Booting Issues: Vista and XP

[sdinesh76]

i was dual booting Vista and xp and then i formatted my xp partition,installed a fresh copy of xp and now it automatically loads windows xp, it doesn't show where i use to select the OS to load

my disk is partitioned c drive for Vista and e drive for win xp

this is the contents of my xp's boot.ini file:

[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


how do i manually add Vista to the boot.ini file of win xp so i can select Vista to boot?

thanks

 

[Lorien]

Hi sdinesh76,

Welcome to Vista Forums!

The following article should assist you in setting up the dual-boot process - and may differ from the above on how to edit boot.ini (as while it can be done directly through boot.ini, we need more information to give precise instructions and this will take you through it step-by-step and should help you find that information - and it needs to be EXACT in every detail or it will not work - either it will fail to boot or will not boot to one of the options): How to dual boot Vista and XP (with Vista installed first) -- the step-by-step guide with screenshots.

The trick is to find the proper entries to identify both boot options (adding them is trivial by comparison) and putting them in the right place and in the proper order.
I hope this helps. If not, post back and we'll see if we can work it out more manually. I believe the boot partition and information needs to be on the Vista partition, but BCDEdit and the above article will walk you through the process.

I hope this helps. If not, post back with what happened and how things stand and we'll try to go from there.

Good luck!