Dual booting XP Pro and Vista

[Guest]

I have two drives in my system, one SATA that contains my XP Pro OS and an
IDE that I just put in for testing Vista. When I installed Vista it didn't
see the XP Pro drive due to lack of drivers so it didn't create a dual boot
option. I currently can only switch back and forth by changing the options
in my BIOS. My question is how can I get the current XP boot managet to
allow me to either boot into the XP Pro or Vista OS's? I have some ideas on
how to edit the boot.ini file but am afraid that if I make some really stupid
mistake I won't be able to get XP to boot. Any one know what the second
entry should look like for the Vista drive in the boot.ini?

 

[John Hagle]

Vista uses an entirely new boot method and since it wasn't able to *see*
your SATA drive, it is installed as a single OS, not a dual-boot. Microsoft
says this:

"That's right, the Boot.ini file is not used in Windows Vista or in the new
Windows PE 2.0. Instead, a new boot loader, bootmgr, reads boot
configuration data from a special file named BCD. A brand new tool called
bcdedit.exe (or a separate Windows Management Instrumentation or WMI
provider) is used to maintain the contents of the BCD. A Windows PE 2.0 boot
image can be configured in BCD too, making it easy to boot into either
Windows Vista or Windows PE without making any other changes to the machine.
This flexibility can be useful in recovery or maintenance scenarios."

Here's a link with more info:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/library/85cd5efe-c349-427c-b035-c2719d4af778.mspx



HTH,

John Hagle, Ed.M, MCSE, MCSA

 

[Guest]

Vista uses an entirely new boot method

yeah, and it seems to be another instance of totally needless complication,
one which I can see giving real headaches when it goes wrong. :-/

Anyway, to control the dual-boot I'd suggest Ranish Partition Manager. This
will allow you to install a boot-choice where you press '1' or '2' at startup
to selcct which OS.

Note that I haven't tried this with Vista, which reportedly also modifies
the MBR as well as its own bootsector. In principle it should work.