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I killed XP with Vista

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I killed XP with Vista

Postby cmjentinger » Thu Feb 01, 2007 9:33 pm

You heard that how many times now? Well I won't ruin the anticipation. I had Win XP Pro installed on C:\. I purchased Vista Premium and wanted to try it out before giving up XP. So, I created a partition on C: and installed Vista. Everything went real well no trouble with drivers or anything. Then...well I realized I could no longer boot to XP.

Drive manager shows it as unnamed and no drive letter assigned, no file system shown, healthy (Primary Partition). The Vista partition is shown as Vista (C: ) NTFS Healthy, (System, Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition).

VistaBootPro shows Vista as:

{BCD ID}: {current}
Boot Drive: C:
System Drive: C:
System Bootloader: \Windows\System32\winload.exe
Windows Directory: \Windows

XP is shown as

{BCD ID}: {ntldr}
Boot Drive: C:
Windows Drive:
System Bootloader: \ntldr
Windows Directory:

VistaBootPro will not allow me to assign a different drive letter to XP or Vista.

The partition was created first and then Vista was installed. I have tried to boot from WinXP CD to start the Recovery Console and it tells me there is no hard drive found. Is there anything I can do to correct this disaster?

I tried to use diskpart to set Partition 1 (XP partition) active instead of Partition 2 (Vista) but no dice. I had to use the Vista DVD to recover from that.

Thanks much,

Charles
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Re: I killed XP with Vista

Postby cmjentinger » Thu Feb 01, 2007 9:40 pm

I read through some of your threads on this a bit more. So, I open VistaBootPro and deleted the XP entry. Next, I ran diagnostics.

Now VistaBootPro says this about XP

{BCD ID}: {5d8aabe8-b236-11db-ac81-0016e68e43ef}
Boot Drive: C:
System Drive: C:
System Bootloader: \Windows\System32\winload.exe
Windows Directory: \Windows

I'm not sure what I need to do from here. A bit scared to shut it down. :)
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Postby kd1966 » Thu Feb 01, 2007 9:48 pm

From what I see of your description, it "appears" you have installed Vista "Over the top" of XP, as both Vista AND XP indicate same drive (C: drive) in your BCD.

What you can do to confirm this is from Vista, look at your "My computer" (Open it) and navigate to the C: drive and tell us if there is a "Windows.old" directory

BTW, Welcome to PRO!! We'll get you fixed up!
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Postby cmjentinger » Thu Feb 01, 2007 10:22 pm

Nope. No Windows.old I created a clean partition before trying to install Vista. It's almost as if Vista took the Volume C from the XP partition. Now, the XP partition has no volume information.

I rand Diskpart.exe to explore.

Results:

List Disk: Drive 0 Online 190 GB 5780 KB Free

Select Disk 0

List Partition:

Partition 1 Primary 141 GB (used to be my XP partition)
Partition 2 Primary 49 GB (my new Vista partition)

List Volume:

Volume 0 D CDFS DVD-ROM 489 MB Healthy
Volume 1 C NTFS Partition 49 GB Healthy System

There is no volume listed for the 141 GB Partition 1 shown in the partition listing. Also notice there is no drive letter either. Vista stole them. lol. Only thing I can think of. Oh yeah, how can I post a screen shot of Drive Manager and VistaBootPro for everyone to see?
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Postby kd1966 » Thu Feb 01, 2007 11:11 pm

To post a screen shot, you need an image hosting site, like (This is what I use) Walagata or Photobucket, or anything else similar. You just upload your pics to your hosting site and post the link to them here in your post......

Also, I wouldn't say Vista "stole" the HDD drive letter............ what is possible is that there are errors on the XP partition and Vista is just not recognizing it correctly. Can you even see the old XP partition from Vista's Disk Mgmt? And have you tried VistaBootPRO 3.1, our Vista Bootloader management program?
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Postby cmjentinger » Thu Feb 01, 2007 11:27 pm

Yes I have. I entered the results in the posts above. I appreciate your help with this Kevin. I have also include a few screenshots below. Nice tip on Photobucket BTW. ^*^

Image
Image
Image
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Postby kd1966 » Fri Feb 02, 2007 12:09 am

Ok, from what I see, you DO have a corrupted/bad XP entry and you need to delete it from the BCD using VistaBootPRO, and then re-add the XP entry manually. Can you add a drive letter for the XP drive?
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Postby cmjentinger » Fri Feb 02, 2007 12:45 am

Ok. I did that. When I add XP back manually, I get the same screen shown in tab 1 and 2 above. And, BootPro won't let me select any drive except for C:. I did notice though that the bootloader for XP is incorrect is listed incorrectly as winload.exe. Should I attempt to transfer the correct loader from my XP CD to the Vista partition? If so, what files and where should I place them in the drive?

Also, in the bootloader tab, it says:

Reinstall the Vista bootloader
Unistall the Vista bootloader (used to restore Legacy OS)

I'd hate to completely ruin my chances by experimenting. Would that route by aa bad thing to try?
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Postby kd1966 » Fri Feb 02, 2007 1:07 am

Hmmmm............ have you tried the diagnostics in VistaBootPRO? Also, can you actually give the XP partition a drive letter BEFORE you attempt to manually add it? This may help, as currently there are no other drives available.
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Postby cmjentinger » Fri Feb 02, 2007 3:03 am

I tried that too. Though I am not an expert here. I went through Diskpart (found in System32 of Vista) and reviewed options. There is an Assign command. But, it says "Assign drive letter to selected volume". There is no volume for Partition 1. Would it be a bad thing to assign a new drive letter to the Vista partition?
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