Fujitsu U810: Dual boot XP Tablet and Vista Business

C

chrisnosleep

Member
Thank you for all of the excellent support! It has helped a great deal up to this point!

Please bear with me as this may take some time to explain.

I purchased the U810 which came with both XP Tablet and Vista Business and I'm trying to dual boot to them. Naturally, this system was designed to only run one OS or the other, but I would like to be able to switch between the two without reinstalling every time. I bought a larger hard drive for the unit and bought an external enclosure for the original. I installed Vista to the larger drive and then swapped and installed XP to the smaller drive. Then swapped the drive back so that the Vista drive is now installed. Then used Gparted to clone the XP partition over to the Vista drive, edited the boot.ini to reflect the correct XP partition and then copied boot.ini, ntldr and ntdetect to the Vista partition. Vista works fine with no problems, however XP attempts to boot, gets passed the XP animated screen after about 3 seconds and moves on to the mostly blue screen with the Windows XP logo and never gets any further than that. The hard drive shows some activity for a couple of minutes but it won't go past this screen. I think its just a file or so away from bringing up the login icons but I can't figure out how to get over this hump. I have searched and searched this forum and the web but haven't been able to pin this problem down. The only thing I can think of is that there might be a problem with something on the XP partition since when it was made it was C: and now its D:.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
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Hello Chris, welcome to NST.
When you were installing XP, do you remember if you changed any settings in your BIOS? And then maybe changed them back, so it could boot into Vista? If so, then you should be able to change your BIOS settings to what you had it set to when you installed XP, and it should boot XP.
If not, then please give the exact error message of the BSOD, so we can help you resolve this problem as quickly as possible.

Jake
 
Thanks for the quick reply! I didn't have to make any changes to the BIOS and I'm not actually getting the BSOD. It actually starts to load into windows, but once it gets past the black windows xp screen with the blue sideways scrolling bar it comes to another windows xp logo screen and won't go any further. (I have a pic of the screen if I'm allowed to post it) It is not the BSOD and there are no errors or messages given at all. It just sits there like its waiting for further instruction. And as a side note the mouse pointer is active and the mousepad functions fine.

To explain a little more: the XP Tablet and Vista Business CD's that it came with are not the normal Vista and XP CD's. They are recovery CD's which only allow reinstalling to the C:. This is what is making the dual boot so complicated for me. Since the registry was set up when the drive was still mounted as a C: and now, since I cloned it over, it is D:, could the registry be hanging up possibly? I'm not sure what is going on at the point where it is hanging.
 
It might be. You should be installing by booting from both discs (hopefully they'll leave each others partitions alone). I that's the case, each OS well probably call itself C: afterwards, but they should be able to boot fine.

Lets try safe mode here. Reboot the computer into the trouble install but press F8 before you get the usual XP loading screen, but right after you select the entry from Vista's boot menu. You haft to be quick or you wont intercept it. This should display an advanced startup options mennu. Try plain old safe mode and than the others if you still can't get in.

If safe mode is working for you, open regedit from the start -> run (or winkey + r). Follow the article here to change your boot drive to c: if isnt already that.
 
The drive lettering is an internal construct of the running OS, stored in its registry, not a part of the partition table like the disk label, so there's no reason why the systems should agree on the drive letters as they were installed independently and each will think of themselves as C:\ and the other as x\: (where x = something other than C)
That's not a problem.
On my system the letters are seen as C-Vista D-XP I-W7 from both Vista and XP, but I-Vista D-XP C-W7 from W7, and of course they're all letterless as seen from Ubuntu.
Do you know that XP has been changed from C: to D: in its own mind ? or are you just thinking it has because Vista sees it as D: ?
There is a registry zap to correct a corrupted OS disk letter which is easy to apply to Vista because Vista is clever enough to get sufficiently far into the boot to allow running regedit. XP doesn't get far enough and needs an external registry editing utility.
Are your two HDDs the same, both SATA or both IDE ? If XP was installed in one mode and is now cloned to a different disk type, the necessary drivers might not be present.
 
kairozamorro said:
It might be. You should be installing by booting from both discs (hopefully they'll leave each others partitions alone). I that's the case, each OS well probably call itself C: afterwards, but they should be able to boot fine.

Lets try safe mode here. Reboot the computer into the trouble install but press F8 before you get the usual XP loading screen, but right after you select the entry from Vista's boot menu. You haft to be quick or you wont intercept it. This should display an advanced startup options mennu. Try plain old safe mode and than the others if you still can't get in.

If safe mode is working for you, open regedit from the start -> run (or winkey + r). Follow the article here to change your boot drive to c: if isnt already that.
Click to expand...


Thank you for the advice and I have tried safe boot numerous times trying each option. The closest I have gotten to being in safe mode is by using "safe mode with command prompt", for some reason gets me all the way to the black screen with "safe mode" in all four corners of the screen, but then before it can load the rest of the desktop, this same screen comes up(again, not the BSOD) with the windows xp logo and it just hangs there. And since I can't even get into safe mode I can't edit the registry, at least not by any means I'm aware of or familiar with.

I did read through that article and it sounds very promising, but how can I use the instructions without getting to the registry?

Addendum:

Terry60 said:
The drive lettering is an internal construct of the running OS, stored in its registry, not a part of the partition table like the disk label, so there's no reason why the systems should agree on the drive letters as they were installed independently and each will think of themselves as C:\ and the other as x\: (where x = something other than C)
That's not a problem.
On my system the letters are seen as C-Vista D-XP I-W7 from both Vista and XP, but I-Vista D-XP C-W7 from W7, and of course they're all letterless as seen from Ubuntu.
Do you know that XP has been changed from C: to D: in its own mind ? or are you just thinking it has because Vista sees it as D: ?
There is a registry zap to correct a corrupted OS disk letter which is easy to apply to Vista because Vista is clever enough to get sufficiently far into the boot to allow running regedit. XP doesn't get far enough and needs an external registry editing utility.
Are your two HDDs the same, both SATA or both IDE ? If XP was installed in one mode and is now cloned to a different disk type, the necessary drivers might not be present.
Click to expand...


Thank you for the help. My device is an Ultra Mobile PC, so its very small and is only capable of one hard drive internally. In fact they are the same line of hard drives that go in many of the ipods. The OEM drive was a 40GB but I was able to find a 120GB drive by the same manufacturer that barely fits in the case due to its size being slightly thicker than the 40 GB. Anyway, both drives are IDE. I had to physically remove each of the two drives to install each of the recovery CD's. Once I had a copy of Vista on the larger drive, I took it out, placed the smaller drive in and installed XP to it. I then took the XP drive out and reinstalled the drive with Vista installed. Then live booted to Gparted, connected the XP drive via USB and cloned the XP over to the 120GB drive on partition 2. And yes, Vista was already set up as C: so the XP became D:.

I'm wondering if there's a way for EasyBCD to load the XP partition and make it think its C: and visa versa with Vista when its loaded?

Thank you again!
 
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EasyBCD just manipulates the BCD, which controls the choice of system at boot time.
You are way past that. Vista bootmgr has interrogated the BCD, presented you with a menu, accepted your choice and chained to XP's NTLDR which has started the XP loading process.
Your problem is a broken XP system, not a broken boot. Normally we'd advise a Repair Install of XP in-situ to fix whatever problem the cloning has induced. Can you manage that with your hardware ?
I'm completely unfamiliar with it.
 
Terry60 said:
EasyBCD just manipulates the BCD, which controls the choice of system at boot time.
You are way past that. Vista bootmgr has interrogated the BCD, presented you with a menu, accepted your choice and chained to XP's NTLDR which has started the XP loading process.
Your problem is a broken XP system, not a broken boot. Normally we'd advise a Repair Install of XP in-situ to fix whatever problem the cloning has induced. Can you manage that with your hardware ?
I'm completely unfamiliar with it.
Click to expand...


Thank you again Terry. Unfortunately this is my only copy of Vista or XP Tablet and like I said they are both only recovery CD's. And the options they give when booted to are to either partition, erase HD or reinstall. And they don't give an option to install anywhere but C:. I do have copies of XP Pro and XP Home but I'm not sure if using them would leave me without some of the capabilities of the tablet device, mainly the touch screen.
 
You should be able to get the tablet software from the OEM's site, so I would go ahead and leave Vista as is since its working and re-format and install XP on the other partition using one of your other XP cds.
 
Thank you Kairozamorro, I will check about that. I'm wondering, if I install Vista, then make the Vista partition not the active partition, then make another NTFS partition and set it to active, won't my recovery CD for the XP Tablet version then see the active partition as C:? If so, I should then be able to have both XP Tablet and Vista on the hard drive, then just work out the boot info after they're both on there.
 
chrisnosleep said:
Thank you Kairozamorro, I will check about that. I'm wondering, if I install Vista, then make the Vista partition not the active partition, then make another NTFS partition and set it to active, won't my recovery CD for the XP Tablet version then see the active partition as C:? If so, I should then be able to have both XP Tablet and Vista on the hard drive, then just work out the boot info after they're both on there.
Click to expand...
Yes, that it is correct. Setting another partition to "active" should make your recovery disk see it as C, so in theory, that would allow you to reinstall XP to where it will see itself as C: when it boots.
 
Coolname007 said:
Yes, that it is correct. Setting another partition to "active" should make your recovery disk see it as C, so in theory, that would allow you to reinstall XP to where it will see itself as C: when it boots.
Click to expand...


Excellent! And thank you again. I will post my results shortly.

Addendum:

Sad to say, for some reason the recovery software see's partition 1 as the C:. No matter what partition I set to active, recovery CD will always see partition 1 as C:.
 
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chrisnosleep said:
Sad to say, for some reason the recovery software see's partition 1 as the C:. No matter what partition I set to active, recovery CD will always see partition 1 as C:.
Click to expand...
Partition 1 I'm assuming is Vista? So what tool did you use to set the XP partition to "active" before trying to install XP again? Disk Management?

 
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Yes, that is the same.
Your original problem, I'm pretty sure was because of a bad clone. Drive letters don't affect the boot of a system. If your recovery disk doesn't let you install XP to a non-C: drive letter partition, then a workaround is to reformat your XP partition, put your smaller drive back in, delete any and all partitions on that drive (I'm assuming it only contains the XP partition), and partition that drive so it has two partitions, and then reinstall XP to the second partition, with the first partition on that drive set to "active", so your XP install hopefully gets the D: drive letter. Then reclone it over to the larger drive, and it should work perfectly. Otherwise, just go ahead, and reclone without doing the extra steps.
 
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Thanks again Jake, I was in the middle of going down another road and luckily for me it finally worked. And thank you to Terry and kairozamorro for you help too.

This has been quite a learning experience for me. I think the biggest thing for me was understanding about the "active" partition. And I was mistaken about my addendum in post #12. I did receive an error that I misunderstood. Both of the recovery CD's installed to the "active" partitions and that is basically what got me going.

So here's what I did:

1- Use Gparted to make 2 partitions in NTFS
2- Make the first partition active (in Gparted, check the "boot" flag)
3- Install the XP Tablet recovery CD and select recover (DO NOT select the partition option)
4- After recovery is done, it must restart and finish the basic customizations
5- Reload Gparted and change the active partition to the second partition
6- Install the Vista recovery CD and select recover, even though the messages tell you its going to overwrite C:, its actually going to write to the second partition or D: (AGAIN, DO NOT select the partition option)
7- Again, after recovery is done, it must restart and finish the basic customizations

****At this point you're able to load to Vista only and if you look at the partitions, Vista is active or C: and on the second partition or D:, you should see the XP Tablet installation.

My next steps took a little trial and error, but were based off this thread towards the end of the first post: http://neosmart.net/forums/showthread.php?t=1203
What it boils down to is that you have to have the boot.ini, ntldr and ntdetect on the Vista drive which normally should be on the XP drive. And then the /boot folder and bootmgr file from the Vista drive on the XP drive. Then use the magic of the EasyBCD program to finish up.

Things you'll probably need: a Live Gparted CD, a Vista Recovery CD (which you can find on this excellent website), a Live Ubuntu CD(or other live linux distro) and most importantly the EasyBCD program(I recommend version 2.0 since it has the auto configuration ability).

Settings in EasyBCD are as follows:
When loaded to Vista, Vista is C:\ and XP is D:\
When loaded to XP, Vista is D:\ and XP is C:\

When copying the /boot folder from Vista to XP, I was in Vista and it would not let me copy the BCD or BCD.log file from the /boot folder because they were in use, and at that point I was unable to boot into XP. So I booted into Ubuntu to copy those two remaining files.

Almost forgot: for my setup, I have to have the XP partition set up as the active partition or it won't boot properly.

And that's it, now i'm on to figure out how to get Windows 7 RC on a third partition.
 
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Glad you got it working. :smile:
To be honest, I was wondering about the drive letter thing.
I couldn't imagine anything that would only install itself to a partition being seen as C: by the recovery disk (and I found it strange that you said it was still seeing partition 1 as C: when the XP partition was "active"), and was wondering if that was actually the case. I'm happy you cleared that part up. Cheers.

Jake
 
As difficult as Vista and XP were to set up in dual boot, I thought setting up the triple boot of XP, Vista and Windows 7 would be horrible, but it wasn't at all. In fact, it was all but automatic. I did see your post in another thread about formatting the hard drive so it can't make the secret partition and without a doubt that saved a huge amount of time. Windows 7 even set itself up in the BCD all by itself. So I am very happy to say, that I am currently triple booting.

Next up have all three Windows OS's and three Linux? When I partitioned the drive, I did a little forward thinking and made the three NTFS partitions then an extended partition with four logical partitions. Three are ext3 and one for the swap.

Thanks again for the help!
 
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