Hi. I originally had XP installed and then installed Vista on a seprate harddrive later which gave me the Vista bootloader. But then when I had to reinstall XP later XP overwrote the Vista bootlader with its own so now I can't boot into Vista anymore. I tried to run VistaBootPRO on XP but I get the error "Cannot access BCD Registry. Please right-click the VistaBootPRO shortcut, and select 'Run as Administrator' to try again." But even when I right click and go to run as and tell it to run as Administrator I get the same error. I'm hesitant to just reinstall vista since Microsoft has closed the public beta and I'm not sure if they'd still accept my activation now.

Thanks for your help

Hello and welcome to PROnetworks, chiklit! Please head over to our Introduction Area so that we can all greet you.

One of our VistaBootPRO experts will be along to help you.

chiklit wrote:

I'm hesitant to just reinstall vista since Microsoft has closed the public beta and I'm not sure if they'd still accept my activation now. Thanks for your help

Activations should still work - Although, try this: Open up C:\Program Files\PROnetworks\VistaBootPRO copy (not cut) the bootsect file to C:\Windows\System32. Now open up the command prompt and type this

Code:

bootsect /nt60 C:

This should reinstall your Vista Bootloader. You now should be able to use VistaBootPRO to edit your bcd registry.

I believe the problem you are experiencing, if I understand your setup correctly, is that when you reinstalled XP (if it was on the system drive partition), you wiped out the entire Boot folder which holds the BCD store - which explains why you cannot access it, as it is no longer there. The way the Vista bootloader works is that it depends on the files which are included in the Boot folder on the system drive. You can use the Vista DVD to boot into the Vista Recovery options which should find you existing Vista installation and offer to fix it by reinstalling the boot loader. You should then be able to boot back into Vista, although you may need to add a legacy entry to allow you to boot back into XP.

I finally got around to trying both methods. The one suggested by gries818 doesn't appear to have done anything but I got this semi-error when trying what he told me:

Code:

C:\Documents and Settings\Kevin>bootsect /nt60 C: Target volumes will be updated with BOOTMGR compatible bootcode. C: (\\?\Volume{4dd4175e-1cf3-11db-bfb6-806d6172696f})     Updated NTFS filesystem bootcode.  The update may be unreliable since the     volume could not be locked during the update:         Access is denied. Bootcode was successfully updated on all targeted volumes.

Also in XP the Vista partition is called G: but my computer boots to disk C: so I wasn't sure which I should use. (They're on two seprate HDs though, not just seprate partitions.)

I also tried jrfree1's method and while the Vista disk does detect that the bootloader is gone and says that it's going to fix it, after it does that it takes me to the main recovery screen but when I restart from there it doesn't appear to have done anything. Though perhaps I'm missing a step from there regarding what to do after it takes me to the main recovery screen after saying that it'll recover the bootloader.