allanmonaghan

Hi guys i want to triple boot two xp pros and vista...sounds complex but i kinda know what im doing to a certain extent. the operating systems are all on the same physical hard disk but on different partitions. firstly ive installed xp pro on the c: drive. i then have vista on the d: drive and finally i have xp pro for the internet on the h: drive.

what i have done is as follows: i installed xp pro on c: first and dual booted with vista on d: by using the vista bootloader menu. everything works fine. i then installed xp pro for the internet on h: ... i used easy bcd in vista to create another entry for xp pro for the net. and set it to boot from the appropriate drive etc but it doesnt work. all it does when i select xp pro for the internet in vista bootloader menu is tell me the ntldr file is missing or corrupt...however the other two os's work fine....any os experts know what the problem is and how to resolve it...thanks and rep will definately be rewarded to someone who helps me solve this as it isnt an easy one

__________________

billbartuska

That only works if you install in this order...XP, XP, then Vista. The problem is that the drive letters are screwed up. MS OSs always call the first drive they see (the boot drive in the BIOS) the %systemroot% drive and install their boot info on the first sector of that drive. Vista recognizes the XP info there and puts info there to call the Vista boot loader on bootup. The second XP stepped on this info and loaded it's own info. Hence the boot loader is now looking for an OS that, as far as it is concerned, does not exist. The Vista boot loader actually calls he XP boot loader to boot XP, but you don't see that because, as far as the XP boot loader is concerned, there is only one copy of XP, so instead of giving you the Choose OS screen, it just defaults to the only OS it sees, the one with it's files on the C drive..the first one installed, which isn't there any more. You need to edit the XP boot.ini file, not the Vista BCD file.

But be aware that, since all three OSs are on the same physical drive, the two copies of XP will always call the partition where their files are located the %systemroot% drive. i e. C:\ becomes H:\ and H:\ becomes C:\...very confusing to the files and programs on each, to say nothing about the user!

Attached Thumbnails

 

__________________
EDGE ...if you're not on it, you're taking up too much space.

nyder

I've had computers setup like this in the past (not with vista though), and I never had a problem, because the boot parition would always be C:\ and i'd make sure to assign the other paritions higher letters, or even have them just not show up (like ntfs paritions in Win98).
That way D: was able to hold all the data and programs that didn't trip out sharing differnent OS's. The programs that couldn't handle it, were installed to the C: drive.

granted, I don't like doing that stuff now, but it's very simple if you do a little planning before hand.

This sort of stuff should always be tried out before you commit your work computer to doing it. Saves a lot of time and possible data loss if you do.