Vista/XP Dual Boot - Deleted partition

Blue Lenin · #1 August 6th, 2007, 09:00 AM

Forgive yet another post on this problem but although I have read a number of posts no one seems to have had this problem.

Single hard drive.Vista installed first. Created new partition and installed XP Pro following the APC guide. XP fine, and can see Vista partition. Re-boot/repair Vista (again as per APC). Vista fine, also can see XP partition. Installed EasyBCD on Vista partition and configured. Re-boot, Dual boot menu available but will not load XP. Error re ntldr. Followed XP instructions, and downloaded & unzipped to XP drive. Tried again, but still no XP, same error. Returned to Vista and looked more closely at EBCD overview settings. XP said to be on Drive: Deleted Partition. Tried removing entry and "Adding" again, but still same result.

Dare I say "HELP"

Blue Lenin · #2 August 6th, 2007, 10:52 AM

Found the following on APC:

"Two issues...
EasyBCD did not set the boot drive properly after I added an entry for XP while running Vista. So add your entry and then click on "Configure Boot". Select you Windows XP OS under "Entry-Based Settings" and note the drive location. Make sure it's set to C:\.
Even though I installed to a D: drive, the ntldr, boot.ini etc, were written to the C: drive. Since vista does not use these files I guess it's ok to put them in the same directory...seems odd to me. At any rate, The boot entry has to be set to C:\ not D:\."

And it works for me too. Hopefully might help someone else.

Computer Guru · #3 August 6th, 2007, 12:42 PM

Hi Blue Lenin,

Welcome to NeoSmart Technologies. Yes, that's a very common mistake as outlined in the official Windows XP documentation for EasyBCD as well: Windows XP entries need to point to the drive with NTLDR.

EasyBCD 1.61 now addresses this issue by searching for NTLDR and setting that drive as the default boot target.

Have a nice day.