Dual boot Vista & XP cant read xp drive

[Rick]

Hi

I did a fresh install of Vista Ultimate on a new Sata drive. My old drive is
now a slave drive on the other controller. The old drive has a working copy
of XP Home on it. It was my original drive for this system.

The problem is Vista cant read any files from the old drive. Vista found the
drive and partitions on that drive and did assign drive letters.

What do I need to do to make Vista recognize Windows XP and be able to boot
to either system?

I wasn't sure if it was a Vista or XP problem so I posted to both groups. My
apologizes if that was inappropriate.

Thanks in advance
Rick

 

[Malke]

Hi

I did a fresh install of Vista Ultimate on a new Sata drive. My old drive is
now a slave drive on the other controller. The old drive has a working copy
of XP Home on it. It was my original drive for this system.

The problem is Vista cant read any files from the old drive. Vista found the
drive and partitions on that drive and did assign drive letters.

What do I need to do to make Vista recognize Windows XP and be able to boot
to either system?

I wasn't sure if it was a Vista or XP problem so I posted to both groups. My
apologizes if that was inappropriate.

What does "can't read any files" mean? Can't actually see any data files
(drive appears empty) or gives you an error message such as "access
denied"? If an error message, please quote it exactly.


Malke

 

[Guest]

can you take ownership of the files on the XP drive?

did you install a dual-boot or just a Vista on the side?

So BIOS and Vista sees the XP drive? what does disk managr says the XP disk
has as status?
Can you run a chkdsk on the drive?

 

[Gerry]

Rick

I would use BootIt Next Generation to create a dual boot system. You
need to create a situation where neither operating system can see the
other. You put shared data files in a third partition which both can
see. BootIt NG provides a boot manager outside both systems enabling you
to choose which operating system you wish to start. You can also resize
partitions to suit.

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/examples.html

--



Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

[Paul Randall]

Hi

I did a fresh install of Vista Ultimate on a new Sata drive. My old drive
is now a slave drive on the other controller. The old drive has a working
copy of XP Home on it. It was my original drive for this system.

The problem is Vista cant read any files from the old drive. Vista found
the drive and partitions on that drive and did assign drive letters.

What do I need to do to make Vista recognize Windows XP and be able to
boot to either system?

I wasn't sure if it was a Vista or XP problem so I posted to both groups.
My apologizes if that was inappropriate.

Thanks in advance
Rick

The easiest way to do this is with Vista Boot Pro or EasyBCD. Use
GROUPS.google.com to search
microsoft.public.windows.vista.installation_setup for them -- you will find
lots of good info & links.

-Paul Randall

 

[Rick]

Hi again

Ok to clarify what's happening is

XP and the partioned drive (ide)was my original drive on this system. I
added a second drive( sata), made it my primary c drive and loaded Vista on
it. I moved the old drive and it now appears as a slave with the DVD burner
as primary in the ide cable.

Vista finds the drive and identifies it as a ntfs with mbr drive. It shows
the two partitions D and E. That is correct. I have full permissions control
of the drive.

It allows me to check the properties on the E drive partition ( which I
know is a empty partition.

However on the d drive partition ( were XP is installed) it correctly shows
the disk usage, but will not let me check the properties of that partition.
If I attempt to explore it Vista reports the drive is blank.

I don't care as much if Vista sees the files on the second drive. I just
want to be able to boot to one system or the other. My plan was as suggested
is to made the E drive a share drive for both systems.

Thanks for your help and I hope this clarifies things some what.

 

[John Barnes]

Use Paul's suggestion and add a legacy entry to your Vista boot. If you
still have problems, post back useful information. In Vista, in Disk
Management, show the information displayed for each disk and partition i.e.
disk 0 partition 1 C system,boot,active,primary etc.

 

[Paul Randall]

Hi, Rick
In general, it is not a good idea to have a CD/DVD drive be a master and
hard drive be a slave on an IDE cable. I tried that once and my system
slowed to a crawl. Making the hard drive the master fixed it.

Before I talk about your problem, we need to define some terms. You have
talked about having a SATA drive and an IDE drive. These are physical
drives, which can be partitioned. Each partition that is not hidden will be
assigned a "drive letter", like C: or D: during bootup. It is important to
note that the drive letter refers to a partition on a physical drive, not to
the physical drive itself. You might think that a drive with only one
partition has not been partitioned; that would be wrong. It must be
partitioned, which sets up the partition table, before the drive is
formatted -- otherwise the format program wouldn't know what part of the
physical drive to format.

You have stated that the IDE drive has two partitions. When you were using
it, they probably were assigned the drive letters C: and D: during the
bootup process. You probably had WXP installed on C: drive. You may have
installed some programs on drive D: WXP and many programs store the paths
of programs and .DLLs they need in the registry, including the drive letter.
On bootup, your SATA drive is now being assigned the letter C:. WXP is
going to have major problems trying to find its stuff on C:.

Hopefully your IDE drive was not messed up by the Vista installation. I
would remove the SATA drive and verify whether your WXP system is still
usable. Report back here, and maybe we can guide you to a dual boot setup
you can live with.

-Paul Randall

 

[Rick]

HI

I just formatted and reloaded both systems on their respective disks. XP can
read both hard drive . XP reports the C drive ( IDE) as:
C drive ( XP)
Location 0
Disk 0 mbr

D Drive ( Sata) ( Vista)
Location 0
Disk 1 mbr

However XP is the only one I can boot at this time. How do I or what program
do I need to make this system dual boot?
Thanks in advance
Rick

 

[John Barnes]

Which is your system drive.

HI

I just formatted and reloaded both systems on their respective disks. XP
can read both hard drive . XP reports the C drive ( IDE) as:
C drive ( XP)
Location 0
Disk 0 mbr

D Drive ( Sata) ( Vista)
Location 0
Disk 1 mbr

However XP is the only one I can boot at this time. How do I or what
program do I need to make this system dual boot?
Thanks in advance
Rick

 

[Ricky]

Which did you install first? It works best to install XP first and then
Vista.

 

[Rick]

I would like the Vista or Sata drive to be the main drive. I did install
Vista first

 

[John Barnes]

Since you don't follow instructions or provide information that is
requested, it's hard to help. My last try is you can run your Vista install
DVD and choose startup repair. You may have to run it more than once. Good
luck, goodbye.

 

[Timothy Daniels]

I would like the Vista or Sata drive to be the main drive. I did install Vista
first

Since you installed the later OS (Vista) BEFORE an earlier OS
(XP), XP's boot manager and loader are in control, and they
do not know how to boot Vista. Without hacking, the simplest
way is to either re-install (or use the Vista installation DVD to do
a repair on) Vista or to use a 3rd-party utility to enable dual-booting .
Free utilities that will enable the dual-boot scenario are:
EasyBCD ( http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1 ) and
VistaBoot Pro ( http://www.vistabootpro.org/ ).
One or both of them *might* require a separate partition in which
to run.

*TimDaniels*

 

[Rick]

John

I am sorry, but I thought I did provide the information you requested. Post
date 08/19 at 0749 AM. I had to give what XP provided as I can not boot to
Vista. I wanted the Vista drive ( Sata )to be the main drive .What have I
missed?

I see from a follow up post I should have installed XP first then Vista. My
error. I will try that then the programs suggested.

Is there anything with those programs I should be aware of?

Thanks in advance
Rick

 

[John Barnes]

If you are going to reinstall anyway, one piece of advice. Install XP.
Unplug the XP (IDE) drive. Install Vista. Plug back the XP drive. Set the
BIOS so the SATA drive is first in boot priority. Download EasyBCD and set
up a legacy entry pointing to the XP drive. You may then have to copy the
ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini files from the XP drive to the Vista drive
and change the entry in the boot.ini to point to XP.
There are many BIOS's that do not handle the mixture of IDE and SATA drives
properly and it is therefore necessary to install with drives disconnected.
Good luck.
You never said which is your system drive even though asked twice.

 

[Timothy Daniels]

I see from a follow up post I should have installed XP first
then Vista. My error. I will try that then the programs suggested.

Is there anything with those programs I should be aware of?

If you are going to install the OSes separately on their own
hard drives (i.e. install on one while the other HD is disconnected
and thus have 2 mono-boot installations), you have another
alternative for dual-booting. That is to adjust the Hard Drive
Boot Order in the BIOS. The "Hard Drive Boot Order" may
be called something like "Drive priority" in your particular BIOS
(but NOT "Boot Device Priority"), and it specifies which HD
gets control at boot time. (It also sets the meaning of "rdisk()"
in the boot.ini file, but that's another topic.)

The Hard Drive Boot Order setting persists in ROM, so that
you only have to go into the BIOS when you want to change
which HD gets control at boot time. The boot loader on that
HD will direct the boot process as if it were a mono-boot
scenario. The OS that gets loaded will be able to see all the
other partitions, and you will be able to drag-n-drop files between
the partitions. The OS that is running will also call its own
partition "C:" and it will call the other partitions by some other
name, including the partition containing the non-running OS.
This will not be a problem as long as all shortcuts do not
refer to other partitions, i.e. do not have the names of other
partitions in them. By using the BIOS to specify the controlling
HD at bootup, you avoid having to download and install a 3rd-
party boot manager, and *possibly* having to devote an entire
partition that boot manager.

*TimDaniels*

 

[Ricky]

When I tried the public beta I already had XP instlalled. I installed Vista
on a second drive and when booting it gave me a choice as to which to boot.
If I booted to Vista it labeled it as C and if I booted to XP it listed it
as C.