FAQs - PLEASE READ BEFORE POSTING WITH A PROBLEM

[Terry60]

We're very friendly and try to answer every post as quickly as possible, and we are fairly widely spread geographically meaning that you'll normally find someone about at most times of the day or night, but this is a volunteer forum and we all have other calls on our time, so there are no guarantees of a rapid response.

Please help yourself therefore by checking a few things before you make a new post.


1) If you want to know how dual booting works before you do anything,

Have a read of this excellent illustrated guide.

2) If you're contemplating a dual boot for the first time and want advice,

read the relevant part of our wiki for XP, Linux generally (Ubuntu or Fedora specifically)

or the excellent APC magazine guides for XP before Vista, Vista before XP, Vista before Linux.
(Several other combinations available from the same site)

3) If you've tried to make a dual-boot and it's not working.

Let's start by checking that you've got everything in the right place
(this is the EasyBCD Support forum. EasyBCD runs on just about any OS, but it's a tool for manipulating the Vista BCD, so if you don't own a legitimate copy of Vista you're in the wrong place, You can't use EasyBCD)

If you only have a single Hard Disk Drive (HDD) that's obviously where you're booting from, so skip on to the next step. If you have multiple HDDs, don't assume that The disk containing Vista is necessarily where you're booting from. Check in your BIOS the order in which the HDDs are checked at boot time.

Run Control Panel \ Administrative Tools \ Computer Management \ Disk Management and look at the flags on the HDD which is 1st in your BIOS boot sequence.
Is there a partition with the "system" flag ? (if not, move on to the next HDD in the sequence till you find one)
If there's more than one "system" flag on the HDD, you want the one that's also marked "active".
This is where you're booting from and where all of your Windows boot files should be, for every Windows OS in your multi-boot set-up.
(Don't assume this will be on Vista. It could be on XP, or a completely different partition. Check for yourself.)

(Microsoft uses its own unique naming system for partition flags. What we refer to colloquially as "the boot disk", and what Linux flags as "boot", is as we've just seen, "system" to MS.
When MS says "boot" it means "the system you're running at this moment".
There will only be one "system" partition in an all Windows environment, but MS acknowledges the existence of rival OSs (which have their own "system" (or boot) files) hence the "active" flag to say which of the possible "system" partitions is the one in control)

4) If you've just added XP to your Vista PC and now you can only boot XP,

Follow the advice in the wiki to repair the Vista boot.

(The Master Boot Record (MBR) sitting invisibly on the 1st few blocks of your HDD, contains the Initial Program Loader (IPL), which will search for the "active" flag and find in the bootsector of that partition a small program (PBR) which looks for the Vista boot manager program (bootmgr).
Installing XP after Vista replaces the PBR with an XP version which looks for the XP boot loader (NTLDR).
NTLDR cannot boot Vista, so you need to put Vista back in control)
Confusingly, the boot sector of each partition, the Partition Boot Record (PBR), and the IPL, are all sometimes refered to "the MBR", which can make it hard to understand what's happening. But you don't actually need to know any more than, "putting XP on after Vista requires the Vista boot to be repaired"

5) If Vista boots but you can't see an option for XP,

Follow the advice in the wiki about XP dual-boot

Using EasyBCD 2.0 will take away a lot of the previous manual customizing necessary with the 1.7 release. As you click Add, you'll trigger the automatic boot.ini configurator which will detect the correct values and create your boot.ini file for you. It will also ensure that copies of the other XP boot files are placed in the correct location if needed.

The drive option will be "greyed out" to prevent you from pointing the entry at the XP partition because the BCD should point to the XP boot files, on the "system" partition, which in turn point to XP. (see 6 below)
If you've been overriding EasyBCD's attempt to point you to the right place by "change settings", and EasyBCD says drive "U", this means "unfound, unknown, undetected" (take your pick), not "drive U:\".
Use "change settings" again and point to the "active" "system" partition, or just delete the XP entry and add it again and this time leave EasyBCD alone when you think it's pointing to the wrong partition. It's right - you're wrong! read the previous sentences again.


6) If the XP boot option tries, but fails to boot successfully,

Follow the advice in the wiki XP troubleshooter which contains each of the possible errors you might encounter and how to fix them.

If you've followed the advice in 5 above, but not used EasyBCD 2.0 the only errors you'll probably see will all have the same cause, namely the copy of boot.ini which is in the "active" "system" partition (see 3 above) is not pointing to the XP partition. Get a copy of EasyBCD 2.0 and let it fix things for you

EasyBCD 2.0 will configure boot.ini for you automatically as you add an entry for XP to the Vista BCD, or you can invoke the auto-configurator directly from the "Tools" dropdown menu. The other boot files will be automatically copied to the correct location at the same time. There is no longer any need to copy them manually.


7) If you're having problems getting the correct disk and partition values for Linux,

There is a known problem with some later- build Linux distributions which you should read about in this other sticky thread.
Make sure that you are using the latest EasyBCD 2.0 release which fixes the problems. Previous releases of EasyBCD do not know about the changes of syntax in Grub which arrived with Ubuntu releases subsequent to 8.04, and you will not be able to make the BCD boot newer Linux distros using an out-of-date EasyBCD.

If your Linux system is on a different HDD to the one with the active bootloader, and has Grub installed in the Linux partition, you will not be able simply to add a Linux entry to the BCD, you will have to tick the "Grub Isn't installed....." box and EasyBCD will install and use NeoGrub to circumvent the problem for you. This is due to a problem with Grub (not EasyBCD) when it is not on the same HDD as Vista.

If Linux is on the same HDD as Windows "system" (boot) files, then you do not need to tick the box. The chaining will be done directly without Neogrub being needed.

From Ubuntu 9.10, grub changed yet again. This time a complete upgrade to Grub2.
When adding a Linux entry for a distribution which uses Grub2, in EasyBCD 2.0, select Grub2 in the "Type" dropdown of the Linux tab.
You will see that other options, necessary for legacy Grub, suddenly "grey out".
Don't worry, this is not a fault. EasyBCD 2.0 will find and configure the boot for Grub2 completely automatically.

Remember firstly that Linux and Windows count partitions differently. Whilst they both count the disks starting from 0, Linux counts the first partition as 0 also, whereas Windows counts it as 1.
Also Linux assigns a number to the Extended Partition, inside which the Logical disks are located, whereas Windows ignores the Extended Partition when assigning numbers.