SysChat - Dual Boot Vista and XP with Vista already installed

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all those with this error message...
C:\Windows\system32>bcdedit -set {ntldr} device partition=C:
An error occurred while attempting to reference the specified entry.
The system cannot find the file specified.

you should just install easybcd and add entry of windows xp, name it and give it the drive letter of where the xp is installed.but if the drive letter is grayed out, give the drive letter first before u select os and name it.
if u have the error message booting into windows with the ntldr and 0x0000etc error message do the same thing with easybcd and u are done.use easybcd in vista.
it worked perfectly for me.now i can boot with ease.no problems.
thanks mr william.

Solution to errors on bcdedit

Quote:

Originally Posted by Unregistered (Post 6479)

After getting to step four I ran bcdedit.exe command but every time i type in the four lines it tells me that it is not recognized.

Any thoughts?

Thanks

I kept getting the error and here's the solution that I found:
(All the '-' need to be replaced by '/')
bcdedit /set {ntldr} device partition=C:
bcdedit /set {ntldr} path \ntldr
bcdedit /displayorder {ntldr} /addlast
bcdedit /set {ntldr} description "Microsoft Windows XP"

Hope this will be helpful.

Moiz Tankiwala

Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in pc

Followed all the steps in creating the partition for XP. It created a Logical Drive instead of a Primary Partition. When installing XP, message says "Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer". I have a Dell XPS M1530 with Vista Home premium. Please help.

Great article and really easy to follow.

If you have a second drive is there any reason why you can't just partition the whole drive and install XP on it and then fix the Vista boot loader?

You'll still be able to access the files on the Vista drive from XP, right? Just need to reinstall any programs that use them. Can you share the same Outlook PST file under both os's?

Thanks,
Benz1

thanx heaps for the tutorial william ... most of it went fine it wasnt till the bcdedit stuff that i couldnt get things happening (3 reformats later and some extra searching) i found this

bcdedit /create {ntldr} /d “Windows XP”
bcdedit /set {ntldr} device boot
bcdedit /set {ntldr} path \ntldr
bcdedit /displayorder {ntldr} /addlast

and it worked!!!
cheers and keep up the good work

Quote:

Originally Posted by PITU (Post 7647)

If you go to the HP website and make sure that the drivers for the model laptop are available for Windows XP, then you should be just fine. This is crucial! Do not install XP only to find that there are no drivers available. Just search for "DV6575us drivers for Windows XP" on the HP site. If there are sound, wireless, graphics card, and other drivers free to download for your HP laptop, then I would download all of them, burn them onto a disc, install XP, and then once XP is on, load the drivers from the disc and install them. Unfortunately, if there are no drivers available, then XP cannot be used on the computer.

I would not be so sure of that. I bought an HP Pavillion dv6000, which, according to the HP website has loads of XP drivers available for it, only none of the actually end up working for the computer. I spent over 3 hours on tech support chat with HP downloading countless drivers for XP they were sending my way, only to conclude that my computer must be "Windows XP incompatible"

Quote:

Originally Posted by Unregistered (Post 7857)

Hi,

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.

This post looked very promising to me so I went ahead and gave it a shot. I had the same problem as tony that upon installation of windows xp, setup would not recognize my new partition. I created a 66GB active partition using the Vista disk management tool, but when I rebooted, the c partition that Setup found was 133GB in size (the size of my vista partition BEFORE i shrunk it to make space for XP). I went ahead with good faith and tried installing XP on it but I got back to my original problem that after copying setup files, my computer WILL NOT continue the XP installation and instead give me an "Invalid BOOT.ini, NTDETECT failed" error message and restart over and over again. Now I'm back to recovering my computer using the recovery cds which takes a good half of a day to accomplish.

I wish someone would just have a solution =o/

Create the partition as described...then download the free boot manager
GAG and install it following the directions. Now you can boot to the xp cd and install the operating system free of issues other than aquiring the needed XP drivers for the motherboard and other hardware that is installed on that computer.

Quote:

Originally Posted by tulpen (Post 11737)

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.

So, now that my fresh installation of XP didnt work I'm stuck with my active partition being the non-vista one and I dont know which tool I can use to switch it back. I tried just loading the vista recovery files, but they abort with an error when setup tries to format my hard drive. =o(

as wombat is all ways peering into his crystal ball to try to see what people left out.....and never being able too...:tongue: ....we can only help if the information is given to us that we need to know.

There are some 46,000 error messages associated with the windows operating systems and other third party vendors software/hardware...As much as I wish I could do it....I just can\'t remember which one you are refering to.

Could you please refress my memory and tell me which one it is and then maybe I might be of further assistance to you!