dual boot with 2 drives

gvosburgh

Member
I'm dual booting with Vista on a SATA drive and XP on a IDE drive. In Vista's disk management it states that Vista is on disk 1 and XP is on disk 0 partition D. I have XP setup in EasyBCD pointing to the D drive and the rdisk in the boot.ini set for 1,partition 1. When I select XP in the boot menu it states that the hal.dll is missing or corrupted.
Going throught the troubleshooting guide it points to the rdisk setting but if I set it to zero, I get a blank screen. Any ideas?
Greg
 
rdisk understanding

I went to MS Technet to further understand boot.ini but it didn't go into detail. Is rdisk a physical drive? Thanks
Greg
 
The rdisk entry is for the physical hard drive. I see you go to MS Technet as well.

When going to dual boot the two versions of Windows you have to have the ntldr, ntdetect.com, and corrected boot.ini on the same drive/partition as the Vista boot loader. For a quick fix here I actually deleted one copy of the boot.ini when that saw invalid boot.ini errors and booted upto the recovery console to use the "Fixboot" and "Fixmbr" once logged onto the correct copy of Windows.

That will rewrite the boot information but knock Vista for a loop. You then boot up with the Vista dvd and use the startup repair option to see the automatic tool correct Vista's startup. Once done and booted into Vista having the XP boot files on the same primary as the Vista boot loader create a new entry for XP.

Surprisingly I found another tool still in beta at the present time was found easier to see XP added into the boot options menu. Here I had Vista on the ide drive while XP was on the first of two sata models. That presented some interesting problems until moving Vista onto one of the two sata drives and seeing working results. http://neosmart.net/forums/showthread.php?t=1692
 
Not necessarily, all the boot files for Vista and XP must be on the boot partition, whichever that is. For me that's XP (where you'll also find my Vista bootfiles), but mostly it'd be the Vista system because Vista boot manager set up the dual boot in the first place.
Read the wiki for background on the Vista and legacy boot process. You find a lot of description and loads of links.
You could try here for a start
http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Windows+XP
addendum
Sorry, I misread your post, answered a different question.
Disk management seems to get confused when you have a mix of IDE and SATA (as I do), and says that the IDE disk is 0 and SATA is 1, even though you've set them the other way round in BIOS and the boot thinks that SATA is 0. This is one of the things giving Guru a headache trying to get HnS out of Beta.
 
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Once you have that you may want to look over the first attempt made here discussed on the link posted earlier. While seeing a reverse situation I still managed to see some great working results with the HnS tool. I also added some screenshots for basic reference.
 
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