Recovery Console Dual-Boot Issue

[JustinW]

Some days you just haft to question... what could have possibly happened?

Anyway, today was one of those days... I ran into one of the wierdest issues ever on my laptop (which is dual-booted between xp/vista) after I had installed XP's recovery console to the local hard disk. I reboot to Vista's bootmgr, and what do I notice but an entry for the recovery console?!!!! Just when you thought XP couldn't have possibly known about Vista's BCD, you've been somewhat proven elsewise! Since I had installed the recovery console from within XP by using the XP CD, I was extremely baffled by this mystery. I chose the entry for NTLDR and found an entry for what I expected to see, the recovery console. However, I grew even more agitated. When selecting it, it gives me an error. Of course, naturally (sarcastically) the entry in Vista's bootmgr works... like omg!

Instictively, I booted Vista, but using bcdedit or EasyBCD does not display an entry for the mysterious appearance of the recovery console in Vista's bootmgr. I figured hey, why not just remove it from boot.ini since it wasn't working in ntldr and use the option from Vista's bootmgr? Bad idea! The second I remove it it vanishes from Vista's bootmgr just as mysteriously as it had appeared!!!

Anyone experience this issue before? More importantly, does anyone know of how this could have occurred? (ie Vista/XP share a file, etc) I really don't care which loader it appears in now, as long as I can remove it from at least one of them while having an working entry.

 

[kalasha]

Vista loads, but no XP. what error do you get when loading, or trying to load XP? Also, have you tried to rebuild the XP bootloader using the recovery option of the CD (not loaded onto the drive?)

 

[JustinW]

The recovery console does not trash ntldr and the entry for xp is still booting normally. It is just one of those wierd issues in Microsoft products I guess that just wasn't meant to be comprehended. I gave up anyway on it since I got Vista on there. I'll probablly just end up loading Vistas Recovery Enviornment instead since XP is on there simply for use with legacy apps.

 

[JustinW]

For anyone who has had this problem, here's my solution...

Keep the non-working entry in boot.ini, but change the timeout to 0.

If you have multiple Legacy Windows instances you are booting from (9x, 2000, NT, etc.) don't just use XP's ntldr for booting all of them. You prob. just want to boot straightaway into any OS/tool from a single menu. To do this, use mutliple copies of ntldr, ntdetect.com, and boot.ini on each system partition and add entries to Vista's bootloader using EasyBCD or bcdedit to point to ntldr at the root of the partition containing the OS you want to boot from. For the other systems, only have one entry in thier boot.ini files to boot them or set thier timeouts to 0 (Just like XPs) to prevent seeing thier menus and booting the default entry straight away.