vista and xp dual boot

bradthegreat · Feb 16, 2007

first off, if there is a thread about this, point me in the right direction...

I installed Vista on my laptop side by side with XP. It installed great and everything works fine. however, I can't choose which OS to boot into at startup - I have to mark either the XP partition or the Vista partition as active and then it boots right up. How can I add XP to Vista's bootloader? am I asking too much?

Rick · Feb 16, 2007

Here is a random article dealing with this:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ben/archive/2007/01/31/so-you-want-to-add-xp-to-your-vista-installation.aspx
BACKUP! I used the new complete backup feature of Vista Ultimate to create an image of my Vista partition and I stuck it on my second drive. Don't skip this step! I actually had to use this at one point because I accidentally formatted my Vista partition. By popping in the Vista DVD I was able to restore the image in a few minutes.

Using the awesome new disk management features in Vista, I shrunk the partition on the second drive and made a second partition for XP. When I booted to my XP SP2 disk, it complained that I was trying to install XP on the secondary drive.

I headed back into Vista, deleted that new XP partition and expanded the single partition on my second drive to refill the whole drive. I then shrunk a partition on my first drive and made a partition for XP.

I booted to XP and successfully installed it on that new partition.

The problem now is that you'll only be able to boot to XP because it overwrites the Vista bootloader. The second problem is that the Vista bootloader and the XP bootloader are completely different.

I booted to the Vista DVD and selected the Repair option. I told it to fix my startup problems and that got me booting back into Vista.

I figured from there I would be able to use VistaBootPro to dual boot my machine. Wrong. I think the problem stems from having Vista on my system partition and XP on a simple partition. Also, in Vista my XP partition shows up as drive F and in XP it showed up as drive J. Whatever the reason, I couldn't get it going.

I booted back to the XP disk, chose Repair and booted into the recovery console. Once at the command prompt, I typed fixboot. That wrote the bootloader to send me into XP.

I booted into XP and inserted the Vista DVD. I opened a command prompt at the Vista DVD and ran these commands:
Code:
cd \boot
bootsect /nt60 c: /force
c:
cd \windows\system32
bcdedit /create {legacy} /d "WinXP"
bcdedit /set {legacy} device boot
bcdedit /set {legacy} path \ntldr
bcdedit /displayorder {legacy} /addlast
Actually when I tried to create the new legacy partition, it said that one already existed from my work with VistaBootPro. I had to run bcdedit /delete {legacy} to remove that and start over.

That worked and I'm now dual booting XP and Vista. It seemed like way too much work and I probably should have just wiped everything and installed XP FIRST.
Let us know how this works for you or if you find a better method. I have yet to try to dual boot Vista.

bradthegreat · Feb 16, 2007

yeah - I'll give that a shot when I have a chance. thanks

bradthegreat · Feb 16, 2007

dang - all that did was delete my Vista boot capabilities. I installed XP first and it still won't give me the dual option. I was able to repair the Vista bootloader so I am back to setting the partitions as active if I want to boot into them...I do not understand why it will not just work!

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vista and xp dual boot

bradthegreat Newcomer, in training

Rick TechSpot Staff

bradthegreat Newcomer, in training

bradthegreat Newcomer, in training