Help with Vista and XP Seperate Drives

I have Vista installed on C drive and XP on drive E. I originally had XP Pro installed on drive C and did not have another drive. My copy of XP Pro got damaged so when Vista came out last year I bought an OEM copy of Vista Home Premium and and OEM copy of XP Home with another hard drive.

Installed Vista on C then unplugged the hard drive and plugged in the new hard drive and installed Xp and then plugged the Vista drive back in to avoid having Vista or XP stopping the other from starting. I've been using OSLoader and have had enough with it. It works 100% but I cannot register it after buying a copy, it always times out and I have emailed them 4 times and no reply so... I'm giving EasyBCD a shot.

Heres my prob:
I followed the step in the help but I don't actually know what was installed first, Vista or Xp because of how I had the other drive unplugged when installing them. When loading the Vista boot stuff on XP and adding it under the 'Add/remove Entries' tab I get funny probs. Whenever I add XP and choose 'NT/2K/XP/2K3' in the type drop down it changes Vista's to 'NT/2K/XP/2K3' aswell.

When i try and add XP when running Vista it's even weider. I add XP and choose 'NT/2K/XP/2K3' and choose drive 'E' it changes Vista to 'NT/2K/XP/2K3' again but this time in the 'Manage Exisiting Enteries' box above it changes Vista to 'Windows Resume Application' and XP to 'Windows Memory Diagnostic'. Very odd.

Any ideas on how to fix this? Is uninstalling the Vista Bootloader on XP and reformatting the Vista drive and installing it again with both drives plugged in at the same time the solution?

Thanks for any help!
 
Hello RogerWilco and Welcome to NeoSmart Technologies!

Okay let me think this out real quick. So each disk is seeing itself as the Active and Boot drive. What happens if you just boot? Does it go to XP or Vista? Since you say you used a RD party boot loader this might cause a problem since we don't know for sure which is the boot drive.

You need to add the XP Files to the Vista drive. The NTLDR, NTDETECT and boot.ini files all have to be on the Vista drive and then add a entry for XP. It will read C:\ that is fine since the boot files are on the C: Drive which is Vista. It should still boot into your XP drive.

Try that out and see what happens. Also did you read the Wiki:

Troubleshooting Windows XP - NeoSmart Technologies Wiki

You say "funny" problems but that doesn't help us help you. We need to know what these funny problems are so we can have a better idea what is going on.
 
Thanks for the reply.

I copied those files to Vista (I had to download them as XP didn't have them) and now the Boot Menu shows. When I choose XP it restarts the computer and shows the menu again.

Here's my boot.ini file:
[boot loader]
timeout=1
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Is this correct?
 
That all depends. Since XP itself was alone when you installed it would be correct for just that disk. But now that you have both of them connected you will have to adjust the boot.ini to show this.

Go to Computer Management. Start>Right click on My Computer (Or Computer in Vista)>Manage>Disk Management.

Is the Vista disk first and the XP disc second? Or how are that situated when you look at this screen. It should show both disks there and depending on the situation of XP the Values of disk and rdisk will have to be adjusted.
 
It says Vista is Disk 0 (C Drive) and XP is Disk 1 (E Drive). It says Vista is the Boot drive and it also says both drives are both active primary partitions.

I've already tested changing the value disk(0) in boot.ini to 1 and 2. At boot menu, if you choose XP it goes to another menu where you choose XP again and it comes up with a message saying the boot configurations are wrong and a lot more of the same sort of crap.
 
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