(Vista) Boot Manager instead of (XP) Windows Advanced Options Menu

[Daave]

I work for a satellite office of a nonprofit which is headquartered in
another city. I am the de facto IT guy here.

Recently, a colleague received a new Dell Latitude E5500. I was asked to
help her set it up (transferring documents, IE Favorites, etc. from the
old laptop and installing drivers for the three printers she uses).
Everything is working just fine; I'm just curious about one particular
thing.

Although the PC was purchased with the XP Pro upgrade and was shipped
with it, someone from HQ laid down an image which has all the licensed
software she needs installed (still with XP Pro). As I was setting up
her PC, I wanted to make sure the Windows Advanced Options Menu was
available for possible future use (e.g, to start in Safe Mode or LKGC).

However, tapping F8 (or F5 for that matter) instead brings up the
Windows Boot Manager! Furthermore, this is a Vista manager! Obviously,
the image was made from a PC that had Vista installed. The screen looks
similar to this one:

http://www.askdrtech.com/solutions/image.axd?picture=2009/8/windows_boot_manager.png

.... but with the following exceptions:

There is no line "Earlier Version of Windows."

There are no lines beginning with "To specify..." or "Seconds Until..."

(That is, there is no F8 option.)

So the only choice (other than running the Windows Memory Diagnostic) is
to select Windows Vista! This hard drive has only two partitions: the
Dell diagnostic partition and C:, which is the partition with XP Pro
installed.

So, in Boot Manager, as one might expect, selecting "Microsoft Windows
Vista" takes you into Windows XP.

So the actual question is how to re-associate F8 with Windows Advanced
Options Menu? I'm aware that one can go into msconfig to accomplish the
same thing, but the complete menu is still a better option.

Would the boot manager need to be changed?

I already asked the usual IT guy at HQ, who said he'd look into it, but
he's stumped for the time being.

Not a huge problem, and I probably will wind up not doing anything at
all. The purpose of this post is more along the lines of learning. TIA!

 

[Leroy]

Try EasyBCD: http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

 

[Joe Morris]

I work for a satellite office of a nonprofit which is headquartered in
another city. I am the de facto IT guy here.

However, tapping F8 (or F5 for that matter) instead brings up the Windows
Boot Manager! Furthermore, this is a Vista manager! Obviously, the image
was made from a PC that had Vista installed.

Whether or not you can get a clean repair to the startup code, squawk to the
central IT people; if you have a help desk at HQ, do it through them.
Assuming that you don't phrase the squawk in a manner that translates to
"Gotcha!" the IT staff should be appreciative of a *polite* report from the
field that something in their provisioning process needs to be fixed.

And I'm speaking from experience. At one time I owned the Windows imaging
process for my POE's worldwide operations; that's now another engineer's job
but I still own the Windows configuration. We *do* make mistakes, and we
really do appreciate users who give us a heads-up when something doesn't
work right.

On your situation: it would be preferable to have the central IT people
determine the response to your problem. You don't say how large your
organization is, but since it's large enough to have satellite offices in
distant cities it's presumably large enough to want consistency in its
desktop systems, and if each user (or each satellite office) does its own
thing to effect a repair then future troubleshooting gets a new and unwanted
variable added to the mix.

If central IT says "tough", then (of course) the rules change...but in that
case it wouldn't hurt to make sure that your management knows about it.

Joe Morris

 

[Dusko Savatovic]

Hi Daave

With Vista, Microsoft released a set of imaging tools called Windows AIK
(free download).
With WAIK you can make WinPE boot media.
This WinPE Boot media contains a utility called bootsect.
You can run bootsect to fix your boot sectors:
bootsect /nt52 C: /mbr
This should fix your boot environment to the old nt52 (WinXP) style.
I can't check now, but perhaps the same utility exists on the Vista boot
medium, when you boot into recovery environment.

 

[Al]

Daave - applications cannot be installed via a separate "image" containing
only the applications. An image for the deployment/installation of windows
can included applications.

From your post "... someone from HQ laid down an image which has all the
licensed software ...." - it appears that Vista is installed and not XP.
Also may be that the HQ image
included group policy restrictions concerning access to the optional
menu - a very common setting.