Quick Question for Dual booting WinXP and Vista

jasper

Member
Hello,

I started with Vista only, and then I installed XP on the D: partition. I can now dual boot thanks to EasyBCD. I was just wondering if the Windows XP Pro entry in the Vista Bootloader is in fact supposed to point to drive C: as it shows in "View Settings" tab of EasyBCD. (WinXP was installed to drive D:smile:

Thanks
 
Hi Jasper, welcome to NST.
The entry is pointing to where the XP bootloader is. (all the boot files for both systems are in the "active" partition root - once NTLDR has been handed control to boot XP, it will locate the XP partition from boot.ini)
 
Is my windows boot manager supposed to be on the non-active partition (drive d:smile:? I can dual boot now, but I just want to make sure everything is proper before I install HnS and carry on with driver installation.
 
Look in disk management for the partition that's marked "system active". That's the one where all your boot files for both Vista and XP are sitting (It's not necessarily C:\ or Vista)
It doesn't really matter which one it is, because your dual boot works and that's all that counts.
You can go ahead and run HnS and it will hide Vista from XP for you regardless of which system is the "active" one. "Active" doesn't mean what you'd expect active to mean by its OED definition, it's just a flag telling the MBR where to find the boot loader.
 
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