Install Vista on dual boot system

I

Ian Hodgson

New Member
I currently have XPpro on C: and XPHome on D: I want to replace XPPro on C: with Vista. XPPro is the main drive having boot.ini and ntldr in the root directory. If I replace it with Vista might I have a problem booting or will Vista pick up the dual boot configuration automatically and take over properly from XPPro?
Thanks
 
vista is good with dual boot systems, just reformat the partition and install vista on it. it will do the rest and detect it all on startup.
 
vista actually blows with dual booting and there is a lot of problems out there.

There is no longer a boot.ini file in vista, instead its a crappy executeable file, which you will have to launch and edit once in vista. It's called bcdedit.exe, then you can add lines in for multi boot systems. Or if you have multiple OSes you can also always installed a third party boot loader, if you want to get into that.

Take a look at this:

http://www.vistabootpro.org/
 
VistaBootPro is a ripoff of the EasyBCD tool that first came out. I've been looking at that for some time. When upgrading from Pro to Vista you will now see a new splash screen asking you to choose Vista which will be default until changed or a previos version of Windows. The EasyBCD is an effective way of changing the boot order without a need to restart the system after changing it with the msconfig utility. It's just another desktop shortcut.

Here XP Pro was on the second drive and Vista refused to install onto a second primary prepared for it. It simply refused and replaced the Pro version on the first there. SP Pro was theh installed to the first sata. Having originally installed XP Home as a separate OS and having then installed Vista a seccond time the third now included the fresh imstall of the Pro version. The boot.ini is still used to decide which of the two XPs are the default. The EasyBCD chooses between XP and Vista since it does have a new boot loader and even creates a new boot folder on the root of the boot drive. Vista will look for the first drive on the system when installing it even if you install to a second drive. The first install here was with the XP Home primary unplugged. But RC1 the first beta had already left an unremovable boot folder even Vista couldn't delete when isolated.
 
i had XP pro installed on one partition, then i put Vista ULT on another, then i put Ubuntu 7.04 over all of it, with absolutely no editing of ANY files as tlarkin explains.
 
PC Eye, links would be nice, I found one

http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EB...e;jsessionid=757B5D2CC8510D2FC7536328B573292D

However, when googling easy bcd you get the vistabootpro.org link, so I think they may be related some how

Impulse666-

That only works if you install vista last on an open partition, because when I installed it first if botched my xp partition every time, and the OS installer has no options about partition schemas. MS did this on purpose I think. Linux installers are honestly some of the best OS installers out there, and able to install pretty much alongside anything.
 
tlarkin said:
PC Eye, links would be nice, I found one

http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EB...e;jsessionid=757B5D2CC8510D2FC7536328B573292D

However, when googling easy bcd you get the vistabootpro.org link, so I think they may be related some how

Impulse666-

That only works if you install vista last on an open partition, because when I installed it first if botched my xp partition every time, and the OS installer has no options about partition schemas. MS did this on purpose I think. Linux installers are honestly some of the best OS installers out there, and able to install pretty much alongside anything.
Click to expand...

The original idea behind EasyBCD while actually running into VistaBootPRO first was to have a tool right on the desktop for editing the boot information for things like changing the boot order(easy) along with adding(?) and removing entries for other OSs. When the mbr was rewritten here for XP neither method of either one of those two or the manual efforts with the BCDeditor saw results. The word on VistaBootPRO is that is was a ripoff of the EasyBCD program according to some? They work the same since one may have been a quick copy with a new name of the other there.

One thing found fast with Vista when trying to install it onto a second partion where there was another version of Windows on the first it went right that to upgrade it refusing to continue onto the second partition. You would probably have to install to a second first followed by the XP install on the first and perform what they call a recovery install on Vista after. When it saw the Vista copy already on the second partition then it would proceed to replace it. But you know the MS trick there to proprietize things a little.
 
I tried installing Vista Ultimate as a clean install on C: and it dual booted fine with XPHome. After I powered off and turned on next day - guess what Vista couldn't boot saying fallback 1. Couldn't get out of it so I installed another XPHome on C: All OK except I have a power-off problem and no ACPI I have posted another message about this problem in this forum.
Thanks
 
From the thread there you seemed to have solved that. When installing either XP or Vista you first have to decide on the power options. That's found in the Control Panel. With XP you simply right click on the desktop and open the screen saver tab. The power option button is on the lower hlalf of that screen where you can then change from 20min. standby to "never". The option for power off when pressing the power switch is checked off there.

The problem seen now with Vista is that you have to install that onto the first NTFS primary partition. It wants to own the drive. The boot loader will automatically go to the first drive detected on the system whether ide or sata with ide even with sata installed. Try installing it to a second partition while XP is on the first? It replaced XP Pro here when tried. If you installed XP to the second first and then Vista onto the first that's an idea.
 
Yes I installed XPHome to D: when XPPro was already on the C: Thats 3 years ago. Two weeks ago I replaced XPPro on C: with Vista and thats when I got the problems. Now that I recall I think the ACPI problem was already there cos something came up during the Vista install about ACPI compliance and I ignored it and it continued installing happily. Perhaps I shouldn't have ignored it.
 
Back to XP

Thanks for your help. I have replaced Vista with XP for now. It was crashing when unattended for about 15 mins. Dont want to look into it right now. However when I re-installed XP on C: the boot loader wouldnt pick up my XP on D:. They are both on SATA drives. C: is on SATA 2 and D: is on SATA 1. I noticed that there are no files like ntldr or boot.ini on D: (not sure if they are supposed to be or not. I looked at the boot.ini file on C: (the new install) and it only had one line of disk info:
[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 Home Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

It says rdisk 0 but this is SATA 2? not sure if that matters?

I tried adding another line

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition on D" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

but this made no change to the resulting boot

How do I get my D: to show up as a bootable drive?

Thanks
 
For one thing the last part you added on the line is no good. The "on D" should be removed. You don't assign drive letters in the boot.ini file. As you must have noted by now the "rdisk(1)" refers to the physical drive installed. If you didn't load the needed sata drivers from a driver disk when going to install the new copy of XP on the second sata drive the installer didn't detect the copy of Windows on the other drive since it didn't even detect it. It created a totally new mbr on the current drive in use only.
 
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