My Wife's Acer Aspire 5720 laptop had Vista Home Premium pre-installed (which she hates of course). I partitioned the hdd and created an XP partition. I found the SATA drivers, used F6 during install ok and the XP Pro (SP2) install went very well on the partition I created until trying first boot into XP. Logo appears, then stalls, then get start-up options (start normally, last known, safe mode, etc). None of these options work and also the Vista partition is invisible during boot-up. It just does this over and over (and over).

I've searched this forum and found answers to what to do if Vista is running but XP isn't, but not when Vista isn't booting and XP fails to boot successfully. Any help would be appreciated. TIA

I now have Vista working again. I used my "Vista Recovery Disk" from an ISO to repair the Vista boot files. Still can't get XP to boot properly though. Have been searching for NTLDR, NTDETECT, and boot.ini on the XP partition but they're just not there (yes I'm checking hidden & sys files too). Thought I'd just search & copy them from my own laptop with XP Pro to hers - not certain that'll work. Found NTLDR & NTDETECT, but boot.ini just ain't there. Wierd! There IS a "boot.ini.backup" in a folder called "C:\WINDOWS\pss" which I think is just a nag generator designed to get you to register certain programs. (prolly safe to delete I think). Anyways, I'm not sure which XP folder to copy NTLDR & NTDETECT to - I assume it's Windows\system or Windows\system32 but not sure. Still looking for some advice here. I assume "boot.ini" won't be created until a successful XP boot, but I'm just guessing! TIA again.

NTLDR and NTDETECT need to be copied to the Root directory of the drive marked as System (Boot in Vista, I believe). Boot.ini should be there somewhere, especially on the machine you've got that's already running XP as the OS cannot boot without it.

Copying NTDETECT and NTLDR from your machine to hers should work, however, the information within boot.ini will be different as it would apply to machine with a different HDD layout and, as such, probably wouldn't work.

Just out of interest, has XP completed the graphical installation stage on your wife's laptop or is it crashing on the first reboot after the text-based installation stage?

Thanks Dan - sorta kinda what I figured. I can edit the boot.ini file to reflect the correct drive config on her machine but my own laptop has almost the identical dual-boot setup, except I'm running XP Pro and Vista Business (not really an issue). It's kinda crazy cuz I've dual-booted lots of systems both new & used with both IDE and SATA drives and using VistaBootPro of course. Piece of cake! This one has been a real challenge. I had a heckuva time finding the right SATA driver. Acer of course was no help.

To answer your question about the install stage when XP fails, you're right, it's just after the textual install (inputting the country/XP key/etc. goes great) just when it boots for the first time into the graphical stage. This is just before the network set-up/activate-register screen and final boot into XP. I think I see where you're going with your question - maybe a problem with the graphics driver?? If you have any thoughts on the issue I'd sure love to hear them.

Unfortunately the mobo on this beast is also made by Acer - the 5720 "Nettiling" and Acer has no drivers for XP. I did find the 5720 service manual on NotebookForums.com and discovered that it's SUPPOSED to support XP Pro too. I grabbed the 5710 (actually the entire 5700 series) mass storage driver for XP "Nettling" mobo which did have an XP SATA driver. That driver did work for me.

Thanks again for your input. I'll let you know how it goes tomorrow. Any other idea are welcome.

pcmedix wrote:

I grabbed the 5710 (actually the entire 5700 series) mass storage driver for XP "Nettling" mobo which did have an XP SATA driver. That driver did work for me.

Where did you find the XP-driver for the nettiling mobo? I can't seem to find them anywhere.

Greets //Jocke - Sweden