HELP, Trying to restore Vista BCD

N

N1GHI

Member
Hello all, i need a little help, before i get into my trouble let me explain my system, I have windows xp pro installed on my C drive then i have Vista installed on my F drive my D is cd rom and E is Data drive, i used to dual boot no problems but then my xp crashed on me, sooo i useed easybcd to backup my settings i have several and then took out all other drives and left the xp drive in to reinstall xp which is the way i allways do it so there is only one drive in the system, so now i have my xp reinstalled and want to reinstall vista's boot loader, i used easybcd version 1.7.2 to reinstall the vista bootloader and reinstalled the backup i have, well as you can figure out it didnt work, when i rebooted it just started back into xp so i edited the boot.ini to add vista in there and that still doesnt work when i try to load vista i just get a black screen and system locks up ,,,,,heres what my boot.ini looks like can someone help me to get vista back booting again ?

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows Vista" /fastdetect
 
Hi N1ghi, welcome to NST.
boot.ini is the data file for NTLDR, the XP boot loader. It predates Vista by years and is not forward compatible. It has absolutely nothing to do with booting Vista.
The Vista bootmgr references the BCD to get its data for booting, and when you select XP from a dual boot controlled by Vista, it will chain to NTLDR which will use the info in boot.ini for booting XP only.
Take the Vista line out of boot.ini, and make sure that the Vista drive is first in the BIOS HDD boot sequence.
If, when you are booting from the Vista drive, not the XP drive, you still have problems, they should be described in the wiki here.
 
ok i tryed that and it gave me BOOTMGR is missing press ctrl alt del to restart your comp
ive even tryed alot of the wiki stuff tryed to load the vista boot mgr from disk but it dont give me an option for repair just install :/
tryed using easybcd to recreate missing deleted boot files it recreated it but nothing still happens it just loads xp and not to the bootloader. id hate to reinstall vista again :frowning:

Addendum:

Hey there, i tryed that web page you gave me to troubleshoot xp and i still get no where when i reboot it just boots xp and doesnt give me the vista bootloader, it looks like easybcd shows everything correctly i think but just keeps booting directly into xp :frowning:
 
Last edited:
Ok i got it working now, i tryed the first step using easybcd to repair the vista bootloader but that didnt work either, why i dont know, so i put my vista disk back in and waited it took a few minutes for it to load the install windows screen but it finaly did, then i clicked on the repair windows button and the screen i got was different from the one displayed on that web page but it scanned my computer for the versions of windows and found vista but displayed it on D drive, well i took a chance and told it to repair it so it did and loaded the bootloader back and now im able to boot from xp and vista again.
Now what i would like to know is in the unfortunate case i have to reinstall xp again, i want to do a correct backup of the bcd using easybcd, what i did before was open easybcd clicked on manage bootloader and selected a folder to back up the bcd in basicaly my external drive and backed up the files, now shouldnt that be able to restore my boot loader if i have this problem again or is there something else im missing?????

I did use reinstall the vista bootloader from easybcd also but that still didnt work, but now that i know my vista disk helped that toook a load of my mind hehe.

Thanks alot for all the help guys keep up the good work.
 
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