Technology, Support, and News Forum

[RGSPro Profile]

I have been trying to get Vista and XP to dual boot for the past few days, but I have only met problems.

I have a 200gb HDD, and have the first 40gb partitioned with NTFS for XP and the rest partitioned for Vista.

I installed XP on the 40gb primary active partition and got it running great. When I go to install vista on the 2nd partition, it will go through the install process until it needs to restart, and then right after the BIOS the system will have the little blink text _ thing and now load any OS.

To get XP to work again I have to load up the vista cd, choose repair and console, and do the Bootsect.exe -NT52 All command. Then XP will load after a repair install but it will be very buggy and get some BSODs. I have to then boot XP in safe mode, format the Vista partition and then XP will load up fine.

I am at wits end since I have done a dual boot before on another PC, and I don't know why I cant get this one to do it.

I am running SATA hard drives on an a8n32-sli deluxe motherboard with 2gb of corsair memory and a 7900gt SLi video card setup with a 530w Tagan SLi power supply.

Here is the BCD Store information:

Entry # 1
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Name: Microsoft Windows XP Professional x86
BCD ID: {ntldr}
Boot Drive: C:
Windows Drive:
System Bootloader: \ntldr
Windows Directory:

Entry # 2
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Name: Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate x64
BCD ID: {default}
Boot Drive: D:
Windows Drive: D:
System Bootloader: \Windows\system32\winload.exe
Windows Directory: \Windows

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

[Grav!ty Profile]

Welcome to PROnetworks RGSPro. I have the same motherboard and GPU (single not SLI) as you do on a system RGSPro and have no issues installing Vista at all.

My guess is that SLI mode is responsible for the halt in installing Vista and I'd suggest you disable SLI mode before running setup and then re-enable it once Vista is installed. This worked for me with some earlier builds when I was running two 6600GT's in SLI mode and in fact was the only way I could get it installed at that time.

If that doesn't help, then please post a screenshot of your Disk Management so that we can get a better understanding of drive/partition structure.