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[JabbaPapa Profile]

You may have non-standard partitioning of your hard drive, and many manufacturers exist that provide factory settings that may be poorly adapted to XP and Vista/W7 dual booting --- and you should also be aware that the Microsoft Windows license only requires that downgrading to the previous version of Windows is supported, so that the only dual-boot scenario directly supported by W7 is Vista/W7 dual-booting

Can you please post a screenshot of your hard drive partitioning ? You can access this in W7 by right-clicking on Computer, selecting Management, and opening Disk Management.

In some cases, Vista/W7 setup can write some boot data into hidden partitions or other such unsavoury locations.

My personal recommendation to create an optimal XP and Vista/W7 dual booting environment is to pop in the Vista/W7 DVD with your XP open and running, and to launch setup from within XP -- instead of booting from the Vista/W7 DVD and hoping that everything will turn out right, and then looking for 3rd party solutions to fix dual-boot scenarios not normally supported by Microsoft Windows

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Having said that, by purchasing VistaBootPRO you have also purchased free support from this website, so that with a little patience and configuration assistance, our boot experts will be able to help you get your dual boot system up and running as desired

[yeshuas]

His disk management screen is posted

[JabbaPapa Profile]

His disk management screen is posted

Aaaah I was in a hurry this morning and missed it grrrr ...

OK, the issue is in fact due to a non-conventional partitioning of the hard drive as I suspected.

XP is installed on a logical drive, and the Vista/W7 pre-boot environment is such that it will order any logical partitions *after* any physical ones present on the hard drive, so that both XP and VistaBootPRO will be unable to use normal protocols to create the desired dual-boot environment.

Having said that, Partition 1 on your drive is a physical partition, and will also be the first partition that W7 will have seen during the setup process, so that *all* of the W7 boot files will most likely be present on that partition.

Here's what I would do -- I would run VistaBootPRO in your W7, and use it to install the legacy boot data to the C: drive (uninstalling the W7 boot files) -- and then *IMMEDIATELY* (that is, without rebooting) reinstall the Vista/W7 boot options. This procedure will ensure that *all* necessary W7 and legacy boot files are located on the proper drive. WARNING : you must be VERY careful to ensure that the Vista/W7 boot data is properly installed prior to re-booting should you follow this method, or your computer might become unbootable !!!

Step 2 would be to create a legacy boot option for XP

Step 3 would be to edit boot.ini so that it pointed to the correct partition number -- now this is the trick, because the Vista/W7 pre-boot environment orders partitions differently, your XP will be seen as present NOT on partition number 2 of the drive (as it would be in the NT/XP pre-boot environment), but most likely as partition number 4, given that the Vista/W7 pre-boot environment will order the F: and G: partitions (being physical partitions) with lower ordering numbers despite their physical locations being after the two logical partitions on the drive.

Now, it is quite possible that a simple edit of the partition number for the XP in your boot.ini would suffice to make your XP bootable again, and you may wish to try that first -- by using the values drive(0) and partition(4) as the entries attached to the XP boot option in that file

You should anyway be aware that your issues are caused by a change from W9x/Me/NT/XP in Vista/W7's method of ordering partitions on hard drives, and NOT from any failure in the VistaBootPRO software. I hope this is helpful

[JonMusker Profile]

Ah, you're brilliant, I take it all back. Thank you.

Setting boot.ini to use multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(4) has fixed it.

Partition 4? Four???!!! Four???? I have tried setting boot.ini to use partition 1, 2 or 3 - but got bored at that point since both Windows 7 and XP agree that it is partition 2.

So what you're implying is that boot.ini is being launched from within the Vista PXE, which is reporting the partitioning differently? I'm not quite sure that I understand why this is the case, to be honest.

Just for clarity, then; VistaBootPRO good, M****soft PXE bad. Thanks JabbaPapa

[JabbaPapa Profile]

Setting boot.ini to use multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(4) has fixed it.

Partition 4? Four???!!! Four???? I have tried setting boot.ini to use partition 1, 2 or 3 - but got bored at that point since both Windows 7 and XP agree that it is partition 2.

So what you're implying is that boot.ini is being launched from within the Vista PXE, which is reporting the partitioning differently? I'm not quite sure that I understand why this is the case, to be honest.

Just for clarity, then; VistaBootPRO good, M****soft PXE bad. Thanks JabbaPapa

Thanx for the compliments

It is very unusual for logical drives to mess up the interpretation of boot.ini code by the Vista/W7 kernel, but sometimes you can just be unlucky