Seriously screwed!

[Michael O]

If anyone has any insight, that would be great. if not, be warned!

I had an Xp/Linux dual boot. Killed Linux and installed Vista on that
partition, the second partition on the only IDE drive, there is also an SATA
drive and flash card reader. Everything was good, (From XP the XP drive is
C, the Vista drive is F) then I wiped the XP partition and reloaded XP. Of
course, I could only boot XP as I expected. I tried to restore the Vista
loader with the Vista DVD, didn't do anything. Then I used VistaBootPro and
it loaded the Vista boot loader, giving me both choices except I could only
boot Vista, choosing Xp would tell me files were missing. I boot to the XP
cd for a repair and it shows two OS's

E:\Windows
C:\Windows

in that order, (E is the XP, first partition) so I run fixboot, it says it
does it. Now I have the NT loader running with no choices. I figure I'll
mess with the boot.ini and find it's on the F drive as is NTLDR (?), the C
drive has nothing (well IO.sys, MSDOS.sys). I say screw it, I'll put the XP
boot sector back and reload Vista clean when I get a chance, boot to the XP
cd again and FIXMBR tells me not to do it unless I am having problems
accessing my disks. WTF?

 

[Guest]

1) Is the Flash card reader plugged in? I have had issues with Windows
forgetting which hard drive to look for itself on if I unplug my card
reader...Since the PC detects it as phyical drives and assigns them letters

2) Run the "bootcfg /rebuild" command instead. Once it has found the Windows
installations....It will ask for a switch at some point. The recommend one to
use is /fastdetect ....

 

[Michael O]

1. Yes. I only mentioned it because I figured someone would ask why Vista
was on F

2. I assume you mean to run this while booted from the Vista DVD?

 

[Michael O]

Update

I booted to the Vista DVD, bootcfg /rebuild gave me invalid parameter. While
I was there, I had Vista fix the start up files. this left me with w Vista
bootloader, choices for XP and Vista, but choosing XP would tell me it
couldn't find /ntldr, so I booted to Vista, copied ntldr and ntdetect.com to
the XP partition and it all works now.

Thanks for your help.