drive in the BIOS.

But can I get a normal dual boot going where the Vista boot loader menu can load XP? I've tried but get ntldr missing and similar errors depending on how I do it.

Basically, I don't want to have to go into the BIOS every time I want to load the other OS.

Help?

[drcspy]

you could use a third party boot loader....several free ones out there

[intel hunter]

Originally Posted by drcspy

you could use a third party boot loader....several free ones out there

Vistaboot Pro or BCEdit

[george12]

I used BCEdit to get the option to load XP in the first place. It doesn't seem to work though. I think usually Vista is loaded on drive E, instead of them both being on drive C. I think XP loads as drive E:, but was installed as drive C:, causing the problems.

Is there any solution other than re-installing Vista?

Edit: Here's what I did wrong: http://neosmart.net/blog/2007/dont-do-it-just-dont/

[george12]

All sorted, thanks for your help people.

[intel hunter]

Originally Posted by george12

All sorted, thanks for your help people.

If you don't mind me asking, what did you do to fix it?

[george12]

Originally Posted by intel hunter

If you don't mind me asking, what did you do to fix it?

Hi,

Sorry, I should have explained:

Because the PC was booting from drive C:, I needed to copy the boot files (ntdetect.com, ntldr and boot.ini) to C: (the Vista drive). I then needed to change boot.ini to rdisk(1) to point to the other drive.

My problem is that I was trying disk(1) not rdisk(1), among other things.

Now both Vista and XP see their drive as C: and the other OS's drive as E:, which is fine.