Tricky Dual Boot

[Jason]

Hello,

I have a laptop with three partitions on a single 100gb drive. Partition
1 is about 3gb and contains the OEM restore data and is in a format not viewable
by either XP or Vista. Partition 2 is about 48gb and contains Windows XP
Pro on NTFS, this was preinstalled with the laptop. Partition 3 fills the
remainder of the drive (about 49gb) and contains Windows Vista Ultimate RTM
on NTFS. All partitions are primary, not logical.

I installed Vista from my MSDN ISO by first hiding the XP Partition 2 then
booting from the burnt Vista dvd. This meant Vista installed on Partition
3 but it shows as drive C: from Vista. I then unhid XP Partition 2 and configured
Vista to give it drive letter D:. The Vista Partition 3 is marked as Active
and Vista boots fine.

If I mark XP Partition 2 as Active in Computer Management then reboot I get
into Windows XP and the XP partition is C: and the Vista partition is D:.
This is exactly how I like it. I can use Computer Management in XP to make
Vista Partition 3 Active again and reboot to get back to Vista.

I have used the 3rd party Vista Boot Pro to setup the Vista boot loader to
have an extra option for XP as "legacy (ntldr)" from drive D:. Vista Boot
Pro also autodetected and created another boot option also legacy (ntldr)
from drive C:. When using the Vista boot loader to select either of the extra
options I get "Boot.ini invalid, Trying C:\Windows, NTDETECT failed" from
one and I get a "NTLDR exception 0x0000??" on the other. Sorry, error messages
are what I vaguely remember, I can write down the full message if it helps.

I believe the XP boot.ini file is fine because it works ok with the active
partition set appropriately. Unfortunately Vista's boot system seems to use
drive letters rather than drive and partition numbers (like XP does) to specify
boot options so I'm not sure what to use and neither C: or D: works in my
current arrangement.

Can someone please help me get the Vista boot loader to work with my XP installation?

Thank you,

- Jason

 

[David Wilkinson]

Hello,

I have a laptop with three partitions on a single 100gb drive. Partition
1 is about 3gb and contains the OEM restore data and is in a format not
viewable by either XP or Vista. Partition 2 is about 48gb and contains
Windows XP Pro on NTFS, this was preinstalled with the laptop. Partition
3 fills the remainder of the drive (about 49gb) and contains Windows
Vista Ultimate RTM on NTFS. All partitions are primary, not logical.

I installed Vista from my MSDN ISO by first hiding the XP Partition 2
then booting from the burnt Vista dvd. This meant Vista installed on
Partition 3 but it shows as drive C: from Vista. I then unhid XP
Partition 2 and configured Vista to give it drive letter D:. The Vista
Partition 3 is marked as Active and Vista boots fine.

If I mark XP Partition 2 as Active in Computer Management then reboot I
get into Windows XP and the XP partition is C: and the Vista partition
is D:. This is exactly how I like it. I can use Computer Management in
XP to make Vista Partition 3 Active again and reboot to get back to Vista.

I have used the 3rd party Vista Boot Pro to setup the Vista boot loader
to have an extra option for XP as "legacy (ntldr)" from drive D:. Vista
Boot Pro also autodetected and created another boot option also legacy
(ntldr) from drive C:. When using the Vista boot loader to select either
of the extra options I get "Boot.ini invalid, Trying C:\Windows,
NTDETECT failed" from one and I get a "NTLDR exception 0x0000??" on the
other. Sorry, error messages are what I vaguely remember, I can write
down the full message if it helps.

I believe the XP boot.ini file is fine because it works ok with the
active partition set appropriately. Unfortunately Vista's boot system
seems to use drive letters rather than drive and partition numbers (like
XP does) to specify boot options so I'm not sure what to use and neither
C: or D: works in my current arrangement.

Can someone please help me get the Vista boot loader to work with my XP
installation?

Jason:

You have managed to dual boot without messing with the dreaded Vista
boot loader. Why do you want to mess it up now?

I would recommend getting yourself a copy of BootIT NG (BING). It will
provide its own boot menu and allow you to leave your existing boot
system intact. You will have to shrink your Vista partition a bit to
make room for BING to install itself at the end of the disk.

The free Ranish partition manager could also do this, but it is very clunky.

David Wilkinson

 

[Jason]

After hunting around even more since posting my original question here, I
have discovered that I needed to copy all or some of the Boot.ini, Ntldr,
and Ntdetect.com files from the XP partition to the Vista partition. I get
the impression that Vista setup would have done this automatically if I hadn't
hidden the XP partition during the Vista install, hence why it just works
for most people. It also appears to be very poorly documented that the Ntldr
option in the BCD expects to find Ntldr on the Vista partition and not the
partition you're trying to boot. Somewhat non-intuitive too.

But the Vista boot loader works fine for starting XP now. I might play around
later with removing some of the 3 files I copied to see if all are actually
needed. Hopefully someone else will find this useful... seems to be many
people experiencing the problem on various forums but very few posting solutions.
My previous error code was 0xc000000f so anyone else searching for the code
can find this post.

David, my previous solution was not workable in the long term. As a primarily
non-admin user under both XP and Vista, it is inconvenient to access Computer
Management and change the Active partition. Other members of the family are
also entitled to use the machine and boot either OS but they do not have
admin credentials under either to make the partition change themselves, nor
should they need to.

Also, I know that using Vista's boot loader with my arrangement is an officially
supported use case, I was merely having difficulty getting the settings right,
so there was no reason to consider another boot manager. Remember, my initial
question was "Can someone please help me get the Vista boot loader to work
with my XP installation?", I did not say "I'm ready to give up on the Vista
boot loader, can someone please suggest an alternative?".

Regards,

- Jason

 

[David Wilkinson]

Also, I know that using Vista's boot loader with my arrangement is an
officially supported use case, I was merely having difficulty getting
the settings right, so there was no reason to consider another boot
manager. Remember, my initial question was "Can someone please help me
get the Vista boot loader to work with my XP installation?", I did not
say "I'm ready to give up on the Vista boot loader, can someone please
suggest an alternative?".

Jason:

Fine, but now that the boot files of the two OS's are entangled you will
have the same problems as everybody else when removing them or
reinstalling them.

You might find the following intersting:

"What's Wrong with the Microsoft Way?"
http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/principles.htm

David Wilkinson

 

[AJR]

Have you considered : C:\$windows.~bt\windows\system32\bcdedit.exe?
BCDedit.exe /? for command info.

 

[Jason]

That link was a good read but having done my share of messing around with
multiple boot configurations over the years I'm inclined to disagree with
a couple of points:

* The traditional non-Microsoft way of triple booting by activating the chosen
partition and hiding all others is somewhat restrictive. In every config
I've used (95+3.1, 98+NT, 2K+Linux [with the 2K boot loader], XP+98, Vista+XP)
I've always wanted to access all partitions from any OS even if it means
installed ext2fs drivers for Windows or NTFS drivers for Linux or Win9x.

* My OS's are not entangled. I change the XP partition to active and dump
the Vista partition and XP just works or I can delete the 3 XP files from
the Vista partition and drop the XP partition and Vista just works. This
seems about as straight forward as if I was using a 3rd party boot manager
and wanted to remove an OS. Similarly, writing the correct MBR to a hard
drive after cloning a single Windows partition is trivial.

But the article has some good points too:

* Microsoft should really go with an MBR loader and things would be easier.
I'll hazard a guess that the size of MS's boot code is what prevents this.

* I do need to have a technical understanding of what is going on in order
to get the Microsoft dual-boot working well. I've often used a disk sector
editor to extract a 9x boot sector after repartitioning or installing OSes
in the non-recommended order. When people ask how I've achieved some boot
config they zone out as soon as it's obvious I spent some time on it.

Cheers,

- Jason

 

[Jason]

Hello ajr,

Originally I looked at the docs for bcdedit.exe and it was late and I was
tired and it seemed like too much reading at the time so I grabbed VistaBootPro.
When that didn't help I settled down and learned how to use BCDEdit and tried
that way too. Ultimately the BCD setup was correct, it was the extra files
I needed.

Thanks,

- Jason

 

[John Barnes]

You set things up right and should have no problems when you delete a
system. You have the XP boot files on both systems so you can load from
both. Also you have the boot record correct on both. Just make sure the
remaining system is marked active if you delete from outside of one of the
systems. Happy computing.

That link was a good read but having done my share of messing around with
multiple boot configurations over the years I'm inclined to disagree with
a couple of points:

* The traditional non-Microsoft way of triple booting by activating the
chosen partition and hiding all others is somewhat restrictive. In every
config I've used (95+3.1, 98+NT, 2K+Linux [with the 2K boot loader],
XP+98, Vista+XP) I've always wanted to access all partitions from any OS
even if it means installed ext2fs drivers for Windows or NTFS drivers for
Linux or Win9x.

* My OS's are not entangled. I change the XP partition to active and dump
the Vista partition and XP just works or I can delete the 3 XP files from
the Vista partition and drop the XP partition and Vista just works. This
seems about as straight forward as if I was using a 3rd party boot manager
and wanted to remove an OS. Similarly, writing the correct MBR to a hard
drive after cloning a single Windows partition is trivial.

But the article has some good points too:

* Microsoft should really go with an MBR loader and things would be
easier. I'll hazard a guess that the size of MS's boot code is what
prevents this.

* I do need to have a technical understanding of what is going on in order
to get the Microsoft dual-boot working well. I've often used a disk sector
editor to extract a 9x boot sector after repartitioning or installing OSes
in the non-recommended order. When people ask how I've achieved some boot
config they zone out as soon as it's obvious I spent some time on it.

Cheers,

- Jason

Jason:

Fine, but now that the boot files of the two OS's are entangled you
will have the same problems as everybody else when removing them or
reinstalling them.

You might find the following intersting:

"What's Wrong with the Microsoft Way?"
http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/principles.htm
David Wilkinson