vista/XP dual-boot gone horribly wrong

mess

New Member
Hi guys,

I was running Vista64 off C:/and added a second hard drive at E:/ in Vista (my DVD drive is D:/) that all went well, but during the XP install. XP failed to recognise the DVD drive and called the second hard-drive D:/, and when I'm in XP the DVD drive is E:/.

The system boots into XP ok, although I think there's some motherboard/BIOS problem as my internet ports don't work and XP is not recognising I have sound devices (both on-board).

EasyBCD only shows a C:/ and D:/ drive when I try and add an entry to the bootloader - I haven't tried using D:/ to see what happens, because in Vista the second hard-drive is called E:/ and I don't want to screw the computer up anymore than it is.

Tried to do a repair off the Vista DVD, but got a Blue-screen STOP error, which I think may be due to drive name conflicts.

If anyone has any ideas, I would be so grateful for any help.

Cheers

Addendum:

OK, the Vista DVD recovery worked finally and repaired the Vista bootloader, so I'm now in Vista.

EasyBCD on Vista lists the drives as C:/ and E:/

Can I have some advice on how to proceed? I don't want to mess up things any more than they are...

thankyou
 
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Hi Mess, welcome to NST.
It doesn't matter that your OS's call drives by different letters. The lettering is just an internal construct of each OS (stored in the registry), and is not physically on the drive. The label that you give the disk when you format it (if you bothered - it's optional) is written on the disk and will be read the same in both OSs, but the letter isn't.
To get your dual-boot working, follow the instructions in the wiki. Copy the three XP boot files across to the Vista root, add an entry for XP with EasyBCD (pointing to C: where the copied boot files are) and edit C:\boot.ini (the copy you just made) to point to the XP HDD by changing rdisk(0) to rdisk(1) in both places.
 
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