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[RGSPro Profile]

I knew i might run into some trouble installing xp after vista since I know they use different boot loaders, however my problem is somewhat strange.

I have vista ultimate as the primary first partition on my 1st drive with 250gb allocated to this partition. Everything is peachy and great but I am sick of not having SLi support so I was going to do a dual boot with XP 32-bit so I can boot that and play some games in SLi every now and then.

I allocated 20gb at the end of the drive for XP, and booted the XP install disc and i chose the 20gb partition and it copied the files over for installation.

When the computer rebooted it simply said "error loading operating system". I thought that was odd, and that at least I could get into XP and not vista at this point. I tried the "fixboot" and "fixmbr" in the XP repair disc, but to no avail. I booted into the vista disc and chose repair and to fix boot problems and it said it fixed the problem and I could get back into vista, but this didn't work either.

Now I can't get any operating system to load with either boot loader.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

[NT50 Profile]

When you say you copied the files over, do you mean you went through he installation procedure?

I wish you would have given us a screen shot of you Disk Management before you started.

BTW: fixboot and fixmbr do not work anymore from what I'm hearing.

Yes the bootsect /NT52 ALL command, but to run that one needs to do so from Vista. From XP it will only work if bootsect.exe is copied and pasted into the system32 folder of XP.

I guess at this point you are feeling a little lost. You can try and boot back to the XP cd and try a repair install and see if it will boot to XP. It should not boot to Vista at all from this point. if you can get XP to boot up then you have two choices to get Vista back, either boot to the Vista DVD and do a repair or use VistBootPro to repair it for you.

[RGSPro Profile]

I was able to do the NT52 All command from the command prompt from within the vista repair section on the install disc, however I still cant get my XP installation to boot.

I have a 300gb HDD, and a 250gb HDD I use for backups. I use the 300gb as my main drive. Originally I had vista taking up the entire drive and booting/running great (except for SLi), and so today I wanted to put XP on a partition on my 300gb drive. I created a 20gb partition in the computer management drive section, rebooted with an XP disc and went to install it. After going through the first part of the install procedure, it copied the installation files over, rebooted, and I haven't been able to boot anything except a preinstalled environment yet. I have tried everything from the vista repair disc, and the NT52 all command, but I am still unable to get it to boot anything.

Unless you have any other suggestions, my next move will be to set my 2nd 250gb drive as the active main hard drive, and create a partition on there and attempt to install XP on it, then get VistaBootPro installed and try to fix my origional 300gb HDD. I hope all is not lost.