Dual boot with XP problem

[douge]

I just installed a SATA card and hard drive in my wife's XP computer
to put Vista on. The idea was to let her be able to boot from either
to make the transition and still be able to run old programs like
Quickbooks 2005.

The Vista install went ok and it runs ok. The boot menu comes up that
lets you choose Vista or "earlier" version of Windows.

When I pick the "earlier" version it hangs with a black screen.


More:

1) The XP drive is now D: and the Vista drive is C:. Could that be the
problem? The old drive can be read from Vista ok and we have
transferred many files to the Vista drive.

2) I've seen that some people have to go back, boot off XP to recovery
and run /fixmbr to get dual boot to work. Is this something I want to
do?

3) I had to do takeown on her XP directory to be able to access files
in My Documents etc. from Vista. Will this be a problem?


I am not sure what to do next and really don't want to lose the XP
drive. Thanks for any help!

 

[Carey Frisch [MVP]]

Try using this excellent utility:

VistaBootPRO
http://www.vistabootpro.org/

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows Shell/User

----------------------------------------------------------------------

:

I just installed a SATA card and hard drive in my wife's XP computer
to put Vista on. The idea was to let her be able to boot from either
to make the transition and still be able to run old programs like
Quickbooks 2005.

The Vista install went ok and it runs ok. The boot menu comes up that
lets you choose Vista or "earlier" version of Windows.

When I pick the "earlier" version it hangs with a black screen.


More:

1) The XP drive is now D: and the Vista drive is C:. Could that be the
problem? The old drive can be read from Vista ok and we have
transferred many files to the Vista drive.

2) I've seen that some people have to go back, boot off XP to recovery
and run /fixmbr to get dual boot to work. Is this something I want to
do?

3) I had to do takeown on her XP directory to be able to access files
in My Documents etc. from Vista. Will this be a problem?


I am not sure what to do next and really don't want to lose the XP
drive. Thanks for any help!

 

[douge]

Try using this excellent utility:

VistaBootPROhttp://www.vistabootpro.org/

Thanks, I have been. I'll try some more tonight with drive letters etc.

 

[cqui3]

Have you run the diagnostic. That is how I got dual boot to work.
Specifying drive letter did not.

 

[Paul Randall]

douge didn't say, but I'm assuming that the original XP was installed on
drive C. The addition of the SATA card may have rearranged drive letters.
Until things are set up such that the original XP drive/partition is
designated c:, I doubt that XP will be able to start or run properly.

What do you think, Carey?

-Paul Randall

 

[douge]

douge didn't say, but I'm assuming that the original XP was installed on
drive C. The addition of the SATA card may have rearranged drive letters.
Until things are set up such that the original XP drive/partition is
designated c:, I doubt that XP will be able to start or run properly.

What do you think, Carey?

-Paul Randall

Thanks for the replies. It's probably hopeless but I will continue my
descent into hell.

The first problem was that the Vista install put the bootmanager on
the XP disk. I found this out when I removed the XP disk and the Vista
disk would not boot alone. I then was able to "repair" the Vista disk
with the Vista installation DVD and write a boot manager to that disk.
Very odd as of course you specify during the Vista install what disk
to use!

Then I disconnected the SATA card to disable the Vista disk and put
the XP disk back in. Black screen and then XP installation disk gets
stuck at the "Setup is inspecting your computer's hardware ...". This
disk worked fine 2 days ago. I fool around with swapping video cards,
NICs, etc. nothing helps. I put it into another computer, am able to
do a fixboot from Recovery and it boots fine in the other computer. It
still does not work in the original computer until I reset the BIOS to
defaults. So at least that problem was solved.

Now that I have a Vista disk with its own bootmanager, an XP disk that
BIOS recognizes, and Vistabootpro I should be ok but no. If I boot
with the XP disk in it always checks that disk for the bootmanager and
is obviously not checking the Vista disk for a bootmanager. If I add a
bootloader to the XP disk once again it will boot Vista but not XP as
there is no ntldr now on that disk. If I disconnect the XP disk it
will boot Vista from the bootmanager on the Vista disk.

I also now have the complication of restoring XP permissions to her
user directory as I used takeown from Vista to be able to copy My
Documents, etc. This has also been a nightmare and a Restore has made
it worse. But that's a seperate issue.

I agree that it might be a drive letter problem. As best I can tell
the SATA/Vista is E: until I boot from it then it becomes C: and the
XP disk is D: You are correct that when XP was installed that disk was
C: to XP. I have tried reassigning the Vista boot drive letter with
Vistabootpro to E: but that did not work.

 

[Paul Randall]

Thanks for the replies. It's probably hopeless but I will continue my
descent into hell.

The first problem was that the Vista install put the bootmanager on
the XP disk. I found this out when I removed the XP disk and the Vista
disk would not boot alone. I then was able to "repair" the Vista disk
with the Vista installation DVD and write a boot manager to that disk.
Very odd as of course you specify during the Vista install what disk
to use!

Then I disconnected the SATA card to disable the Vista disk and put
the XP disk back in. Black screen and then XP installation disk gets
stuck at the "Setup is inspecting your computer's hardware ...". This
disk worked fine 2 days ago. I fool around with swapping video cards,
NICs, etc. nothing helps. I put it into another computer, am able to
do a fixboot from Recovery and it boots fine in the other computer. It
still does not work in the original computer until I reset the BIOS to
defaults. So at least that problem was solved.

Now that I have a Vista disk with its own bootmanager, an XP disk that
BIOS recognizes, and Vistabootpro I should be ok but no. If I boot
with the XP disk in it always checks that disk for the bootmanager and
is obviously not checking the Vista disk for a bootmanager. If I add a
bootloader to the XP disk once again it will boot Vista but not XP as
there is no ntldr now on that disk. If I disconnect the XP disk it
will boot Vista from the bootmanager on the Vista disk.

I also now have the complication of restoring XP permissions to her
user directory as I used takeown from Vista to be able to copy My
Documents, etc. This has also been a nightmare and a Restore has made
it worse. But that's a seperate issue.

I agree that it might be a drive letter problem. As best I can tell
the SATA/Vista is E: until I boot from it then it becomes C: and the
XP disk is D: You are correct that when XP was installed that disk was
C: to XP. I have tried reassigning the Vista boot drive letter with
Vistabootpro to E: but that did not work.

The next time you are on an XP system, run Regedit. Search for c:\, or
whatever drive XP is on. I think you will find hundreds of hardwired paths
that will fail if those resources are not in the place that the registry
says they are.

I once tried setting up a hard drive with four primary partitions. My
intent was to install WXP to one partition and then use Norton Ghost to copy
the partition image to each of the other partitions, which worked fine. I
also set up a way to boot up with my choice of which partition would be
active and would hide all of the other partitions. Bootup on all but the
first partition was faulty -- one reason being that the boot.ini file on all
partitions had entries that pointed to the first partition, which would only
be available (unhidden) when it was the partitions I was booting from.

-Paul Randall