Hello everyone. I have a friend who has a 64bit Vista installation on his single hard drive. He wanted to dual boot Vista and XP. When he came to me, he had two partitions. The first was Vista 64 Business Edition and the second was a HP recovery partition.
I followed the directions here:
http://apcmag.com/how_to_dual_boot_vista_and_xp_with_vista_installed_first__the_stepbystep_guide.htm
The first thing I did was boot to a Vista 64 boot disk and shrink the Vista partition. I then booted to an XP 64 disk and installed XP. I then used EasyBCD to restor the Vista bootloader. I then booted into Vista and used EasyBCD to create an XP entry in the vista bootloader. I did so without changing any drive letter in BCD. I just went to add/remove > selected the Windows tab > selected NT/2000/XP from the drop down and selected save(I followed the directions above to a T).
Upon reboot, it wouldn't boot to Vista or XP. So I booted to the Vista CD and restored the bootloader. I rebooted into Vista and tried this time to select maybe drive F (In Vista, the XP partition is drive F. The Vista DVD stated the XP partiton was drive D. I dont' remember what XP called it's own partition when I was booted into XP).
At this point, I can't remember what the first error I got was when I booted into XP but it wouldn't boot (This was 8+ hours into the adventure with MANY obsticles along the way because of not being use to working with a Vista 64 version. i.e. serial drivers, not having a 64bit boot disk ect...) Last night, I tried messing with the boot.ini file changing the partition to 2 then 3 then 4 with no luck but I think I did get a different error of /ntldr missing with a hex address. Right now, when the PC boots to XP, it will say Boot.ini error then give me an NTOSKRNL.exe error. I tried copying over all the XP root critical files from the Vista partition to the XP partition with no change.
I also noticed, in EasyBCD, when I go to view settings, the legacy OS path just says /ntldr. Shouldn't it say /windows/system32 ?
So, since I can't remember the exact chain of events, I don't relly know what I'm asking here. I guess I what I was to know is if I am doing things correctly? Are the directions from the link above mainly for people with two physical hard drives in their PC? Do I need to do something different since he has one hard drive? Does the boot.ini and all the other XP critical files belong on the Vista partition?
Thank you ladies and gents...
I followed the directions here:
http://apcmag.com/how_to_dual_boot_vista_and_xp_with_vista_installed_first__the_stepbystep_guide.htm
The first thing I did was boot to a Vista 64 boot disk and shrink the Vista partition. I then booted to an XP 64 disk and installed XP. I then used EasyBCD to restor the Vista bootloader. I then booted into Vista and used EasyBCD to create an XP entry in the vista bootloader. I did so without changing any drive letter in BCD. I just went to add/remove > selected the Windows tab > selected NT/2000/XP from the drop down and selected save(I followed the directions above to a T).
Upon reboot, it wouldn't boot to Vista or XP. So I booted to the Vista CD and restored the bootloader. I rebooted into Vista and tried this time to select maybe drive F (In Vista, the XP partition is drive F. The Vista DVD stated the XP partiton was drive D. I dont' remember what XP called it's own partition when I was booted into XP).
At this point, I can't remember what the first error I got was when I booted into XP but it wouldn't boot (This was 8+ hours into the adventure with MANY obsticles along the way because of not being use to working with a Vista 64 version. i.e. serial drivers, not having a 64bit boot disk ect...) Last night, I tried messing with the boot.ini file changing the partition to 2 then 3 then 4 with no luck but I think I did get a different error of /ntldr missing with a hex address. Right now, when the PC boots to XP, it will say Boot.ini error then give me an NTOSKRNL.exe error. I tried copying over all the XP root critical files from the Vista partition to the XP partition with no change.
I also noticed, in EasyBCD, when I go to view settings, the legacy OS path just says /ntldr. Shouldn't it say /windows/system32 ?
So, since I can't remember the exact chain of events, I don't relly know what I'm asking here. I guess I what I was to know is if I am doing things correctly? Are the directions from the link above mainly for people with two physical hard drives in their PC? Do I need to do something different since he has one hard drive? Does the boot.ini and all the other XP critical files belong on the Vista partition?
Thank you ladies and gents...
