Decided to dual boot Vista. Having problems :(

S

Skirrow

[H]ard|Gawd
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Mar 25, 2005
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I gave in and decided to finally install Vista on my machine. I wanted to dual-boot with XP and installed Vista on a spare hard drive. All went well, sort of. I now have both OS's working flawlessly. However. I do NOT get a boot menu when i start up the PC. If there is no dvd in the drive my pc boots into XP and i can only boot into Vista if the Vista install dvd is in the drive.

When i was installing Vista i got the boot menu once, and both boot options showed Windows Vista. After which i have never seen the menu again. Vista says there is only 1 OS on my system.

Is there a way to fix this issue and regain the boot menu? or will i have to swap discs each time i wish to use Vista?. Its not really a huge deal as i'll only be using Vista for DX10 gaming and XP will remain my primary OS till it breaks for one reason or another. But having to put the Vista install dvd in just to boot Vista isnt exactly ideal.
 
I set up mine using 2 partitions, first installed and configured XP, then installed and configured Vista. You can use BCDEDIT.exe in the command prompt of Vista to configure dual boot there if necessary.
 
I installed Vista on another drive and it default boots to it. Even if I chose the XP drive last bootup. All SATA drives.
If I need to check something on XP, I hit F8 on mine to choose Boot drive.

When I installed Vista, I unplugged my 2 drives and only had the Raptor it was going to be installed on. Once install completed, I plugged the other drives in.
 
strange... my dual boot went off without a hitch.

I know Vista needs to be installed on the primary drive.

If you want a surefire install, separate a single drive into 2 partitions, either pre os install using XP installer or after xp install using a program like partition magic.

Install Vista onto the 2nd partition. It went smooth for that part (configuring Vista is another matter entirely...)
 
Kowan said:
When I installed Vista, I unplugged my 2 drives and only had the Raptor it was going to be installed on. Once install completed, I plugged the other drives in.
Click to expand...

There's the problem right there... Having your XP drive disconnected during the Vista install.. The Vista installer has to be able to detect the presence of another OS in order for it to correctly set up your bootlaoder...

You can either start over and re-install Vista with your XP drive connected, or try a utility like VistaBootPro... or perhaps install GRUB and let it handle things for you.... Hope that helps....
 
Well its all gone arse over tit for me. Got confused with all my drives and partitions and accidentally deleted the wrong partitions. Managed to wipe both my XP and Vista installs. :eek:

On the plus side i can start over from scratch and make things work properly :D Glad i backed everything up before i started
 
At least you're taking it well enough. :)
Good thing you had backed up.
 
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