How would I do a Dual boot after the fact....

P

Pochrist

Member
Heres the story....

I had XP Pro installed on my PC.

I Pulled out the Drive and Put in a New Drive

I Installed Vista 64bit Home Premium on the new drive.

I Just put the Old drive back in and want make a dual boot with Vista and XP Pro.

Here are the facts:

Vista is installed on a 1 TB SATA drive with 5 Partions (C,D,E,F,G)

XP Pro is on a 80 gig IDE Drive with 2 partitions (H & J) - DVD is Drive letter "I"

I installed EasyBCD on Vista and did the following:

"Added Entry" (Windows XP)

"Change Settings" Changed XP to Drive "H"

Copied the "Boot.ini", "NTDETECT.COM" & "NTLDR" form "H" (Original XP Root drive)
to "C" (Vista Root Drive)

Here's what happens, when start the PC, I am presented with the Multi Boot loader and I select Windows XP and comes up with:

Unable to run ntoskrnl.exe please reinstall

I then hit escape and it will boot into Vista.

I assume this is because it it looking for the ntoskrnl.exe for XP but it finds the version in vista - how can I tell it where to find the XP version. Surly i can't replace the Vista ntoskrnl.exe with the XP version?

Thanks in advance.
 
Hi Pochrist, welcome to NST.
You shouldn't have "changed settings". The reason why that option was "greyed" when you added the entry was because the BCD points to the XP boot files not to the XP OS. The XP boot files say where to locate the OS.
Change the entry back to what it was (C: or boot)
Edit the C:\boot.ini copy to point to the XP HDD (rdisk(1) instead of rdisk(0) )
 
Back
Top