Reinstalling XP on dual boot sys w Vista

frustrated999

Distinguished Member
Using Vista and XP Pro with the latter being my main O/S. Currently have EasyBCD and HideNSeek installed in Vista. The two o/s are in primary partitions. Having proiblems with the XP and would like to do a clean install. Want to restore an image of C: (XP) and want to make sure that this is not going to cause boot problems. Is that correct?

Hopefully that will fix my problems and I will not have to resort to do a clean install from the XP CD which will cause boot problems. Think in that case booting with the Vista DVD and restoring the bootloader would be all that is needed?
 
That 's a fair assessment.
There shouldn't be a problem just restoring a partition image of XP, unless XP is "system" and the image is old enough for the boot information to be different to the way it is today.
If Vista is "system", then the restore of XP should be transparent.
You're correct that reinstalling XP would regress the boot (unless XP and Vista are on separate HDDs, in which case you could disconnect Vista to protect it while you do the install, then put it back afterwards)
These days, regressing the boot is easily dealt with. The latest build of EasyBCD 2.0, will do all the hard work of dual-booting XP automatically.

HnS is another matter. If you do have to reinstall XP, and you know it's going to regress the boot (because it's on the same HDD and you can't protect it), then it would be best to run the HnS UI in "remove" mode first, otherwise XP will stop HnS working but leave enough traces around to cause problems trying to put it back on again.
If you remove HnS, reinstall XP, fix the Vista boot then reinstall HnS, it should go on clean.

But hopefully that's all academic, and your image restore will cause no problems.
 
There shouldn't be a problem just restoring a partition image of XP, unless XP is "system" and the image is old enough for the boot information to be different to the way it is today.
If Vista is "system", then the restore of XP should be transparent.

By system do you mean the o/s whose bootloader is being used to boot the o/s on the system?


These days, regressing the boot is easily dealt with. The latest build of EasyBCD 2.0, will do all the hard work of dual-booting XP automatically.

Would you still not have to get Vista to boot up so as to use EasyBCD to fix the boot problem?

This is added to be able to post this message as the system was refusing to allow me to post the above because my reply was too short.
 
"system" refers to the Disk management flag which indicates the partition containing the boot files.

Yes you'll need to repair the Vista boot and put the BCD back in charge before you can begin modifying it with EasyBCD of course.
 
Yes I did. What I wound up do was reinstalling HideNSeek which hid the vista partition when I booted into XP thereby fixing the drive letter assignments in XP.
 
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