Triple boot xp home, pro, 7

[plasma dragon00]

this may be a difficult question, although im sure it can be done...

i got bored today and decided to format and partition my 500 gig drive into 3 partitions, and install windows in this order (on separate partitions) - XP Home, XP Pro, Windows 7. yes, as you can tell, im triple booting. i prefer the vista boot loader over the xp one, and the vista one (im referring to the 7 one as the vista one because thats what it is) only gives me two options - windows 7, earlier version of windows

Windows 7 - correctly boots me into windows 7
Earlier version of windows - brings me to the xp boot loader, giving me Xp Home and XP Pro, each correctly booting into the correct operating system.

what id like is for the xp one to be gone, and the vista one to have Windows 7, XP Pro, XP Home - all as options, without the last two redirecting me to an xp loader. i installed EasyBCD and tried, but to no avail...

im currently stuck as to what i can do to fix this, any ideas?

e' - also, any help finding drivers for windows 7 for the logitech mx revolution mouse? havin a hard time...

e'2 - the mouse is the least of my issues right now, more of a convenience. althought, i guess that my boot question is as much of a convenience. my guess is leading me to believe i have to get rid of the xp bootloader, possibly on both partitions, and then tell vista bootloader to boot off of the specified disk. right now, if i make 2 separate entries for xp home and pro in easybcd in windows 7, both lead me to the xp bootloader. IDK. im currently waiting for the WoW servers to come back online, so this is what ive ben doing since then.

would using something like GRUB help? i only used it once, when i installed linux and forgot to disconnect my xp drive... didnt like it much, but i wasnt open to change. i have a 20 gig drive that ill eventually install ubuntu linux to also, and im pretty sure that installls grub, so if that will help the process let me know and ill do it.

thanks!

 

[PuzZah]

Maybe have a go at using EasyBCD (http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1) to try and reconfigure the bootloader. I'm surprised at the way that yours has set itself up to be honest. On my machine which currently has XP Pro, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2003 on it they all ran through the Vista bootloader by default.

And yes, Ubuntu does have an option to install GRUB during the setup process. GRUB has a nice configuration file (On Ubuntu it's /boot/grub/menu.lst or there is a Gnome GUI for it http://grubconf.sourceforge.net) which you can play about with so if EasyBCD doesn't offer you enough flexibility then GRUB almost certainly will.

Ben

 

[plasma dragon00]

Maybe have a go at using EasyBCD (http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1) to try and reconfigure the bootloader. I'm surprised at the way that yours has set itself up to be honest. On my machine which currently has XP Pro, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2003 on it they all ran through the Vista bootloader by default.

And yes, Ubuntu does have an option to install GRUB during the setup process. GRUB has a nice configuration file (On Ubuntu it's /boot/grub/menu.lst or there is a Gnome GUI for it http://grubconf.sourceforge.net) which you can play about with so if EasyBCD doesn't offer you enough flexibility then GRUB almost certainly will.

Ben

yeah i think i set it up like this a while ago and it worked through the vista loader just fine...

what im going to try is edit the boot.ini of xp pro and home, making them see that theyre the only OS on the disk (which wont let me boot from them) then go to vista and edit the bootloader of that and direct it to each disk. i guess its kinda a ghetto way to do it? but hey, it SHOULD work... i think... (i have next to no experience doing this...)

e' - one last thing with EasyBCD which is annoying me (never seen it do this before, however ive never seen my boot loaders config like this either...) if i go into either xp install and, say, "Remove Vista Bootloader" it does remove it, and correctly boots the xp one, but the vista one still shows as the one im editing in the list of EasyBCD X_X...

e'2 - doesnt exactly work... heres how my partitions r set up...
partition1 = XP Home
partition2 = XP Pro
partition3 = Windows 7

(thats how the boot.ini of the xp installs tell me, minus the windows 7 part. im guessing that on my own, although i DID install it to the third partition...)

but, when i boot into windows 7, the drive letters are as follows
7 = C:\
Pro = D:\
Home = L:\ (had ot assign it a letter manually)

under xp pro... (need to reboot into it and check, brb)(not gettin into it for a min, installing sp3 on home)
Pro = D:\
Home = C:\
7 = E:\

under xp home...
Home = C:\
Pro = D:\
7 = E:\

so as you can see, pro always stays as the D drive, yet the others change depending on what install ive booted... might that be an issue as well? my idea isnt working from before... im about to scrap this and reinstall all, as xp, 7, then pro. MAYBE that would work....

ok, looks like drive letters only change when i boot into windows 7. could THAT be the issue?