forgive me, as i'm no hardware wizard. i've been running winxp on an ata drive on a p4 dell. i bought a new sata, and installed vista. then i downloaded vistabootpro, and quickly set up the xp for the dual boot.

when i boot, i see the two options (vista and xp) - and it boots to vista fine, but when i try to boot xp it says it can't boot, and that recent hardware or software changes may be the cause. it recommends putting the xp install disk in and repairing. but, when i disable the sata, it boots to xp fine.

what can i do?

Welcome to PROnetworks piperjoe68

I've been through a major excercise trying to understand the issues created with a combination of SATA and IDE drives with XP and Vista and my conclusion was that provided one booted to XP and kept the IDE drive with XP installed on it as ones boot drive in the BIOS and as ones System drive in Windows XP, then installing Vista on the new SATA drive will work.

In your case, I'd suggest you first physically remove your SATA drive and go through the process above. Once you are booting to XP fine, connect your SATA drive and then on startup go to BIOS and make sure your IDE drive remains your boot drive and format your SATA drive from XP then reboot to make sure that the drive configuration holds and is taken into the mbr of XP.

Once you've done that you should be able to install Vista on the SATA drive and keep the IDE as your system drive.

Before installing Vista, you can post a screenshot of your Disk Management from XP if you like, so that we can see what the drive/partition structure looks like.

The other thing you could try is to copy ntldr, NTDETECT.COM and your boot.ini and paste them to your Vista installation drive. You will need to check that your boot.ini file still points to the correct drive/partition though and one can do that by checking your drive/partition structure in Disk Management

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Once you've done that you should be able to install Vista on the SATA drive and keep the IDE as your system drive.
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when i remove the sata physically, it boots to xp fine.

what if vista is already installed and configed on the sata? can i just run repair, or do i need to format and reinstall the whole thing?

Try my second option with both drives attached and that could save you a reinstall

don't mean to be a total dope - but where do i copy them to, and where do i get them from? are they all located in the windows dir on xp? and do i put them in the vista win dir?

piperjoe68 wrote:

don't mean to be a total dope - but where do i copy them to, and where do i get them from? are they all located in the windows dir on xp? and do i put them in the vista win dir?

No they are on the root of the XP drive (not in any folder at all) and that is where they need to go on the Vista drive. You'll need to set folder options to show hidden files and folders and not to hide protected operating system files

well - the only place i'm finding ntldr on xp is the i386 folder... i'll put that in vista root and see how it goes...

piperjoe68 wrote:

well - the only place i'm finding ntldr on xp is the i386 folder... i'll put that in vista root and see how it goes...

You can also copy ntldr and NTDETECT.COM from the XP CD and if you need to we can help make up a new boot.ini with notepad and just save it as .ini instead of .txt

OK - i did all this, and here's what i put in my boot.ini:

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[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
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when i rebooted and tried to boot to xp it did not go to the error screen again, but instead went black as if it were about to boot - but then just hung there. when i rebooted to vista it went to a "windows did not start - start in normal mode?" screen - and it rebooted then fine.

how do i paste a screenie of my disk management screen?[/img]