Problems Booting XP

miketoddmiller

miketoddmiller

Member
Hi NeoSmart, firstly want to commend you on such a great product - especially a free one. :smile: Basically I'm having major issues dual booting Vista & XP. Feels like I'm very close to fixing it but I'm not sure whether there is underlying issues causing the problem.

Here's the story;

Got a HP DV2810 laptop last week with Vista pre-installed, with the intention to dual boot with XP. Installed XP, got back into Vista and using EasyBCD, set up the dual-boot absolutley fine and fully functioning. Then unfortunately got the Virtumonde virus on Vista - so got rid but it seemed to corrupt a lot of apps so just reinstalled Vista. Problem is now, although using exactly the same process cannot boot XP. Seem to get the quick invalid boot.ini error. I have read through loads of forums, including yours and just want a definitive answer on what I need to do and what needs to be where (relating to boot.ini, ntldr, ntdetect.com) to try and fix the problemo!

Regaring the boot.ini file - got Vista on C: (First Partition), XP on D: (Second Partition). Help would be so much apprieciated! Thanks in advance.

Mike. :wink:
 
Hi mike, welcome to the forum.
boot.ini is an XP boot file. It has nothing at all to do with Vista.
Vista's bootloader will pass control to NTLDR if you choose XP from its menu, and NTLDR uses boot.ini to find the XP system.
Have a look through the wiki about the XP boot process,
http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Windows+XP
(note the troubleshooter link), and post back if you can't find the answer to your problem there.
All of the boot files for both OSs must be on the partition marked "system active" in disk management
 
Cheers for the reply Terry - sorry for taking so long. Think the issue was when I reinstalled Vista - must have messed up the XP boot settings. Now that I've reinstalled XP (due to the virus) everything works fine and dandy, like before. Anyway thanks for the help - nice summary.

Happy customer! :brows:
 
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