SgtSpike

I already have XP installed on one drive and vista on the other, but I don't ever get an option to boot to Vista. I had Vista installed before XP, and I actually removed the Vista drive (I thought it was dead) and installed XP to the other drive. Now, even with both drives connected, it only boots to XP. The Vista drive seems fine, because I can browse and open files from anywhere on the disk, and Western Digital's disk check passed it as well...

So, how can I boot to the Vista drive? Or will I have to just reinstall Vista on the second drive with both drives connected? This is confusing...

Or, is there a way I can use virtualization to run Vista?

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The Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L Thread
101% OC on E6300!

Murlocke

As far as I know all the guides say to install XP and then Vista to avoid problems when dual booting, since Vista uses a different type of boot.ini than XP and when dualbooting your boot.ini will get edited. Because vista doesn't use a boot.ini and xp does, you should install vista after xp so vista can edit the xp boot.ini and not vice versa.

I think XP overwrote your boot file in Vista causing it to not work.

You probably need to redo both.
1. Install XP
2. Install Vista
3. Install VistaBootPro for changing OS names/boot times. (This program only works under vista)
http://www.vistabootpro.org/

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SgtSpike

Thanks for the reply Murlocke. A couple questions... How could XP overwrite my Vista boot file when I didn't have the Vista drive connected while I was installing XP? Also, why would I need to reinstall XP again? I really don't want to reformat unless I have to...

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The Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L Thread
101% OC on E6300!

killerhz

I can't find the answer for this either. I have had both installed and did not want to reformat either. So for now I just enable which drive I want in the bios and the disable the other. That is until I can figure out how to get the window option.

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startekee

the boot mgr file is missing

Murlocke

From what i've read when I did mine the only way to dual boot with XP/Vista is to install XP first...

Both drives should be connected when installing the 2nd OS so it can edit the boot files correctly, I believe the problem you are having is caused by when you disconnecting the other drive that had Vista on it when installing XP, or the fact that XP edited some files on Vista (But i dont see how thats possible since you had it disconnected, however it might of done it when you booted up anyway). I think your only option is to refromat.

Or you can do what killerhz is doing but that would get pretty annoying having to switch that each time you wanna go into the other OS. I'd just reformat and install the dual boot the correct way.

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SgtSpike

Ok, I'll probably do a reformat of the Vista drive with the XP drive connected and see how that goes... thanks for the help all!

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Hotel Da Volta - The Enigma: Rising Tide Add-On
The Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L Thread
101% OC on E6300!

The_Rocker

Put vista cd in and do a repair install.