With EasyBCD only Vista will boot - Help

My computer came with windows Vista with so many vista problems I bought a second harddrive which I installed XP to I did this while disconnecting the Vista drive. in the Bios Vista is the first SATA drive to load.

I then installed EasyBCD to the Vista drive and had it add the an entry for the XP drive I changed the driver letter for the XP drive to F tahtys waht vista shows the winxp to be on i also tried C the bootloader path says \NTLDR

The problem is when i do I reboot both operating systems are listed but only the Vista one will boot

Should I be installing EasyBCD on the XP drive as well? what else do I need to do to get the XP drive to boot???

Hello Soccirboy Welcome to NST!

Please read thru our documentation provided on this common error with XP:

Troubleshooting Windows XP - NeoSmart Technologies Wiki

there is no need to load bcd on xp except in rare cases.

do you get an error message when you try to load xp, or it just goes into vista?

if it's on a tower, set both drives to master, and let the cable select the drive. if you want the second drive to load, press [F8?] on start up and you will get the option of what drive to load (will not show o/s label, just the drive description.

that's i use xp with ubuntu. nothing fancy...

jat

Still no luck

kalasha said:

there is no need to load bcd on xp except in rare cases.

do you get an error message when you try to load xp, or it just goes into vista?

if it's on a tower, set both drives to master, and let the cable select the drive. if you want the second drive to load, press [F8?] on start up and you will get the option of what drive to load (will not show o/s label, just the drive description.

that's i use xp with ubuntu. nothing fancy...

jat

Click to expand...

If you set both drives to master the PC will not boot. There is a jumper setting for Cable Select which is what you would use for the Cables to select the device priority. Using bot as Master will not allow the PC to work.

Plus many people like a simple bootloader. They like to just have a selection to choose their OS from a menu and not have to worry about hitting F8 or F12 at boot to select the drive.

soccirboy unhide all your files. Organize>Folder Options>View tab.

Unhide the files by showing the files and also uncheck the hide recommended system files.

No check the Vista drive. Does it have NTLDR, NTDETECT and boot.ini files located on that drive? If not look on the XP drive for them. Copy them to the Vista drive.

Now in EasyBCD remove your XP entry and add it again. But this time use the BOOT option for the drive.

Restart and it should work.

Both drives are set as active, these new SATA 2 drives do not have any jumper pins.

I tried what you asked I copied the NTLDR, NTLDDETECT and BOOT.ini file taht was on the root of XP C and copied itto the root of vista C and deleated the XP entry then added it again on the list and rebooted and still no go...

When I select to boot with the XP drive it just resets and comes back to the very same screen asking me again which OS do I want to boot to in endless circle, only when I selectthe Vista OS will that boot but not the XP. Now what ???

You say "select to boot with the XP drive". Do you mean you're overriding the HDD boot sequence in the BIOS, or selecting the XP entry in the Vista menu ?
You need to have the Vista and XP boot files all on the first active disk in your BIOS boot sequence, and you must boot from that disk for either OS.

Is Vista on the SATA Drive? Or is XP? Do you have the SAA Drive set to boot first?

This is another one of those SATA/IDE compatibility issues. We have seen several of them. Guru knows the fix.

Terry60 said:

You say "select to boot with the XP drive". Do you mean you're overriding the HDD boot sequence in the BIOS, or selecting the XP entry in the Vista menu ?
You need to have the Vista and XP boot files all on the first active disk in your BIOS boot sequence, and you must boot from that disk for either OS.

Click to expand...

Not in the the Bios, both drives are active there.
The windows boot manager that comes up a black screen that is config through easyBCD


Addendum:


I am using two seperate SATA II Drives . I have a nvidia 780I mobo which has FOUR SATA connectors right on board.

In the bios SATA #3 is the Vista drive and SATA #4 is the XP harddrive so the Bios sees the Vista drive first I would imagine.

if I go in the bios and make the XP drive get sceen first then windows boot manager doesnt even comes up it just boots right to XP.

with the vista drive listed first in the bios then the boot manager screen comes up and i get the screen to pick but only the vista one will work. when i try to select the XP one the computer just reboots and comes back to same screen asking my which again


Addendum:


So it seems with both drives connected and vista being seen first the boot manager does come up showing that there are two OSs to choose from, after using and adding XP with EasyBCD to the list .to this point every things seems to be working right.

If I select the Vista drive to boot it will boot that fine

The only problem is when I select the XP drive to boot it just reboots and comes back to same screen asking which drive do I want to boot from again. so it seems like there is something missing or incorrect when it looks for the boot files for XP it doesnt see them or there incomplete , what maybe missing or incorrect at point?? if we can figure that out maybe then it will boot ??

can you post a copy of your boot.ini for us to take a look at, along with a disk management screenshot of your HDDs.

Ok here is a screen shot of disk managemnt as seen in VISTA, disk 0 is vista disk1 is Xp.

www.overclock.net/member.php?u=53805

the XP boot.ini file

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

I cannot see your screenshot. (trying to register but no confirmation)
If, as you say your XP system is disk 1, then you need to change rdisk from 0 to 1 in both places in boot.ini

ADD

I can just see it now (a bit small and blurred) but enough to say follow the advice above.

Please upload the screenshot as an attachment here on the NST forums. Just use the "Add Reply" feature instead of the quick reply box, and then use the attachments section to upload.

Xp wont boot only Vista will

Ok think I figured this out just been on this site a few days here is a screenshot of the disk management in the vista drive:

Hello everyone I finally got everything to work the way I been trying to get it to. taking a few tips given here and piece them together I found a combination that works atleast for me at the moment maybe it will help others who also want to install a seperate HD in there computer while keeping Vista as the primary one and the second HD with XP. I did this because Vista has too many issues still and I wanted to use XP on my new machine which i'm hoping will run my 32 bit games better then my slower 64 bit drive.

How it is setup now Vista is drive 0 Xp is drive 1. used easyBCD to add XP to the list. using one suggestion here I copied the BOOT.INI file on the root the XP drive to the root of the Vista drive also then modified it so that the boot.ini file on both has the rdisk as (1)

this is what the Boot.ini file looks like which is on the root of both my XP and vista drive now they both boot by just selecting which one on I want when the bootmanager screen comes up. Thanks for everyone who helped!

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /FASTDETECT /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN

You can try to repair it yourself.

Rebuilding Boot.ini - NeoSmart Technologies Wiki

Glad you got it working, soccirboy.

Glad everything's sorted now.
Now that you've got your dual boot working, a couple more things to consider.
Do both XP and Vista think of themselves as C:\ ?
If they do, that's fine.
If however, XP sees Vista as C:\ and calls itself something else, beware that installing software on XP could put some data in Vista's program files\common files folder, despite you telling the installer to use a different disk. This is because developers are too often, ignorant of dual booting, and assume that the system is always C:\ if they can find a C:\. This could make the operation of Vista's copy unpredicable (Adobe reader is a prime example, almost always on both systems)
Also, be aware that if XP can see Vista, it will destroy Vista's restore points. This is a forward compatibility problem in XP that will not be fixed.
You can avoid both these problems however, by hiding Vista from XP.
If system restore is important to you, then look at the sticky Vista Hide 'n Seek (HnS) thread in "Ideas and Wishlists" forum.
That will do the trick for you.

Hi Terry,


Yes, its a bit confusing it looks like everything is visible before I could get XP to work with the booot loader with the Vista drive in i could not see the vista drives in XP.
but now as I am booted in XP I do see them, I didnt think that was possible i thought you could only see XP when in vista but that you couldnt see Vista in XP because Vista uses a differnt type of NTFS but I guess taht not the case.

So how do I hide the vista C drive when in XP i dont want programs or system files going from one drive to the other.

heres what I see in explorere when in VISTA I see the XP c drive as F.

when in XP I am seeing the vista C drive as D.

opening the D drive in XP the foldeers I see are : program files. prografiles X86, windows, users etc .

should I hide both C drives from the other OS even though they dont both show as C if so how dod i hide one from the other?

As long as the booted system can't see a C:\ disk (except when it is the C:\ disk of course), then you won't get a problem with the cross-installing of software. (it doesn't matter what they're called when the other system is booted, the lettering is an internal construct of each system individually. The problem occurs when the booted system thinks of itself as notC:\ and something else as C:\
The system restore problem is a different matter. It's not important what the disks are called, XP will see Vista restore folders as corrupt (it doesn't recognize the new format), so it reinitializes them in XP format, losing all Vista's data.
You have to set system restore on each system only to monitor its own disk(s) (where software is installed which might need to be removed by system restore), and then hide any disk with a Vista restore folder from XP.
You don't need to hide XP from Vista. It's backward compatible, and will do XP no harm. In fact it can be useful to see XP from Vista x64, because you can install some legacy software with 16bit installers on XP x86, which would be uninstallable on Vista, but can still be executed from the XP disk while you're booted in Vista.
I do this with my old Oxford English Dictionary software, which was completely uninstallable on Vista, but still runs there from my XP disk - very useful.