hey there, sorry for the semi-thread-hi-jack, but i think i'm suffering from the same problem.

I had Windows XP Pro SP2 installed on drive C. In then added a new hard disk and installed Windows Vista on it (Drive E). Finally i added a third hard disk which had Windows XP Home SP2 installed on it (Drive F). I installed Vista Boot Pro and added Drive F as another option on the boot loader.

Now, at this point i selected Change Settings-> Advanced Options -> selected the one i just added and i noticed that it said Drive C and not F. i changed this to F and restarted.

I select the new drive XP Home (the one set to F) and it loads up my C drive XP Pro.

I go back into VBP and the settings are all correct:

Quote:

There are a total of 3 OSes installed into the boot manager. Current timeout before default boots: 10 seconds. Default OS: Stu PC Entry #1 Name: Stu PC BCD ID: {ntldr} Boot Drive: C: Windows Drive: System Bootloader: \ntldr Windows Directory: Entry #2 Name: Windows Vista BCD ID: {current} Boot Drive: E: Windows Drive: E: System Bootloader: \Windows\system32\winload.exe Windows Directory: \Windows Entry #3 Name: Suze PC BCD ID: {de5a5b7b-ffb5-11da-8347-001150c325c2} Boot Drive: F: Windows Drive: System Bootloader: \ntldr Windows Directory:

And that brings us to now. Me being confused and my computer refusing to boot up my girlfriend's old pc's hard disk.

can anyone help me out?

cheers,
Stu.

Hi Stu Welcome to PROnetworks.

Really sorry no one has responded to you yet - I am splitting these two posts off of the old thread so hopefully your question will get more attention.

Please stop by the Introduction Area and Introduce yourself.

I'm afraid it looks like there are some bugs in the 1.0 relating to Windows 2000/XP/2003/XP x64 boot loader management

No great harm done for the time being, given that upgrading from Vista Beta 2 to future builds will probably not be supported, and will require fresh installs all 'round --- but we at PROnet certainly sympathise with any problems that may have ensued from any bugs in the VBPRO 1.0 software ...

But several of our users have reported issues after having used VistaBootPRO to attempt to modify their XP boot entry --- I have no real idea why this is so, but there's clearly a bug there

This may be a Vista bug, not a VBPro bug, but it seems to me that when several people post the exact same issue occurring on their rigs that there is, indeed, a bug.

The possibility that it may be non-reproducible on any Vista-ready rigs used by any development & testing team does not automatically provide non-bugginess

IMO this is just another iteration of the old bug, when VBPRO was unable to "see" certain drives in unusual hardware configs ...

Most of the issues with non-standard boot configuration problems stem from the fact that if you add a drive, or change your boot configuration in the BIOS, the Vista boot environment does not know where ntldr, ntdetect.com or a properly configured boot.ini file are located at. Even using BCDedit.exe to add an entry to the boot store will make no difference if the files needed by XP to boot are not accessible.

The other issue which lends to much confusion is that many people mistake the drive letters which they see in XP and Vista as representing physical locations on a hard disk - ie: C is always the first partition - when in fact that is not always the case. Then there are always the cases where people are using machines which have a FAT32 partition at the beggining of their drive which has been made active and then acts as the boot partition even when there is no OS installed on that partition (many manufacturers such as Compaq/HP place recovery partitions in these areas). All of these conditions can create issues when trying to multiboot if the users are not familiar with the boot environment and the neccessary files needed by both Vista and XP to boot.

cripes. i've no idea what's going on with half that stuff above, however i did notice this in the computer management bit in XP.



Disk 0 - XP Pro SP2 (original install)
Disk 1 - Vista B2
Disk 2 - XP Home SP2 (an old dell install)

what's going on with that extra bit on Disk 2? could that be affecting the boot loader?

also, i've not altered the boot.ini on either Disk 0 or 2. should i?
ie. should i include the XP Home install (Disk 2) in the boot.ini of Disk 0?

all my drives are on standard connectors (ie. not sata or raid) in order:
Cable 1 - Master Disk 0.
Cable 1 - Slave CD Drive.
Cable 2 - Master Disk 1.
Cable 2 - Slave Disk 2.

no idea if this is of any help and any help is much appreciated. i'm off to the introductions forum now.

That is likely a Dell "recovery" partition (the EISA unnamed partition that is FAT) and no, it is probably not affecting any bootloaders, as it is only accessible on reboots (Hit F12 I think) to do a Dell system recovery or run some of their utilities

hmmm, thanks kd.

i'm kerbaffled. i can happily just add the XP Home OS to the boot.ini of the XP Pro disk, however i'd rather have all the OSs on the same list
A- as i'd rather only have 1 auto-select countdown on boot up
and
B- as it might confuse the girlfriend.