Looking for any assistance.

lost99

Member
I recently purchased a Sony Vaio laptop computer VGN-FZ190 which I was quite happy with once I managed to uninstall large chunks of Sony pre-installed software.

For work I needed to install a dual-boot with XP. I found the posting on the internet from apcmag.com by James Bannan. Everything worked as it should until I used EasyBCD. When I tried to add an entry for Windows XP I did not have the option to select the drive - is was greyed out. Other posts suggested that this was okay.

When I booted my Vista partition - it worked fine.
When I booted my XP entry - nothing happened it eventually came back to the original window asking me to choose one of the two systems.

After some reading of various post I thought I would use NeoGrub and hide partitions hd0,1 and hd0,2. I only have one drive and the Sony Vaio has a recovery partition at partition position one. Partition two - Vista and partition three- the partition I created that contains XP.

Once I did the above I lost all operating systems. I used my Mac computer to find and build a Super Grub CDRom boot disk. I used this disk to unhide partitions 1 and 2.

Now my computer boots up into Vista in a form of recovery mode. My C: drive is now my smaller former G: drive where XP is installed, and my G: drive is now my larger drive where Vista is installed.

As a last measure after reading some of the posts here I edited the menu.lst file (now on the G: drive) so it says unhide (hdX, Y) instead of hide but no change.

Is there some way to just get back to single boot sytem with Vista as it was? I'm rather tired and embarrassed at the mess I've created. Any help would be most forthcoming.

Lost99
 
Further information.

I ran bcdedit and received the following:

Windows Boot Manager
{bootmgr}
partition = G:

Windows Boot Loader
{current}
partition = G:
\Windows\system32\winload.exe
Microsoft Windows Vista

Real-mode Boot Sector
device boot
\NST\NeoGrub.mbr
NeoGrub Bootloader

Currently my C: drive is my former G: drive where XP is installed. Not too sure how or if I should start editing with bcdedit?

lost99
 
Sounds like you had a bad/mis-configured boot.ini - there really was no need to go into the (technically advanced) NeoGrub to get that working.

NeoGrub cannot resize partitions, so I'm not sure what you're seeing there.

What you need to do now is delete the XP partition, use a partition manager like Acronis or Paragon to return Windows Vista to its full size and you should be ready to go.

When you're ready to re-tackle the dual-boot situation, just let us know and we'll walk you through it.
 
Will try again - shortly.

Thanks for your response.

I've already started rebuilding my computer from scratch again. I decided it was best to get this done properly as I'd made rather a mess of it.

In a day or two I should be back with Vista and XP (and that bothersome Vaio recovery partition) installed and ready to attempt to get a dual-boot properly installed. But I will reread all the other similar posts first then ask for directions.

Thanks again.

Lost99
 
Lost99, the best and safest way of dual-booting Windows XP and Windows Vista is to install XP first then Vista --- if that is possible with your Vaio recovery thing....

Either way, good luck and we're here when you need us :smile:
 
A Happy Ending!

Computer Guru,

I rebuilt my computer - with Vista first, then XP, then followed the instructions as laid out in all your posts. Everything works just ducky now.

In retrospect it seems when I first installed XP with my hand-built slipstream XP install disk, XP was not installed correctly. When I tried to boot into XP it was this corrupt installation that was the problem - it had nothing to do with EasyBCD - I just assumed that the problem had to originate from someone other than myself. I used nLite to build a slipstream XP install disk which cleared up all associated problems.

Thanks again for your help.
 
You're mighty welcome, Lost99!

I'm glad to read the happy ending - congratulations on getting it all to work out so well in the end :smile:
 
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