Restore XP after Vista install - help!

[Andy Phillips]

Hi,

My son installed Vista as a dual boot system with XP on a second hard drive
of his PC. After the install, the PC would only boot into Vista and not into
XP, so he (perhaps rashly) reformatted the Vista drive in order to remove it
from his system. Now the PC won't boot at all from the hard drive.

We have successfully booted from an XP installation CD and entered the
Recovery Console. Following hints on the web, we ran fixboot, fixmbr and
bootcfg/rebuild but the system now hangs after reboot.

Any suggestions? We'd prefer not to have to reinstall XP from scratch if
possible...

Many thanks,

Andy

 

[DL]

Did you try to the repair option,from the cd?

 

[Guest]

i was doing a reinstall.. at this moment you have problem with the boot,
later is going to be errors messages, later computer is going to hang for
missing files or corrupted files....I recomend reinstall that is going to
take probably 2 hrs and you know that everything is going to be fine rather
than fix every day a problem because corrupted files. here is the link to
reinstall:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315341/en-us

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316941/en-us

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Hi,

My son installed Vista as a dual boot system with XP on a second hard drive
of his PC. After the install, the PC would only boot into Vista and not into
XP, so he (perhaps rashly) reformatted the Vista drive in order to remove it
from his system. Now the PC won't boot at all from the hard drive.

We have successfully booted from an XP installation CD and entered the
Recovery Console. Following hints on the web, we ran fixboot, fixmbr and
bootcfg/rebuild but the system now hangs after reboot.

Any suggestions? We'd prefer not to have to reinstall XP from scratch if
possible...

Many thanks,

Andy

How far does the boot process go? What messages do you see
on the screen?

In view of the low prices of hard disks, it would be better to test
beta software on an independent disk instead of setting up a
multi-booting operation and risk damaging the production system.

 

[antioch]

Hello Andy
Perhaps the moral of this tale is if you don't have a test system in
addition to your home computer, or you have the tech knowledge of an idiot
like me or you have little experience of dual boot(tried it once and that
was enough), then keep ALL beta stuff off your one and only system.
Now it may be a selfish attitude but I have made myself learn that I must
not see all beta issues as a 'must have' as soon as they are on offer, but
play it safe and wait until I do not read continual complaints from those
who have allowed such onto their systems and acted as
testers/trouble-shooters for MS.
I hope you manage to clean it all up, but I see mention of 2hrs.
I do hope you have more tech know-than I - I was a day and a half, about 30
hrs in all. I had to keep going to a neighbours house to get help from the
web based windows group - I must have used half a ream of his paper printing
out all the instructions.
Rgds
Antioch

 

[Doug Sherman [MVP]]

Try starting the machine with a boot disk:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305595/en-us

If this works, you may still need a special utility to resolve the boot
issue:

http://www.pro-networks.org/vistabootpro/

Doug Sherman
MCSE, MCA, MCP+I, MVP