Hi there,
This will be my first post, so allow me to just say - thank the heavens you guys are here.
This problem I am having might be a tired old repetition of issues you have already solved (and if this is true, then by all means, I'm sorry), but I'm a bit unsure of how to proceed and could really use some help. In advance, thanks.
My situation is as follows:
I have a (home-built) PC with a single (SATA) hard-drive upon which a OEM copy of Windows XP Home Edition is currently living. Now, I recently purchased a dying ZT box (for only 25$ too!) with a copy of Vista Home Premium. I purchased this item because the hard drive was still good and it had a copy of vista home premium on it.
So I disconnected the XP drive in my home-built PC and connected the Vista Disk in it's place. Vista booted without complaint, and I did a factory settings restore before also installing all the necessary drivers. Once Vista was settled in, I plugged my XP drive back in and then added the Vista drive on the second SATA port.
Of course, at this point, I hadn't read the EasyBCD documentation yet. Because of my negligence, (I know, I know... RTFM!) I was not aware that Windows XP's bootloader would not load Vista. I tried to add Vista to boot.ini, but msconfig kept rejecting the entry. Giving up on that, I swapped the boot order in the BIOS and went over to Vista to install EasyBCD.
With EasyBCD locked and loaded, I proceeded to add another entry for Windows XP. EasyBCD automatically selected C: drive for it, but as far as Vista is concerned XP is on G: drive. I swapped the drive letters under EasyBCD and rebooted. Upon reboot I was presented with a nice boot menu with both my desired entries in place. However, when I tried to start up Windows XP the computer just rebooted and brought me back to the boot menu.
At this point, I realized I might as well just read the documentation, because hacking away at it wasn't really helping much. I quickly learned that EasyBCD would automatically select the drive with NTLDR on it. Armed with this knowledge I deleted my Windows XP entry and added it again, this time leaving the drive as C:. Sadly, when I try to select this new entry from the boot menu, I am told that the entry NTLDR is 'missing or corrupt'.
I think my situation is somewhat unique because I'm not installing any new operating systems. Both OS's are already installed and set up, each on their own individual drives. I'm coming to the conclusion that this might be the very problem.
So I guess it comes down to one question: Assuming that I have XP and Vista on two seperate drives, and that neither was installed with any knowledge that the other existed or would ever exist, is there any way to get them to dual-boot?
Once again, thanks for your time and patience.
Hoping sincerely you can help,
RayneMan
This will be my first post, so allow me to just say - thank the heavens you guys are here.
This problem I am having might be a tired old repetition of issues you have already solved (and if this is true, then by all means, I'm sorry), but I'm a bit unsure of how to proceed and could really use some help. In advance, thanks.
My situation is as follows:
I have a (home-built) PC with a single (SATA) hard-drive upon which a OEM copy of Windows XP Home Edition is currently living. Now, I recently purchased a dying ZT box (for only 25$ too!) with a copy of Vista Home Premium. I purchased this item because the hard drive was still good and it had a copy of vista home premium on it.
So I disconnected the XP drive in my home-built PC and connected the Vista Disk in it's place. Vista booted without complaint, and I did a factory settings restore before also installing all the necessary drivers. Once Vista was settled in, I plugged my XP drive back in and then added the Vista drive on the second SATA port.
Of course, at this point, I hadn't read the EasyBCD documentation yet. Because of my negligence, (I know, I know... RTFM!) I was not aware that Windows XP's bootloader would not load Vista. I tried to add Vista to boot.ini, but msconfig kept rejecting the entry. Giving up on that, I swapped the boot order in the BIOS and went over to Vista to install EasyBCD.
With EasyBCD locked and loaded, I proceeded to add another entry for Windows XP. EasyBCD automatically selected C: drive for it, but as far as Vista is concerned XP is on G: drive. I swapped the drive letters under EasyBCD and rebooted. Upon reboot I was presented with a nice boot menu with both my desired entries in place. However, when I tried to start up Windows XP the computer just rebooted and brought me back to the boot menu.
At this point, I realized I might as well just read the documentation, because hacking away at it wasn't really helping much. I quickly learned that EasyBCD would automatically select the drive with NTLDR on it. Armed with this knowledge I deleted my Windows XP entry and added it again, this time leaving the drive as C:. Sadly, when I try to select this new entry from the boot menu, I am told that the entry NTLDR is 'missing or corrupt'.
I think my situation is somewhat unique because I'm not installing any new operating systems. Both OS's are already installed and set up, each on their own individual drives. I'm coming to the conclusion that this might be the very problem.
So I guess it comes down to one question: Assuming that I have XP and Vista on two seperate drives, and that neither was installed with any knowledge that the other existed or would ever exist, is there any way to get them to dual-boot?
Once again, thanks for your time and patience.
Hoping sincerely you can help,
RayneMan