Problems booting Vista and/or XP

RetGI

Member
I have two separate hard drives with XP loaded on one and Vista on the other. I use the XP drive for gaming only and Vista for everything else. I got tired of having to go into the BIOS to change drives every time I wanted to swap boot drives so I loaded "Vistabootpro". I'll admit I really didn't and still don't know what I'm doing when it came to the settings but I thought I configured it so I could easily boot into either OS. From that point on, everytime I attempted to load my Vista drive I got the message "File: windows\system32\winload.exe - the selected entry could not be loaded because the application is missing or corrupt. 0xc000000f. After a lot of research I read somewhere to not use Vistabootpro and to get EasyBCD 1.7. I uninstalled Vistabootpro and loaded EasyBCD 1.7 but honestly I'm in the same situation. I've tried recovery from the Vista boot DVD several times, did the bcdedit and mbr fix files to no avail. Now when I change the BIOS to configure my XP drive as the boot drive it boots into it just fine but when I try configure BIOS for the Vista drive to boot into the Vista drive I get the message "NTLDR is missing". The only way I can get into the Vista drive is by selecting my DVD drive as the boot drive and booting from the Vista DVD. Can someone please tell me what if any changes to make in EasyBCD to get things working properly or to just remove it and get everything back to normal? I'm pretty desperate! thanks.
 
Hi RetGI,

Have you taken a look at our Windows XP documentation? It should contain everything you need to get it working - and if you're still stuck we'll see what else we can do.

Windows XP - NeoSmart Technologies Wiki

No I haven't looked at XP at all. I assumed since I loaded EasyBCD on the Vista drive that my problem would be with Vista. See how little I know! Before I do anything on XP, are you sure that's where the problem is? thanks...
 
OK, here's what you should do.

Set BIOS w/ XP as boot device.
Boot into XP and run EasyBCD from there.
When it asks for Vista drive, give it the Vista drive letter. When it asks for the boot drive, give it the the XP drive letter.

Then go to EasyBCD -> Add/Remove -> and add an XP entry.
Reboot.

All should be well.
 
Thanks for your help. I just tried that. Set the XP drive as the boot drive and changed first boot device from DVD to hard drive. Now, every time I boot it only comes up in the Vista drive! This is strange..

Addendum:

OK, I reset something in esaybcd from the vista drive and got it to boot to the xp drive via BIOS changes. Installed Easybcd there and did as you suggested and now everything seems to be working fine. One more question if you don't mind. Let's say down the road I need to reload either XP or Vista on their respective drives. How does this affect this dual boot? Also, if for some reason I wanted to totally remove Easybcd from both drives, how would I go about doing that? When I was having these problems, I removed Easybcd and the Vistabootpro I originally installed and had loads of problems. So how would one totally remove this setup to get the drives to work independently again? thanks so much...
 
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Well, the first step is no longer using VistaBootPRO anymore, it's what complicated the initial problem.

You can read up on the proper way of installing XP after/before Vista from our documentation (recently re-written for complete clarification) at Windows XP - NeoSmart Technologies Wiki
 
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