Windows XP and Vista Dual-Boot not working

exautt

Member
I've been checking these forums and all the signs keep pointing to the fact that i should have my XP install pointing to C.. well i do. I've tried C and D to no avail. bootmanager just keeps telling me my /ntldr is missing. I've had Vista installed for quite some time as my primary OS. but i wanted to try a couple games in XP just for the heck of it. so i threw in an old 20GB ide hard drive in addition to my primary 160GB sata that's already partitioned into C & D drives.
That means Vista see's that i've got a C, D, & G drives. like i said no matter what i do i cant get XP to boot. what now?
 
Hi Exautt,

Yep, this is an error commonly occurring when you add a drive with XP already installed to a system with Vista working just fine.

The problem is that the XP bootloader files are not on the Vista drive.

Set the XP entry in EasyBCD to the bootloader drive. Copy the boot files to your boot drive and copy over the boot.ini file from your Windows XP drive to there as well - but be sure to update it to reflect the new position of the XP drive/partition.

It would help if you could go to Diagnostics | Copy Debug Data and paste it in your reply.
 
boot.ini

ok, so i copied over the boot files and edited the boot.ini and now ntldr starts, but it still cant load xp quite right. i know the problem is in my boot.ini now, but im unsure how to fix it. here's my boot.ini file:
Code:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
 
To set up Boot.ini:

EasyBCD | Add/Remove | Linux/BSD
Look at the drive/partition list and identify the XP drive.

The numbers in boot.ini should be:

drive(): the number shown in EasyBCD
partition(): the number shown in EasyBCD + 1
 
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