John John said:
Interchangeable in what sense?
1- As on a Vista installation, can the Vista MBR be replaced
with the XP MBR?
or
2- As on a Windows XP installation, can the XP MBR be
replaced with the Vista MBR?
The answers are yes, no and maybe. I'll give you my full verdict
later on. jorgen raised a point about BitLocker functions in the
MBR, I'm looking into that, it appears that the MBR must be
TPM aware for BitLocker to work properly, so if one wants to
use BitLocker then other MBR's are unsuitable.
John
The original question concerned the claim in APCmag that
Vista's MBR had to be restored after an installation of XP in
which XP's installer had overwritten Vista's MBR with XP's
MBR - or would it be sufficient to merely restore the active
primary partition's Boot Sector (which points to ntldr). That
question would be 1).
Then, when "jorgen" made the claim that MBRs are all the
same (at least among Windows OSes), the question also arose
about whether Vista's MBR would be equally suitable for
booting XP (provided that the Boot Sector in the active primary
partition pointed to Vista's boot loader/manager). That would
be question 2).
If use of BitLocker affects the answers to 1) and/or 2),
I guess there should be questions 1a), 1b), 2a), and 2b),
in which a) is "BitLocker Off", and b) is "BitLocker On".
*TimDaniels*