Boot Manager error

[paulhk88]

I have a HP notebook with Vista Ultimate64 pre-installed. I have shrunk the
partition and created 2 other partitions (all primary partitions). I now have
partitions VISTA, XP and DATA. I used Acronis Disk Director Suite 10 to set
partition XP as Active and VISTA hidden. Reboot and installed WinXP pro SP2
on the 2nd partition. I then installed XP drivers for the XP configuration.
Working fine so far.
When I re-set partition VISTA back to Active and XP hidden, rebooted and got
an error indicating "Windows Boot Manager - Windows failed to start... File:
\Boot\BCD Status: 0xc000000d Info: The windows Boot Configuration Data file
is missing required information.".
I have Vista pre-installed and no Vista DVD. How do I get out of this error
and get Vista running again? Thanks.

 

[MikeF]

With the NT series 4.0 thru 2003-R2 you could install the OSs in any order,
then copy the newest versions boot files (ntldr, ntdetect) to the root of
the c: drive, then manually modify boot.ini to get all the OS paths right,
and it would all work. This is because the modifications to the mbr and the
partition boot sector continued the reference the same files, so only the
content of the files mattered.

With vista, installing an earlier version later in the installation sequence
screws that up, because the mbr and boot sectors on C: no longer refer to
the correct files. When you try to run from the vista partition, Boot
Manager needs to control the whole process. Boot manager rather than ntlldr
and boot.ini needs to be invoked and it needs to be the file that offers you
the alternative OSs. However when your *original* partition is active the
mbr is referring to the boot partition are on the second drive, that is
looking for Boot Manager but finding ntldr.

You _may_ be able to fix this by booting into recovery mode from the vista
DVD and choosing the option to fix the start up process, which is called
Startup Repair. This should give you back vista, but I have not tested this
with two OSs installed, so I don't know if this will hose XP or not.

Another Option - perhaps better - get VistaBootPro 3.1 -- or one of the
other third party boot managers -- and you should find in the documentation
or forums the instructions to restore Boot Manager to primacy while at the
same time including the information it needs to allow you to choose to boot
XP. Then you won't have to mess around hiding and unhiding partitions. the
vista boot manager will offer you options to boot from either OS.

HTH

Mike