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[old_wise Profile]

Here's the deal. I have
1) My primary (C) 300G Drive with a copy of XP PRO
2) a second (F) physical 300G HDD with Vista Business

First I had xp pro installed on my primary (C) drive. I then disconnected the primary drive so as not to harm the XP installation and installed a fresh copy of Vista Business on the other physical HDD (F).

I reconnected my primary drive and both work fine BUT if I want to switch which OS I'm using I have to got to my BIOS and switch the boot order of the drives. I think this is because I did not have the drive that had xp loaded on it (C) connected to the computer when I installed Vista on the second physical drive (F) .

I would like to have that nifty screen pop up when I boot that lets me pick which OS to go to. Can I use this software (Vista Boot Pro 3.1.0) to try and get that back or do I have to reinstall VISTA (with the HDD that has XP on it) still attached to the computer so the Vista installation will recognize the previous XP installation on the other drive and set up the window?

Any help is appreciated and thank you for your time! Sam B.

[kd1966 Profile YIM]

Moved here by me.........

Hello and welcome to PROnetworks! By your description of disconnecting your XP drive, you in fact DID harm your dual boot, or at least made it more difficult now. For future reference, if you want to have a backup of your XP, you can simply image it, but unplugging is NOT the way to go about a dual boot setup.

Ok, that said, you CAN recover, but it's going to take a bit; realize that currently you have TWO hdd partitions that say they are the SYSTEM partition (This is not good) If you could, please post a screenshot of your Disk Mgmt console from whichever OS you can access (I azzume it is Vista)

There are a number of ways of going about this........ and no, VistaBootPRO will likely NOT fix an "Unplugged" issue, but more on that later. This is going to depend on "where" (Logically speaking) you plugged your XP drive back in (Boot.ini on your XP determines "where" the XP OS is)

I'll hold off on further assessments until I see your disk mgmt screenshot (Also tell us if you're running IDE/SATA mix of HDD's)

[Grav!ty Profile]

Welcome to PROnetworks Sam. If you follow this process you should get your dual boot menu setup fine: Unplugged XP Drive for Vista Setup: Can't Dual Boot to XP

Setting your XP drive as the boot drive will automatically make it the system drive. It's important not to keep changing the boot drive in the BIOS to get the process to work.