windows vista dual boot problem

Sorry if this is already a thread, but I couldn't find one. I had installed Vista onto a partition of one of my current hard drives using partitionmagic and had a dual boot setup going along with XP. No problems at all and it worked flawlessly. However, today I decided to reinstall XP due to performance issues. I currently have XP up and running well but the dual boot menu is not coming up during my boot up anymore. It just boots right into XP. Any ideas as to how I can get my dual boot menu to show up??

XP overwrote the boot sector and it didn't recognize Vista.

Try using the Vista disk to repair the mbr, if such an option exists. It's possible that vista has to be the one to run the show, since in general with MS os's, the newer one can boot the older one, but not vice-versa.

If all else fails, you could use grub, but you'd need to set up a tiny grub partition for that, and it shouldn't be necessary.

the xp partition, although made by xp is actually accessed for booting vista, i noticed that bootmgr and a few other files are copied in. i had two hdds running and when i removed the xp drive, vista wouldnt boot either.

I doubt it's the xp partition, it's probably just the master boot record on the first hard drive.

But I am no expert on windows...

You might try booting into the Vista CD and doing a repair. I think it's after you tell it what language/keyboard/etc. There is a repair button and it will boot up a nice gui with several options. Not sure what they are though. I used this last night to do a full restore of my Vista boot partition and it worked great..