Vista boot problems

mcdonnst

Got vista today, great.

Installed really easly, half hour.

I installed in on the first of 2 partitions of a ide drive.

I have a second sata drive with xp pro on it which I was keep for anything which would not work on vista.

When I boot the pc it will only boot from sata, cant boot from just the ide.

Cant boot with just ide or with just sata.

I need to boot sata then it reads the ide (I think)

Somehow vista is linked on sata as their is nothing for xp to boot:eek:

In windows its the ide partition has vista installed.

I dont understand it.

I want xp on the sata which is still their when I look in windows.

Did the installation link to two, is their a boot manager?

How can I boot the sata on its own if I want xp and ide on its own if I want vista?

Thanks

8T8

Okay I don't quite follow your post can you boot into Vista or not ?

If not you can only boot into XP is that correct ?

Have you tried changing the boot order of the hard drives in the bios so the drive Vista is on is first to boot ?

If you install Vista alongside XP it will tie the two together by placing some of its boot files on the XP drive which is why you need the XP drive present to boot it. The easy way to correct this as far as I know is to disconnect the XP drive and boot the Vista DVD and run the repair option, without the XP drive present it should place the boot files back on the Vista drive.

Now check to see if Vista boots and if it does then power off the PC and add back in the XP drive and boot into Vista again. Use a program called EasyBCD that will allow you to customize the boot menu & add XP as an entry at startup.

mcdonnst

8T8 wrote:

Okay I don't quite follow your post can you boot into Vista or
not ?

Yes I can boot no problems, vista works fine.

8T8 wrote:

If not you can only boot into XP is that correct ?

I can't boot into xp, even if I just have the xp drive.

8T8 wrote:

Have you tried changing the boot order of the hard drives in the bios so the drive Vista is on is first to boot ?

Vista will only boot when I boot the xp drive first.
When the xp dirve is not hooked up onlythe vista drive, it come up not boot device.

8T8 wrote:

If you install Vista alongside XP it will tie the two together by placing some of its boot files on the XP drive which is why you need the XP drive present to boot it. The easy way to correct this as far as I know is to disconnect the XP drive and boot the Vista DVD and run the repair option, without the XP drive present it should place the boot files back on the Vista drive.

Thanks, this makes sence. The only thing is that if I just boot the XP drive I get an error form vista boot manager. Saying something like run windows recovery from installation disk. Probably have to run xp installation again but I could never get the recovery console to work for me. Any help on this.

8T8 wrote:

Now check to see if Vista boots and if it does then power off the PC and add back in the XP drive and boot into Vista again. Use a program called EasyBCD that will allow you to customize the boot menu & add XP as an entry at startup.

Thanks for the programme. Will help.

Also found this on the web, might help.
http://www.windowstalk.org/dual_boot_part2.htm
and
http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsVista/en/library/85cd5efe-c349-427c-b035-c2719d4af7781033.mspx?mfr=true

Thanks for your help

8T8

All right that makes things a lot clearer, the best thing to do by the sounds of it would be to install EasyBCD, add XP as an entry at startup and see if XP loads correctly before trying anything else.

There is another Vista boot manager called Vista Boot Pro as well though only install one or the other not both.

mcdonnst

Ok cool, thats sounds like a plan, ill try that later.

Cheers

mcdonnst

Yeah That program EasyBCD works like a treat.

Got xp back working no problem

Thanks 8T8