Lost XP in a dual boot

[Guest]

Here's my problem, I installed Vista onto a new physical drive (g leaving
XP on the old drive (c. Apart from a problem with a non-responsive
keyboard (which was resolved by plugging in a cheap and cheerful ps/2
keyboard) the dual boot system worked great. Exactly once. On loading up XP,
the system installed some Microsoft updates and I let it restart (no idea if
this had anything to do with it). After the restart it went to reinstall
vista, as I had left the vista DVD in the drive. I aborted and it would not
do anything (non-system disk error), so I let it reinstall vista, but
discovered that it had renamed its drives, the vista drive was now c: and my
original drive was d: It no longer gave any dual boot option. After reading
up on bcdedit I have managed to restore a dual boot menu, and redirected the
legacy entry to the ntldr file on drive d:, When I select this option on
booting however, the system goes back to the BIOS loading screen and then
back into the dual boot screen, putting me in an endless loop unless I load
Vista. I'm at a loss as to what to do next.
To make matters worse, I can't find my XP recovery disk anywhere, so
hopefully there is a solution that doesn't require it. (no lectures on the
foolhardiness of installing vista without being certain you had a disk for
your previous OS please)

 

[John Barnes]

Try copying your ntldr ntdetect.com and boot.ini files to the drive with the
Vista boot file on it. Make sure that the boot.ini points to the XP
partition the way it is currently set up.