Dual Booting with XP and Vista...how?!

D

dR.Jester

2[H]4U
Joined
Jun 7, 2004
Messages
2,759
Ive installed Vista Beta 2 and now Pre-RC1 and I am still unable to dual-boot with XP on a separate physical hard drive. The Vista OS menu has "previous OS", when I select that I get an error stating that XP is unable to load. Something like NTLDR missing and I even saw Winload.exe problem. Has anyone else been able to successfully boot Vista and XP properly? I ended up doing a "fixboot" on my XP install and that seemed to fix things. Not the first time I have done this either. But now to load Vista Pre-RC1 I have to unplug my first hard drive which has XP on it so Vista will load.

Here is how I installed Vista. I booted off the DVD that I burned from the ISO download and then selected for Vista to be installed on my 3rd drive. My XP drive was still plugged in at the time. All 3 drives said primary beside them. Did I do something wrong at that point?

Thanks!
 
With XP installed first, then Vista installed after to a different drive but not changing the hard drives boot order (still initially booting the XP drive), the boot menu will be altered by Vista to support booting both OS's.
I dont know if XP can setup dual boot correctly when installed after Vista as I have never tried it but I cant see any reason why not.

If you have installed Vista and XP on separate hard drives so each one booted off its own hard drive, you will need to change the boot drive in the CMOS to boot the different OS's.

Sorry I'm not much more help but thats what should work.
I'm interested to see if others have had the same problem.
 
I just installed RC1 on a different partition. XP and Vista share the same drive, just diff partitions. This worked with every previous Vista build, but I can't make it boot into Vista with RC1. There is no boot menu, it just continues to load XP by default. I can see the drive and everything in windows. I'm puzzled.
 
Your best option may be to install to separate drives, changing the boot order in the cmos.
You could have found an RC1 bug :)
 
I just fixed my Pre-RC1 boot loader because I did fixboot on XP and that gibbed Vista from loading up. Love the new menu system they have come up with, just click and fix! lol Anyone can do it now! :p

I wish Logitech would release some frickin drivers for testing. Also I can't get my USB mic to work either and its Logitech btw. All separate issues I hope to get worked out next. :(
 
TheGamerZ said:
I just installed RC1 on a different partition. XP and Vista share the same drive, just diff partitions. This worked with every previous Vista build, but I can't make it boot into Vista with RC1. There is no boot menu, it just continues to load XP by default. I can see the drive and everything in windows. I'm puzzled.
Click to expand...
This still works. Its how I have it right now.
 
Well, I bit the bullet and reformatted and tried again. XP first, then Vista on second partition. Same deal: automatic skip to XP, no boot menu.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top