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[rainman1962 Profile]

I used VistaBootPRO to install XP on one physical drive and Vista on another. I would like to re-install Vista. What is the best way to do this? What if I just disconnected the XP drive. Would this be the best approach?

[rainman1962 Profile]

Any ideas?

[kanaloa]

Sorry for the delay, some of our support staff are currently out.

Can you still boot into Vista currently? Or can you only boot into XP? If you can only boot into XP, then I'd do a clean installation of Windows Vista so you'll get access to the BCDEdit file again. Then you can recover your XP installation (see below) using VistaBootPRO (DualBootPRO).

This guide may be of use until one of our support folks can respond to your inquiry in more detail:
reinstalling-windows-xp-when-dual-booting-with-windows-vista-t88193.html

Again, I apologize for the delay in the responses.

[shreader]

I have done this many times, most recently w/ Windows 7.

What I do is >leave all the hard drives connected< boot from the Win7/Vista DVD and choose a custom installation, format the Hard drive using the DVD (advanced button) and install the Win7/Vista OS again.

Make sure you format the correct hard drive, I have mine named by the OS so its easy for me but some people don't do this & its not clear sometimes that they got the correct one.

[rainman1962 Profile]

Thank you very much for your reply. If I use my Vista disk to reformat my Vista drive, will I loose access to my XP drive. I used BootPro previously to generate a menu when booting up where I choose either Vista or XP (it was a couple years ago so I forget the process). I currently have access to both XP and Vista.

If this is correct, than what are the steps to get the boot menu to give me back access to XP?

Thanks

[shreader]

You should not have any problem booting into XP after you format & install Vista again, using the Vista DVD.

BTW is Vista or XP your system drive in Disk Management?

If anything unexpected happens please post here again

[rainman1962 Profile]

Thanks for your response. Vista is my system drive. Does this change anything?

[shreader]

It shouldn't, but you may have to replace any root files there that XP needs to boot.
I'd suggest taking a screenshot of the Vista "Root" (& saving it somewhere in XP) so you can see what was there after installing Vista again incase you have a problem.

[rainman1962 Profile]

Sorry to resurrect an old post, but I am finally getting around to reformatting the Vista drive (drive 0, system). The XP drive (drive 1) is working fine. Sorry if I am a little anal but I don't want to screw this up. Feel free to correct whatever below and add anything you think might clarify the process.

1. Boot off of the Vista disk and reinstall Vista on drive 0
2. I suspect that I will not have access to XP after the reinstall of Vista since the ntldr, boot.ini and ntdetect.com files will no longer be there (aren't these XP files that are not in the Vista root?).
3. Should I copy them onto a thumb drive or something and then, after Vista boots up copy them over to Vista?
4. Do I need to do anything with VistaBootPro afterwards? If so, what?

Thanks for your help!

PS the Guide that was referenced in the first response talks about reformatting XP rather than Vista so not sure if it applied to me.

Jeff

[Grav!ty Profile]

Backup those XP boot system files (ntldr, boot.ini and NTDETECT.COM) and restore them to the Vista drive/partition after reinstalling Vista. As they are on the Vista partition which as you state is tagged the (System) partition this will be necessary.

Use DBP/VBP to reinstall the Vista bootloader and you should then have your dual boot back.