XP Pro after Vista Home Premium

K

kewartist

Member
Hello, First of all thank you for your support. My new HP PC has Vista Home Premium with a recovery partiton only but I want to keep my old XP Pro with all its customized settings. I knew about Disk Management from XP but think that Vista's version is less flexible. However, I shrunk my 250 GB HDD on my new PC to achieve a 104 GB partition (F:smile:. I would have loved to have three partitions on it but this was refused. I learned that this apparently is due to some unmovable files placed by Vista unfortunately anywhere on the HDD preferably towards the end. I formatted the new partition with NTFS.

Then I took the old HDD and made it an USB external disk and connected it to my new PC and moved the partition containing XP Pro from my old HDD to the new partition (F:smile: on my new PC.

Then I downloaded EasyBCD to my C: drive containing Vista and followed the instructions. I made a couple of mistakes and in this process I had to receover Vista, which now shows up as Vista(recoverd) but seem to work fine and I also lost my Documents and Settings folder, which disappeared. This is what I see on C:
BCD File 32KB
BCD Txt Doc 256 KB
BCD LOG1 LOG1 File 0KB
BCD LOG2 LOG2 File 0KB
boot_nst.old OLD File 28 KB
boot_nst.old Txt Doc 25KB
boot_nst.old.LOG1 LOG1 File 0KB
[FONT=&quot]boot_nst.old.LOG2 LOG2 File 0KB
bootstat Video CD Movie 64KB
Recovery.bcd BCD File 28KB
Recovery.bcd Txt Doc 25KB
Recovery.bcd.Log1 LOG File 0KB
Recovery.bcd.Log2 LOG File 0KB

EasyBCD shows the following settings:
There are a total of 2 entries listed in the Vista Bootloader
Bootloader Timeout: 30 seconds.
Default OS: Windows Vista(TM) Home Premium (recovered)

Entry #1

Name: Windows Vista(TM) Home Premium (recovered)
BCD ID: {current}
Drive: C:\
Bootloader Path: \Windows\system32\winload.exe
Windows Directory: \Windows

Entry #2

Name: Microsoft Windows XP
BCD ID: {f73a8d15-e200-11dd-b6ef-84371d9161a7}
Drive: F:\
Bootloader Path: \NTLDR

When I boot my new HP PC it first shows a blue HP screen, funnily at first boot in the morning quite long but very short in any later subsequent reboot and then offers me the Windows Boot Manager with
1. Vista recovered
2. XP Professional

However, if I choose XP it will start up but then fail and close. This is the big why?

I looked for answers. I found that when an operation system is installed on a PC it will be linked to the PC configuration so it is often not pssible to just move a partiton from one PC to another. Does this mean I will have to install XP new from the installation CD, which means I will loose all my old settings?

I also read your briefings. Would installing Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0 to my existing XP installation, which seems to be a must ( would be lovely to know why?) solve this problem?

Sorry for the long explanation but I hope I covered all.

Kind regards

Joachim[/FONT]
 
Hi Joachim, welcome to NST.
You're right about copying an OS from one PC to another. Apart from the fact that it might not contain the drivers for the new hardware (I assume your new PC is more advanced than the old one), there's the problem of the physical layout.
The OS contains an internal description of its previous environment in the registry, which won't correspond to the situation it now finds itself in. Imagine taking your befuddled old grannie from her home of 50 years and giving her a new home in your spare room. Don't be surprised if she comes into your bedroom in the middle of the night and pees in your wardrobe !

You should be able to re-educate grannie by Doing a "repair install" of XP over the partition where you've copied it. This should hang on to your settings, but you might still need to uninstall/reinstall your apps if the disk letter that they were originally installed to is no longer the same on the new system.
After an install (or repair install) of XP, the Vista bootmgr will have been regressed to the XP NTLDR, so you'll need to repair the Vista boot.
Please read the sticky thread first and you should avoid the pitfalls.

You only need to install NET 2.0 framework if you intend to run EasyBCD from XP. (It is a tool for manipulating Vista's BCD, but it can be run on just about any other available OS if you're unable to boot Vista)
 
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You should have started off with a 3rd party drive partitioning tool to see the Vista primary resized. First you look to see how much free space was available and shrink that down to where you needed it to be to allow space for XP.

Since you copied the partition over you need to repair the mbr and later restore Vista's own which was done. But now you need to unhide and copy XP's boot files over to the Vista root along with an edit of the boot.ini file copy to point at the second partition now seen since you removed the recovery there. Without that done XP won't load when selected.

The preferred option however before copying an entire partition over would be using the file and settings transfer wizard to backup the settings. From there you see those restored on a clean install of XP to a new second primary created in the space you now have for that. That also sees a new hardware profile and mbr followed by the Vista startup repair.
 
Terry first of all, thank you for your prompt reply and apologies for not having replied sooner which would have been good manners. I was not cross about my granny, even though I doubt she would have behaved like this. Anyway this way you explained it all nice and clear.

You confirmed what I feared I have to basically reinstall XP even though I am a bit confused about PC eye's comments. Does he say I can get away without a repair/reinstall? I need a granny explanation, I suppose.

I did use a 3rd party partition manager which also only offered me 104 GB. I read about the Windows file transfer wizard. I understand I should use it once I have repaired/reinstaled XP?

Thank you again for all your efforts.

Joachim
 
Re-reading your first post, I see you don't mention how XP failed.
Your EasyBCD entry for XP is pointing to the XP partition. It should be pointing to the XP boot files, which should have been copied to the partition flagged as "system" in disk management. Then boot.ini (1 of the 3 copied files) should be edited to point to the XP partition.
Please read the sticky thread link I gave you from 3 to 6, and check that you've done everything you should have. Any failure of XP to boot should be covered in the troubleshooter.
Only when you're sure that all of that is done will we know how granny is going to get on in her new home, and we'll deal with any problems she has then.
 
Hello Terry, Meanwhile the tumbling toddler tried a repair install with his XP Pro installation disk. Set up found indeed the xp partition I had prepared, called it C: and then went through the repair install and lo and behold after rebooting XP started up and continued the set up but then in the network section it suddenly asks for a file called cimwin32.mfl from the XP Pro SP2 CD. I do not have it. I only have a XP Pro CD and did the upgrade online from Microsoft 2 or 3 years ago. What best to do? At the moment I do not have internet access on my PC and write to you from my laptop. Thank you.

Regards Joachim
 
If its trying to connect to the internet during setup skip it. You can always go get the net drivers for your laptop and transfer them via usb drive or after you got that setup get sp2 to replace any missing files. You might want to look into slipstreaming an SP3 disc so you don't need to do two SP updates after re-installs. You can use tools such as automstreamer and nlite for this.
 
Thank you for you reply Justin, I am presently downloading a stand-alone version of SP3. Can't I just use it directly on the installed XP Pro?

You seemded not surprised that my XP Pro installation did not include the net drivers. I was puzzled.

By the way, when I now boot the PC I get the bootloader offering Vista and Windows XP but when I choose XP it says hal.dll is missing in root directory? Forgive me I just looked at the Troubleshooter link and will read all suggested by Terry including the Troubleshooter more carefully and will start over again. May be granny is more astute than assumed. If I tumble I will toddle along with more questions if you don't mind.

Regards

Joachim, truly tumbling toddler
 
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The HAL error is one of many symptoms with the same cause.
The rdisk and partition values in boot.ini are not correctly identifying the location of XP.
When it says "missing or invalid" it means "I can't find it where you said it should be"
 
Yes, XP doesn't have much driver support included with it. It basically just has the bare bone enough to get you up and running long enough to install everything else. If you downloaded a full SP3 package you should have no problems, however, if its just an installer (can tell by the size) it would still need access to the internet to get the needed files for installation. It is some amazing stuff MS has done lately to include such support in Vista and especially for Windows 7.
 
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