I'll describe my situation...
XP Pro MCE installed on SATA drive. Then I installed RC2 on a partition of my PATA drive. In the past
(beta versions) this has worked fine. But now when I turn on the PC it just goes right to XP, without using the boot loader. The only way I can get into Vista is if I leave my Vista CD in the drive and don't "Press any key to boot from CD", then it goes to the vista bootloader.

I've installed VistaBootPro 3.1 on both (XP and Vista). In Vista, all appears well. In XP, it shows as "No OS(s)" available. I tried going into XP, save the bootloader, and do a restore when I went back into XP. It looks like it should work, since in XP, it now shows both OS(s), but unless I leave the RC2 dvd in the drive as described earlier, it goes straight to XP. Any ideas?

Oh, and I did try reinstalling Vista, but to no avail.
Thanks in advance!
Dave

Yeah, it's the old dual active partitions "issue" (actually a quirk not a bug ), which seems to hit SATA/PATA combos more than any other config arrangement

Easiest thing is, in Vista, use VistaBootPRO to uninstall the Vista boot loader, then reboot (into XP).

Then use the same software to reinstall the Vista bootloader, and then create a new entry for Vista (from within XP) pointing to the proper (XP-defined) drive letter for your Vista OS Partition...

Then reboot, and dual-boot should be back to normal (I hope )

Good Luck !!!

Thanks for the idea, but it didn't work.

Based on some of your response, I even reinstalled Vista on the same SATA drive as XP (created a new partition of course). Still does the same thing... Could it have anything to do with it being MCE?

I have it running fine in dual boot with MCE 2005. Check out these two threads dph1077 for some ideas although they don't relate directly to your problem there is some info there that does.

You may want to try a startup repair of Vista, and you will find the directions for that there too.

The fact that it starts fine with the DVD in the drive seems to indicate that the file bootmgr is not on the system drive.

Unplugged XP Drive for Vista Setup: Can't Dual Boot to XP

Reformatted and Reinstalled XP: Lost Boot to Vista

I got it to work following the first link. Thanks for your help!

Grav!ty wrote:

I have it running fine in dual boot with MCE 2005. Check out these two threads dph1077 for some ideas although they don't relate directly to your problem there is some info there that does. You may want to try a startup repair of Vista, and you will find the directions for that there too. The fact that it starts fine with the DVD in the drive seems to indicate that the file bootmgr is not on the system drive. Unplugged XP Drive for Vista Setup: Can't Dual Boot to XP Reformatted and Reinstalled XP: Lost Boot to Vista