Please help me with my XP/Vista dual boot issue

L

luminous

Member
Please bear with me on this post. I have been through a lot to get this far. I've spent more than 30 hours on this, and once my issues are resolved I will post up a nice detailed guide to help others who run into these problems.

I am trying to create what I thought would be a nice standard dual boot of Vista and XP. I am doing all of this on a single spare HDD. I have removed my main drive from my machine physically while this is sorted.

Firstly, I have been a fan of Acronis products, True Image and Disk Director. I have been using them for years, and my main drive has been formatted, backed up and restored using Aconis products. Here comes the first issue.

If I use Disk Director to format my spare drive and partition it up, the Vista consistently fails to install. If there is a primary active NTFS partition with XP installed, Vista will attempt to install its boot loader on to that partition. When it does so, it totally corrupts the XP partition :rage:

Using Vista to format and partition the drive, I have no issues at all. I can even create a nice dual boot environment so long as XP is installed first. My aim however, is to install Vista onto a working XP machine, and get a dual boot environment. I am at the last atage where you tell BCD where the XP parititon is and try and get it to work.

Details:
160 Gb drive
1st partition 40Gb NTFS primary wih XP Pro (data here recovered using Acronis True Image)
2nd partition 30Gb NTFS primary active with Vista, fresh install from CD. Vista was installed here first.
3rd partition 90Gb NTFS logical with data

On booting to Vista, it sees my XP drive as D:\, so I have added it like that. NTldr was missing so I copied Ntldr, boot.ini and ntdetect over from my XP partition to the primary active Vista partition.

When I select XP it looks like it will work. The splash screen loads, and Windows gets up to the point where it is just about to show the logon screen. At this point it BSODs with some information at the top of screen and instantly reboots. I never get the chance to see what it is saying to me.

Any ideas please?
(I should point out that I have successfully booted into both OS. XP after it was restored, Vista after installation. It is just after Vista has been installed I cannot get into XP)
 
OK, I managed to catch the STOP error in all its glory. This is the error I see when attempting to boot into XP Pro from the Boot loader...

STOP: C0000139 {Entry Point Not Found}
The procedure entry point LdrSetMUICacheType could not be located in dynamic link library ntdll.dll

Anyone have a clue, as you may be able to tell I don't? :sick:
 
More progress, and a question that most of you should be able to answer :booyah:

In Vista:
c = vista
d = xp

I copied boot.ini, ntldr AND ntdetect to c: It was that bad move that caused the issue about regarding the stop error. Having removed ntdetect the situation is now different, and reminisent of a few other people who have posted on here but not managed to solve their problems.

At the moment I can boot to Vista, but any attempt to boot to XP is instant restart back to boot menu.

The Vista partition is the second partition on my HDD, it is Primary Active NTFS and where I boot from. It has copies of ntldr and boot.ini. Should I delete these files from the XP parition? Or is it fine that there are two copies of them?

The boot.ini file looks like this:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

BCD setup is like this:
There are a total of 3 entries listed in the Vista Bootloader.
Bootloader TimeOut: 30 seconds.
Default OS: Windows Vista (TM) Ultimate

Entry #1

Name: Windows Vista (TM) Ultimate
BCD ID: {current}
Drive: C:\
Bootloader Path: \Windows\system32\winload.exe
Windows Directory: \Windows

Entry #2

Name: Windows XP Pro C
BCD ID: {ntldr}
Drive: C:\
Bootloader Path: \ntldr
Windows Directory:

Entry #3

Name: Windows Xp Pro D
BCD ID: {f8e10b23-de23-11db-ae6e-a37f004f0c7e}
Drive: D:\
Bootloader Path: \ntldr
Windows Directory:

I have 3 entries as I was starting to get annoyed. Vista sees the XP partition as D:, but some people have said to try C: anyway. So, this way I get to try two options each reboot...only I am not getting anywhwere.

Anyone any suggestions please?
 
BOING BOING!!!

UPDATE, all is fixed....

Really, really simple solution. Install osl2000, thats it. It installs itself as an IPL into the MBR. It autodetects all operating systems on the machine, and bang...fully sorted :smile:

I will have a look at BCD again at some point in the future, but at least I know that the way I installed the machine is capable of working :smile:)
 
Glad you sorted it out luminous. I wouldn't have had a clue myself and I guess the others here are busy elsewhere.
 
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