Technology, Support, and News Forum

[mausoman Profile]

Support Email from:
Sent at: 2009 05 12
Hi,My son has a dell XPS (Vista ready) with xp pro loaded. He recently asked me to install vista on a SEPERATE hard drive for him. I went and bought a 500 GB sata drive and a copy of vista. When I plugged the new hard drive into one of the available sata sockets on the mother board it would not see it. After much frustration,I disconnected the working XP hard drive from the mother board and plugged the new hard drive into the same socket. I turned on the computer and I was able to see the new hard drive and load the new vista onto it.
Shortly after this I realized the reason I was not able to have both hard drives working at the same time on the motherboard was the computer bios had only one sata socket on the mother board turned on.When I realized this,I went into the bios and turned it on.
Problem:Because I installed the new hard drive with vista without the other hard drive with XP plugged in, it will not give me a choice as to which drive to boot from on start up.When the XP hard drive is plugged in and I go to my computer icon,it sees the other drive with vista.What can I do to have a boot choice on start up now?I do not want to reinstall vista.
I am very new at this so if you can give me a step by step solution I would be greatly appreciative. Michael:

[yeshuas]

Can you get it to boot to Vista, then try this.

You could try is having both drives plugged in, then use the Vista install disk and boot from it, then try the startup repair option to see if it will find the XP install and re-configure the bootloader for you automatically.