Extra boot options & EasyBCD changes don't seem to take effect

dct3416

Member
I had a successful triple boot of Vista64, Vista32 & XP until the Vista64 drive crashed. I then reinstalled Vista64 and I have been unable to get XP to boot. In my frustration I installed Acronis OS Selector which ran so slow, just selecting any menu option would take 30 seconds, so needless to say I uninstalled it. Now I have the following boot options:

Earlier Version of Windows
Microsoft Windows Vista
Microsoft Windows Vista
Vista 32
Vista 64
XP

The "Vista 32" and "Vista 64" options both work but XP does not and it simply returns an \NTLDR error. I'd like to address this but I seem to have a bigger problem... nothing that I do in EasyBCD seems to make any difference to my boot options. I've tried changing the different OS's but no matter what I do, nothing changes to my boot menu. Currently EasyBCD only sees one boot option "Windows Vista" which doesn't even show during boot up. I tried reinstalling the Vista bootloader and resetting the BCD storage to no avail. Obviously Acronis screwed something up but I can't seem to figure it out. I'd appreciate any help that you guys can offer.
 
Hi dct, welcome to NST.
If the options in your boot menu look completely different to the options you see in EasyBCD, it would suggest that you've contrived to get 2 Vista BCDs (one on each Vista) instead of booting both Vistas via the one shared BCD/bootmgr, and that you're looking at the wrong (inactive) one with EasyBCD.
What happens when you run EasyBCD on the other Vista ?
Do you remember which Vista was marked as "active" before you did the reinstall ? Has it now changed to the other Vista ?
Your XP ntldr failure also suggests that you're now booting from a different partition, because ntldr would have been on the active partition before and now obviously isn't.
Try setting the other Vista partition as "active" (or changing the BIOS boot order if your Vistas are on different HDDs)
 
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