trying to dual boot XP and Vista, unable to locate bootsect.dos

T

tony906x

Member
Hi, I installed a new copy of Vista Home Basic 64bit on my second partition ( C: ) and i accidently deleted the entry "previous version of windows" and i added XP on EasyBCD, but i can't seem to be able to boot into XP from my vista bootloader.

It keeps saying that "unable to locate E:\bootsect.dos"

The only way i can boot into XP right now is to uninstall Vista Bootloader on EasyBCD. And i can repair the vista bootloader again and boot into vista.

drives,
C: Vista
D: Media
E: XP Pro

If there is any other information u need please ask, :ldown: this has been so annoying.

P.S. I already formatted the vista partition and reinstalled Vista, but the vista bootloader hasn't changed, somehow been retained. :shame:
 
You first have to copy the ntldr, ntdetect.com, and boot.ini file over from the XP primary onto Vista's at the root. You will have to go into the tools>folder options>view tab off of the menu bar in any explorer window to uncheck the "hide all protected system files" and "known file types" items in order to make the boot.ini and others visible in order to copy them over.

Once that is done and since the XP installation is on the same drive as Vista you shouldn't have to edit the boot.ini file at all but simply add the XP entry in with EasyBCD.
 
Here when adding in a 3rd ide drive along with a pair of sata models already seeing a working dual boot of XP with Vista I had to re-edit the boot.ini file due to the missing boot.ini error. The rdisk(1)partition(1) had to see rdisk(2)partition(1) once the ide became rdisk(1) second to Vista's rdisk(0)partition(1).

That changed simply due to ide overriding sata by default. You may want to keep that in mind if you eventually see that come up on a different setup. The change is made on both the default listing and under the operating systems sub catagory when showing the repeat reference to XP there.
 
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