Dual boot problem- XP & Vista

I'm having trouble with my dual boot set up.
Read stickies...Googled...etc..Cant find solution.

Here is what I did:
All fresh installs on a new build.
1. Installed XP Pro on a RAID 0 configuration. Booted up fine.
2 Installed Vista X64 on a separate hard drive. Booted up fine although I didn't see Windows XP as one of my choices during boot up.
3. Installed EasyBCD in Vista X64 to fix boot up. Set up the choices and rebooted.
During re-boot I chose the XP Pro during boot up and I all I got was a blank screen then the computer went into re-boot. Fail.

In BIOS i have the Vista X64 drive as first boot hard drive and the RAID-0 XP Pro as the 2nd hard drive boot.

The only way I can boot into XP Pro is to change the XP Pro hard drive as the boot first selection.

Any ideas?

Vito said:

I'm having trouble with my dual boot set up.
Read stickies...Googled...etc..Cant find solution.

Here is what I did:
All fresh installs on a new build.
1. Installed XP Pro on a RAID 0 configuration. Booted up fine.
2 Installed Vista X64 on a separate hard drive. Booted up fine although I didn't see Windows XP as one of my choices during boot up.
3. Installed EasyBCD in Vista X64 to fix boot up. Set up the choices and rebooted.
During re-boot I chose the XP Pro during boot up and I all I got was a blank screen then the computer went into re-boot. Fail.

In BIOS i have the Vista X64 drive as first boot hard drive and the RAID-0 XP Pro as the 2nd hard drive boot.

The only way I can boot into XP Pro is to change the XP Pro hard drive as the boot first selection.

Any ideas?

Click to expand...

This has been covered many times over. You need to manually add the XP drive to the Vista bootloader. I'd recommend using EasyBCD to do this, it should move the necessary files over. If it doesn't then go to your XP drive and unhide the folders/files, copy over NTDETECT, NTLDR and boot.ini to the Vista drive.

You might have to modify the boot.ini on the Vista drive to get XP to load.

when I tried dual-booting xp and vista I had to modify boot.ini to include the 2nd OS. I did it wrong, but go the dual boot screen and vista worked fine.

give boot.ini a shot and see how it works.

Where is the boot.ini file located in XP?

Did you try running a search for it?

Start | Run | Type sysdm.cpl, and click OK | On the Advanced tab, click Settings under Startup and Recovery | Under System Startup, click Edit.

redduc900 said:

Start | Run | Type sysdm.cpl, and click OK | On the Advanced tab, click Settings under Startup and Recovery | Under System Startup, click Edit.

Click to expand...

I'm trying to do this all from the Vista X64 side of things?
Or do I need to boot back into XP Pro?

I am now getting this error message in the boot up screen:
"Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
Windows root\system32\ntoskrnl.exe"
"Please reinstall a copy of the above file"

The boot up screen for what? XP? Vista? or in general? If it's for Vista or in general then you screwed the pooch on the Vista bootloader and need to fix it using the Vista DVD. If it's for the XP boot, are you sure you copied the files, not cut.

As an alternative to copying the files I mentioned eariler, in EasyBCD, when you create the XP part, it should ask you for a drive letter, try changing that from C to D.

It's kind of difficult to explain, but essentially, you're creating a pointer for the XP bootloader. Since, you are booting into Vista first, it's automatically the C drive, so XP is now the D drive, so when you select XP from the Vista bootloader, it'll look in the root of the D drive (XP) for the XP bootloader.

I got it...finally.

What I ended up doing is simple:
I rebooted the rig with my Vista X64 DVD.....went to "Repair the computer" option. (Seemed to take forever to load).
Did a repair of the boot files and rebooted.
Upon reboot I went directly into Vista like it should.
Then opened up EasyBCD....Added XP Pro on Drive "D" ....saved it. Rebooted.....and bada-bing!...There's my 2 OS choices in the boot screen. I Selected the XP Pro and it booted right up into XP Pro.

I think the problem was caused by me changing the hard drive boot sequence in my BIOS.( Bad Vito!) After the initial install of Vista, I had changed the order around having my Vista hard drive booting first...followed by the XP Pro hard drive. I should have kept the XP Pro drive as the first booted drive.

All is well now.

Thanks for your input guys!