Upgrade Vista Home Prem to Vista 64 Ultimate POSSIBLE SOLUTION ?

[Guest]

I have an HP laptop with 2 HDD. It came loaded ith Vista on the C drive and
the HP Recovery on the D drive of the first HDD.

I installed XP Professional on the 1st partition on the 2nd HDD tonight and
now can no longer boot to Vista.

I do not have Recovery disks, only the recovery partition.

I would like to get back into Vista AND still have the ability to boot into
the XP drive and partition.

QUESTION - can I do an UPGRADE to 64 bit Vista Ultimate onto the C drive and
when it completes will I be able to boot into Vista with my applications
still there?

If not, how can I #1 get Vista back up and running

\and

#2 how/can I get the dual booting of the 2 O/S going?

 

[Guest]

You can't upgrade from 32bit to 64bit; has to be a clean install.

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi,

Not creating the recovery disk set prior to making these changes was not a
good idea. When you installed XP it overwrote the mbr to point to XP's
bootloader instead of the proprietary boot manager that HP uses for their
Recovery Manager software. You will likely need to contact HP support about
how to access it (normally done by hitting F11 at startup).

If you install x64 to the Vista partition, programs will not be migrated as
this would not be an upgrade but rather a clean install. It would, however
alter the mbr once again and give access to both installations. Data from
the existing installation would be preserved in a windows.old folder
provided you do not format as part of setup and sufficient space is
available.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com