I have a system with a couple installations of XP. I formatted one of them and installed Vista. When it would boot it would ask if I wanted to boot to Vista or a Legacy OS. This worked fine. I had to reinstall a copy of XP to one of the other partitions(not the Vista partition). Now when I boot the Vista Boot Loader is gone and only the Legacy Windows boot loader exists (the one that reads from the boot.ini). Will VistaBoot Pro help resolve my problem? How do I tell the system to use the Vista Boot Loader and not the original XP boot loader?

Thanks,

Todd Meister

Hi tmiester, and Welcome to PROnetworks.

VistaBootPRO 2.1 should be able to help you restore your bootloader successfully, if you didn't overwrite the system partition with another OS. If you run VistaBootPRO from within XP, and you can see your BCD entries, then you should be ok. Make sure that the BCD entries include both Vista and an {ntldr} entry, and none of the entries say 'unknown' in the detailed view.

First, make sure you use the backup function in VistaBootPRO to back up the BCD store in case of any problems - this can always be restored from within XP, or from the Vista Recovery environment.

Then click on the Bootloader button and choose to Reinstall the Vista Bootloader - this will overwrite the XP bootloader which overwrote the original Vista bootloader when you installed XP again.

Reboot, and you should be able to boot into both Vista and XP.

If you have any problems, post back and we will help you get it straightened out - Remember to backup first!

When you get a chance, stop by our Introduction Area and say hi