Dual Boot XP and Vista with XP already installed with XP drive missing after install

This post is for people who are having trouble seeing XP partition in Vista after Vista is installed.

Project: Dual Boot XP vista with unforeseen Issues.

Time Spent: 9.5hrs

System:
5 Hard Drives 6 Partitions

Goal: No reformatting, no physical HD fix. (i.e. jumpers) No DATA loss.

1st HD 130 GB partition (storage) 20gb Partition Windows XP
Previous Info of the Drive:
XP was the first OS on that Hard Drive, later I installed Vista on a 2nd Hard Drive. Vista uses its own Boot management thus making boot.ini not needed. Vista Expired and i had to format the 2nd HD. That left the Vista boot manager on the 20 GB partition with XP. I loaded up XP CMD and did fixboot thus restoring original boot.ini.

2nd HD Vista 80gig
3rd HD Old XP/Back Up – I never bothered removing the useless files. But the entire OS was there.
4th HD Back Up
5th HD Back Up

1 Year later i decided to install vista again. I reinstalled Vista on the same HD that I did 1 year ago. Everything went fine up until the part when I booted in Vista and was unable to see the XP partition. Every other partition/HD was there but not that one. Even the 1st partition on the same HD as XP was showing.

Problem:
1. How can I make vista see that drive? (no solution) I've tried to figure it out but came out with the same result in vista. It could be some compatibility issue with x64 vista. When in vista drive management the Drive is there BUT it does not have an assigned Drive letter. Any attempt to do anything with the drive in vista gives an error that the "system info cannot be changed. refresh the console to continue."

2. How Do I Make XP and Vista Dual Boot? Note: This was not an upgrade. There is an option in vista set up which will allow you to select the partition to load vista on. It will come up if multiple drives are detected or Shift-F10 is used.
Even though it did prompt me for the partition and it was installed on a separate partition yet the Vista bootsect was not able to pick up the boot.ini file to reference it to XP. It was simply not found.

So now I have Vista fully functional, and XP which is fully functional but missing.

Failed Attempts:
1. Loading in XP CMD prompt and editing using bcdedit.exe bootsect.exe
The reason it failed is because when loading XP Recovery Console the CDROM gets locked and you are an able to swap CDs to Vista.
2. There was a previous XP installed on HD3 and it was not a full install. Thus it was reading the OLD XP which is was not able to get into. Vista did not show in selection of OS in XP RC.
3. I did get in to the OS that was missing through XP RC but it was a dead end. I also tried fixboot and fixmbr on that drive but vista still did not care that there was a boot.ini there.

Past info: Previously when I did this I had an old copy of XP which no other OSs on any other drives. I was able to boot up vista CMD and manually add the drive using bcdedit.exe. Or that can be done while in Vista OS CMD.
Drive:\Windows\system32\Bcdedit /create {ntldr} /d "Windows XP"
Drive:\Windows\system32\Bcdedit /set {ntldr} device partition=x:
Drive:\Windows\system32\Bcdedit /set {ntldr} path \ntldr
Drive:\Windows\system32\Bcdedit /displayorder {ntldr} /addlast

or from cd:\boot\bcdedit...

I did not have a problem of vista seeing the drive because I was running Vista 32bit.

Reason i was unable to do the same thing is because the Drive was always missing when either booting in vista or booting vista RC CMD.

Looking back at the Problem: No Solution Yet.
1. Vista cannot see the Drive in OS.
2. Vista cannot see the drive in Vista Recovery Console.
3. XP is still installed on that partition and is not corrupted.
4. Vista was unable to find XP previously installed thus it did not put it in the Boot Selection Screen.
5. Not boot screen appears just goes straight to Vista logo screen.
6. A partial XP is installed on a separate HD.
7. Editing vista Bootsect in vista RC console Failed due to not seeing the drive.
8. Editing Vista Bootsect through XP RC failed due to inability to swap CDs


Solution:
1. Reinstalled a New XP os over the OLD XP.
2. Booted in XP and was able to see all drives.
3. Took the new Boot.ini file modified it by adding the hard drive to the boot list. I had to do this blind because I did not know what was the address to the HD so I put in all five HDs just in case.
4. Now I was able to restart and see both XPs after boot screen.
5. Then I went back to Vista Recovery Console and fixed boot with vista so I was able to get back in vista.
6. Once back in vista I was able to see the new XP installed but still not the old one.
7. I downloaded a program called VistaBootPro and ran that across all the drives. It only detected the NEW boot.ini and still not the old one due to the fact that it still cannot see.
8. Bootsect was modified with this program and when I restarted Vista boot was there with “Older versions of windows” text.

Project Complete.

Note: XP does not detect Vista OSs. After I finished I was still not able to see the HD in vista. Which is fine because I was now able to boot into xp or vista.