Booting 2 drives, Vista & XP

lewis2.0

Member
Ok i'm sure this must be a common issue in these forums, but i cant seem to get my head arround it...

I have 2 drives 1 SATA, and the other is IDE - The SATA drive has Vista x64 installed and the IDE has XP Pro x64 installed.

I want to be able to boot to both drives using EasyBCD. I've tried adding an entry to the bootmenu pointing the entry to whats seen as drive E:\ under Vista but it doesnt appear to work.

I'm not sure if this could be something to do with my drive configurations, the ide drive naturally boots before the sata, until i changed the boot sequence in the bios and now the sata drive boots first.

If someone could tell me how i can boot to the second drive it would be a massive help! :smile:

Edit: both drives are seen as active and have primary partitions under Vistas disk management.
 
Hi Lewis, welcome to the forum.
Have a look at the wiki, on dual-booting XP and Vista
http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Windows+XP
with special reference to the troubleshooting link.
All of the boot files for both systems must be in the root of the active partition on the 1st disk in the BIOS list.
You'll need to copy the 3 XP boot files into Vista's root, then make sure that boot.ini on the Vista (SATA) disk points to XP on the other disk.
 
Thanks, got a bit confused previous from reading other peoples thread, took a look at the troubleshoot section like you suggested and have managed to dual-boot perfectly :smile: :grinning:
 
Glad to have helped Lewis. Wish all the problems posted here resolved so painlessly.

Now you're a member of the Vista/XP dual boot club, be aware that every time you boot XP it's going to remove all your Vista restore points.
If you never use system restore, no problem.
If you do, you'll need to take steps to hide Vista from XP.
Take a look at Vista Hide 'n Seek (HnS) which will do the job for you.
http://neosmart.net/forums/showthread.php?t=1341
 
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