SysChat - Dual Boot Vista and XP with Vista already installed

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no harddrive found

i partitioned and formatted as NTFS, but when i start to install windowsXP it says something about not finding a hard drive.

btw i have a gateway MT6840 notebook

came with windows vista home premium

thanks in advance

I'm having the same problem, it's incredibly frustrating, the previously suggested solution didn't do much to help, how might I go about fixing this?

Oh, and cheers for the awesome guide by the by.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Unregistered - JimR (Post 7565)

I've read all the posts regarding this dual boot issue, but your quoted post particularly caught my attention, as I too had read that XP would need extra drivers, and would not install without them onto an SATA drive. Here is where I am at (not unlike a lot of others here it appears):

1) I have a new Dell with Pre-installed Vista Premium, trying to dual boot with XP Home.
2) Used Vista to partition the C: drive, created an F: drive about 10Gbs (probably more than necessary, not sure, as I do plan on installing some programs that won't run in Vista). I'm not sure, will check later, but think my new F is a Primary Drive.
3) Inserted my XP install CD, rebooted, F12, and it got to the screen than asked to which partition I wanted to use.
4) The only partition listed was c: partition 1(unknown)
5) The new F: partition does not show up. I F3 and fume..... I spent ALL day yesterday futsing around with one issue or another... all a waste thus far.

6) I installed an external Seatgate via eSATA and tried to install on this.
7) Step 3 again, never got to step 4 above. Blue screen with suggestion I remove any new drives I might have installed, or check for viruses.

Back to square one.

I removed my new external drive I tried the F: drive route again. Same ugly results, no option except the c: drive.

I see that a few others here are having no problem actually getting XP installed (unlike me) but that getting the the PC to see both OS as a dual boot is the issue. I'll deal with that later if I can just get past my install problem.

Question:

1) Should my new F: partition show up as F: on my XP install? Or is the C: partition 1 (unknown) actually the F: partition in reality, just showing up as C:?

I'm afraid to proceed as I don't want to wipe out all the Vista, including the Restore D: partition which came with my Dell in case of a dire emergency.

2) Any suggestions of where I might go from here?

Thanks for your help.

Hi there,

After trawling some forums and attempting to setup this dual boot i appear to be coming across the same error as many others. Unfortunately having followed all of your instructions i have still getting the \ntldr error when trying to boot XP.

Currently my bcdedit looks as follows. Whilst there are some small variations which may be preventing XP from loading i have completed all the steps you have describe and they have all come back succesful including the command lines in step 4.

Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier {bootmgr}
device partition=C:
description Windows Boot Manager
locale en-US
inherit {globalsettings}
displayorder {current}
{ntldr}
toolsdisplayorder {memdiag}
timeout 30

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {current}
device partition=C:
path \Windows\system32\winload.exe
description Microsoft Windows Vista
osdevice partition=C:
systemroot \Windows
resumeobject {007313d3-4207-11dc-b58a-806e6f6e6963}

Windows Legacy OS Loader
------------------------
identifier {ntldr}
device partition=C:
path \ntldr
description Microsoft Windows XP

Currently i have the following setup:

Vista on C:\ (75gb HD)
XP on E:\ (seperate 75gb HD)
and then two 350gb HD's with other bits on them.

I can load into vista fine and when i change the bios i can boot straight into XP because they are on seperate Hard Drives but the dual boot just isnt working. I get the error as mentioned by many when trying to boot into XP.

File: \ntldr
Status: 0xc000000e

I have tried EasyBCD 1.6 but i get the same error. I have also tried copying ntldr and ntcommand.com (or something like that) to the root on C:\ drive which gets me past the error message when trying to boot xp but the system then just hangs permanently.

Any help on this would be really great.

M.Knowles

Dual Boot with Vista OEM

I have a pc with Vista Home Premium OEM pre-installed [and no CD coz it seems to be 3Gb+ in size]. For 2 specific reasons, I wish to dual-boot with Windows 2000 Professional for which I have the CD. I have followed page 1 [of 4] and successfully partitioned the C:\ drive, but, at the foot of Page 2, you say [after loading XP] re-boot with your Vista CD in place. Is there a workaround if there is no Vista CD, or, if I have installed W2k in the partitioned section, will the pc auto-load Vista and present the same options?

Thanks and regards
Dave Brownstone
Hove
England

Solving dual boot issues

William,
I want to express my sincere thanks for this helpful tutorial on dual boot vista and XP. I struggled an entire day to get it to work, but just like Kishore on this forum, my efforts were in vain. Then I followed your advice, VOILA! it finally worked. I appreciate your gesture to take the time to give guidance to folks like me solve their computer issues. You are amazing!!

Many Thanks,
Swami :)

Issue with installing

I'm freaking out over this, I have my old XP installer disk but my Acer is not letting me boot from it, and above that I try to use the installer and that wont work either please help email [email protected]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Stuck On Three (Post 7661)

William,

I'm stuck on Step 3. Typing in Bootrec.exe /fixMBR in the Command Prompt will prompt the successful operation message. But when I do the next line '/fixBoot' it gives me an error message stating that "The Volume does not contain a recognizable file system." This is all from the X:Sources so I'm at a lost to figure out how to correct this problem.

Thanks as always!

Exactly same problem here. Please help!

I set up my daul boot according to your directions. We had a problem with loading XP. We had to go into the bios and turn off the Raid Disk controller.
Then we got it all loaded and comming up right on rebooting. But when we tryed to boot to XP it locked up before loading. What we found out if I went in Bios and shut off the Raid controller Xp would load but then Vista wouldn't load. So you have to go to Bios and switch Raid depending on which OPS you want to run.
Does anyone know of a cure for this I would appreacate the help
Thanks

Dual Boot Vista and XP with Vista already installed

Thanks Much!!!
I will try this. Once XP is installed what would happen if vista was removed?
I am very tkankful you took the time to explain all this to me. I have been searching and did find a file to install XP but the readme is hard to understand. Would you mind if I send you the readme, PM and let you take a look?
Bruce

Hi,

Thanks for the tutorial. I've spent most of the last 3 days trying to get this working and reading related sites. I bough a HP Pavilion a1740n with Vista Home Premium pre-installed. I have Vista recovery disks (not install) and XP Media Center disks (install).

Creating a second partition was easy. The first issue I ran into was not being able to boot to the XP CD (would make it to the "Starting up Windows..." message on the XP install until getting BSOD). From reading online, I assumed it was the SATA Raid native support issue, so I changed SATA Mode in the BIOS to "IDE" and made a floppy with SATA Raid drivers that I could install along with XP using F6. This got me past it and up to the XP loading screen, but.. I'd get another BSOD right before the 2nd part of the XP install.

So, now I was stuck trying to boot onto the XP drive without the OS installed (vista wouldn't boot). I booted off the Vista recovery disk. I tried the Startup Recovery in the advanced options. While it didn't seem to work, when I restarted I got the option to boot from:

HP recovery
Microsoft Windows Vista (recovered)
Windows XP

The recovery worked and I started over using this method (in the comments from http://apcmag.com/5485/dualbooting_vista_and_xp):

The following method has been working for me to add an XP boot to an existing Vista. It has the advantages of not needing to repair the Vista boot AND of having the XP system drive installed as C:

1. Create the available space as described in the article

2. Using Disk Manager from Vista, create a new partition in that unallocated space -- don't use the XP install to do that.

3. Still in Disk Manager, set that new partition as Active. WARNING: That means that the machine will now be trying to boot from the empty partition. That's OK because the next thing you're going to do is install XP from a bootable CD. If you restart and then change your mind, you'll have to have some bootable utility to change the active partition again.

4. Boot from the XP installation CD and start the install. When you get to the step where you select the XP partition, you'll notice that your new target partition is C! That's because the active partition is always assigned that letter at this point. So your new partition will show as C and the existing Vista will show up as some other letter. So XP WILL be installed as C. Vista will remain C, too. Finish the install.

5. Once XP is running, copy NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, and BOOT.ini from the XP partition to the Vista partition. This is required because the Vista partition will soon be the boot partition again .

6. Still from XP, use Disk Manager to change the Active partition back to the original Vista partition. The Vista partition's letter will show up as something other than C, doesn't matter, it will be C when booting Vista. Since the XP install never touched the Vista partition, NO repair is needed -- reboot and Vista will startup again.

7. Use EasyBCP as described to add the XP boot.

I can vouch from experience that this works very well. In fact you can have any number of Windows OSes all running as C using this method. You can also adjust drive letters using the HKLM/System/MountedDevices registry key. I've used this method to have 5 or 10 OSes installed in different partitions all at one time, and to restore various images to any partition and then fix the drive letters.

------

Now I have both OSs installed, and the dual boot option comes up when I restart. Unfortunately, I can only get one OS to load at a time. After I installed XP, I couldn't boot Vista unless I used the recovery disk. When I use the recovery disk and use the "Install vista bootloader" option in EasyBCD, Vista loads fine, but XP won't load.

My bcdedit looks very similar to:

Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier {bootmgr}
device partition=C:
description Windows Boot Manager
locale en-US
inherit {globalsettings}
displayorder {current}
{ntldr}
toolsdisplayorder {memdiag}
timeout 30

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {current}
device partition=C:
path \Windows\system32\winload.exe
description Microsoft Windows Vista
osdevice partition=C:
systemroot \Windows
resumeobject {007313d3-4207-11dc-b58a-806e6f6e6963}

Windows Legacy OS Loader
------------------------
identifier {ntldr}
device partition=E:
path \ntldr
description Microsoft Windows XP

Do I need to change the XP partition to C:/?
What should the boot.ini file look like?
Do I need to toggle SATA Mode between RAID and IDE depdning on which OS I want to load?

Thanks!