Vista installed first & partition hidden, XP installed into second partition

JasonW

Member
Hi All
Vista came pre-installed on Laptop partition 1. Used Gparted to make second primary partition and hide the Vista partition. Installed XP onto second partition and used GAG bootloader to launch Vista.

Installed EasyBCD.

Copied NTLDR and Boot.ini (from the XP partition) into Vista partition and made sure the boot.ini pointed to the XP partition.

Vista bootmanager displays Vista and Xp. Vista boots no problems.

When I selected XP at boot time it causes the laptop to reboot immediately. No information is spashed to the screen, the system just reboots.

I have easyBCD set up to boot XP from Drive C as per instructions. I even tried Drive D.

Any ideas, anyone?
 
Answer = NTDETECT.COM

Finally found the fix.

I assumed only the boot.ini and ntldr files were needed on the Vista partition. I needed NTDETECT.COM there as well.

EasyBCD really now works a treat.
 
Thank you for this info, Jason.

In our XP documentation we hilight the need for both NTLDR and NTDETECT, though I expected an explict NTLDR-related error if it wasn't found.... This answers quite a few other threads here!!
 
does the attributes of ntldr and ntdetect.com matter?
because i have both, but it still reboots ... I had them set to HSR, but on a native XP machine it was set to only A .... and just now i got it booting into XP with the HSR flags unset on my NTDETECT.com and NTLDR ... as far as i know these files should be hidden and system.
now that I have it booting, I'll try setting back to HSR.
Addendum:
OK .... wierd .... they're back to Hidden, System, Readonly and now it boots again ... I think my NTDETECT was not copied right .... i copied it again and it worked.
w00t ... really didnt want to re-install XP after having just finished installing all my appz on it :grinning:
Thanks boyz n gals
 
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