Low leveled Vista now XP won't boot

jcclow

jcclow

Member
I have one hard drive that had Vista64 on C: and still has XP Pro on H: and Windows 7 on I:. I legally own all three installs. I got sick of Vista and low leveled it from within Windows 7. Now, nothing will boot. I've tried fixmbr and fixboot from inside the XP install disc and the furthest I've gotten it to boot is to "NTLDR is missing. Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to restart." The version of Vista Ultimate 64 I own is downgraded to "upgrade only" unless I can boot into another OS. I've tried putting each of my XP Pro (legally owned) discs in the drive to see if I could trick Vista into seeing them and letting me re-install it, but no luck. I'm about to go get the BFH and fix the whole PC myself. My search of this forum has netted no posts like mine and I'm at wits end.

Thank You!
 
Hi Jcc, welcome to NST.
You can't get XP to boot Vista or W7 no matter what you try.
Boot your W7 DVD, select "repair your computer" then "startup repair", and repeat this 2 or 3 times till W7 is booting unaided.
Then use EasyBCD 2.0 to add entries for Vista and XP to the W7 BCD, and let it auto-configure XP for you.

Or if you own a bootable Vista DVD, you can follow the same instructions with the Vista DVD as the controlling system, as it was before you deleted it.
 
I can't believe that Microsoft could screw something up this bad. I am absolutely amazed.

So I finally got into my Windows 7 installation. Here's what I did. I booted to my XP disc and chose Repair and did a FixMBR. I then rebooted to the XP disc and again chose repair and then a Fixboot. I rebooted to my Vista DVD and it finally saw my Windows 7 installation. I did a nstartup repair from the Vista DVD a couple of times and it finally let me boot into Windows 7. However, with the install of Vista gone that I had used to get a copy of Windows 7 RC1 with, My Windows 7 was now not a genuine install. So, it booted to a blank screen and wouldn't let me do anything. Seeing as 99% of the time, I'm smarter than my PC, I CTRL-ALT-DEL, started the Task Manager, Chose File>New Task and browsed to install DVD for Vista and ran Setup.exe. Vista installed fine and I started the upgrade to SP1. SP1 installed, rebooted and hung on update #99409 (something to do with the registry). I rebooted and got the error screen saying "...if this is the first time you've seen this screen, reboot and try again. If it happens again, reboot from the Vista DVD..." So I rebooted and got the same screen. I put the Vista DVD in and nothing. I tried repairing Vista with the Vista DVD and nothing. I think I tried the repair option at least 15 times and everytime it came up, there were no OS options. I tried starting over with the XP CD (because there was still a perfectly good install of XP on a partition of the same HD) and nothing. I ran FixMBR and Fixboot again and nothing. I was done. This BS had been going on for two days and I was sick of Googling for info.

I low level formatted the entire HD and I just finished installing XP Pro and am now on my Vista 64 install. I just can't believe that Microsoft made a once easy process this impossible. All I wanted to do was reinstall my Vista from a clean partition, meaning I wiped it before the install, and that is just not possible with this new MBR.

I attached pics of my legal XP and Vista discs just so everyone didnt think I was being dishonest...

vista.jpg

xp.jpg


Addendum:

BTW, Terry60...thanks for the quick response. EasyBCD is amazing and has gotten me out of a bind many times before. I should've started with it before I removed Vista.
 
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