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DISCLAIMER: I am in no way an expert on the subject. This is just my experience and my work around.
So I had one hell of a time getting Vista to dual boot with XP Pro. I thought I might share my experience since no where on the web could I find help for my particular situation. My problem was that I disconected my primary drive with XP on it. I had heard of Vista killing existing partiontions. Therfore Vista never set up my dual boot for me like others. Luckily the second drive had previoulsy had an OS, and a MBR pointing to an OS that no longer existed. I didn't want to have to install a boot manager.
I was trying to do it with 2 hard drives, one with an existing XP Home SP2 installation, one for storage.
You cannot boot from the drive with XP on it. It has to be booted via Vista.
You have to install XP first. Vista second.
Vista will not let you edit the boot.ini. You have to show hidden files, and show system files, and extensions of unknown file types to see it.
Once you have done this copy the boot.bak to another folder/drive. Edit it to point to your XP partition.
You then have to copy OVER your original boot.ini.
Presto, you can now dual boot without having to install XP over again, or worry that Vista will kill your old XP installation.
So I had one hell of a time getting Vista to dual boot with XP Pro. I thought I might share my experience since no where on the web could I find help for my particular situation. My problem was that I disconected my primary drive with XP on it. I had heard of Vista killing existing partiontions. Therfore Vista never set up my dual boot for me like others. Luckily the second drive had previoulsy had an OS, and a MBR pointing to an OS that no longer existed. I didn't want to have to install a boot manager.
I was trying to do it with 2 hard drives, one with an existing XP Home SP2 installation, one for storage.
You cannot boot from the drive with XP on it. It has to be booted via Vista.
You have to install XP first. Vista second.
Vista will not let you edit the boot.ini. You have to show hidden files, and show system files, and extensions of unknown file types to see it.
Once you have done this copy the boot.bak to another folder/drive. Edit it to point to your XP partition.
You then have to copy OVER your original boot.ini.
Presto, you can now dual boot without having to install XP over again, or worry that Vista will kill your old XP installation.