It turns red when the device partition is not properly configured. If you take a look at your BCD Registry you will see where it has "unknown".

Windows Legacy OS Loader
------------------------
identifier {ntldr}
device unknown
path \ntldr
description XP

What you need to do here is change this to the correct drive letter in the Manage OS Entries page. Once you do this, you will probably want to Reinstall the Vista Bootloader and you should not have any problems booting to either OS.

If that does not work, then I will post the guide that you need to follow in order to move some files around to get it working.

Quick update - dualboot working now. Redefined xp drive letter. That fixed the "unknown" issue in the view settings tab. Vistapro comes up happy in all respects (as far as I can tell) in both xp and vista. Niether os is red in "manage os's". You got a fix here it looks like to me!

This is a new (sacrificial) notebook. This is actually the very first glimpse of seeing it the way I want it -YES! But I've hacked at it long and hard on these os loads with this and drivers and such. I might go back down all the way and bring it up nice and clean.

Thanks a lot jbullard ! Happy holidays to everyone!

Not a problem. Glad to hear you got it working. If you do decide to do clean install remember to install XP before Vista which will resolve a lot of issues.

I'm stuck going vista first. Vista is NB OEM loaded os. Once it runs (restore type DVD disks) notebook goes back to factory load. All drive structures wiped and recreated in the image of their maker! But actually I may not take vista off line anyway. XP is where most of my butchering took place.