XP booting disaseter!

J

JeffH

Member
All,

Plese help, I made a mess of things. My XP installation will not longer boot. Most likley since I deleted the \boot\ directory out of my c:\ drive. This may sound like a really dumb thing to do, and it is! I thought I was cleaning up a failed install of vista and wiped out this directory.

I now get the error message: "Error Occurred file \boot\bcd
An error occurred while attempting to read the boot configuration data"

I can still boot to Vista on my K:\ drive, but XP on my C:\ drive is dead. The files I deleted should be in the recycle bin, but I can't boot to access it.

I should note that I was using XP pro with a password so this prevents me from easily accessing the c:\ files when I boot into Vista.

Pleas help!

Jeff
 
Hi Jeff,

So when you reboot, you see a menu giving you a choice between XP and Vista? And when you select Vista everything is fine?
 
Not exactly, When I go into bios and make my K: drive the drive to boot first, it boots into vista. At this point, I get a selection asking if I want Windows or Vista. I set this up using your program. If I select Vista, all is well. If I select Windows, then it dies.

If I go into my bios and make my C:\ drive boot first (my XP drive), I get the error message I typed above.
 
OK - we don't recommend using the BIOS to switch between operating systems, so here's what you should do:

Set Vista to boot.
Install EasyBCD.
With EasyBCD add a new Windows XP entry from the "Add/Remove Entries" section.

When you reboot, now along with the Vista option you should have an XP entry as well. Assuming your Boot.ini is properly configured & NTLDR and NTDETECT are on the Vista drive, it should work.

If anything in that last sentence isn't the case, you can address it here: http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Windows+XP

Good luck.
 
I already tried easyBCD and added an entry for Windows XP, it shows up on the list, but when I select it, the boot fails. I will have to post the exact error message later since I am not at this computer. I will take a detailed look at the link you posted and try what it says.

Thanks for your help!
Addendum:
Well I made some progress after reading the file you referenced above. On my Vista drive (K:\) there was no boot.ini or NTLDR files so I copied them over from my XP drive (C:\) After looking at the boot.ini file, it looked like what was needed since the linx menu on easyBCD1.7 said it drive 0 partion 0 was my XP installation. Drive 0 partion 1 is the Gateway recovery partion (D:\) and Drive 1 partion 0 is my new Vista installation on K:\. Here is what it said:

[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

When I rebooted, I choose windows from the boot menu and this time it did not give an error. It booted into the hidden Gateway recovery partition which is my D:\ drive and tried to run a system recovery. I exited out of this as I did not want to do this.

I then went back and tried to change parttition(1) to partition(2) and tried it again. This time when I selected windows the screen just went black for a few seconds and it booted right back the the boot selection menu.

Any suggestions?

Thanks a million for your help!!
Jeff
 
Last edited:
Sounds like one or more of NTLDR and NTDETECT are not on all drives.
Can you double-check that?
 
They are on both the XP and Vist drives, but the versions are not the same (based on file date). I will try all possible combinations of the four files and see if this helps!

Do I need to have it on the gatway restore drive (d:\) which has a hidden partition with the XP restore data?

Thanks!
Jeff
 
Thanks for all youe help on this, but after 4 days of trying I have had to pull the plug on this project. Last night, I reformatted the drive and started with a clean install. I could not even use the windows disk to repair the installation, as it would not recognize the hard drive when I booted from the CD. At this point, I just need to finish reinstalling all my programs!
Thanks again!
Jeff
 
Well, I'm sorry you had to do that; but glad to hear it's working now.

If you need anything else, ask away.

Stick around, and good luck! :smile:
 
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