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[pcdoctor123 Profile]

I am hoping there is a way to recover my boot options. Here is what happened. The main OS of my Tri-Boot system is XP. It has crashed and needs to be reloaded. I tried a repair, which did allow me to boot to the XP OS, but I lost the Boot menu which allowed me to choose the OS I wanted to boot to. Now XP will not load so I am in the process of formatting and reloading the OS. The other two paltforms are on seperate drives and are both Vista Ultimate. One is 32bit the other is 64bit.

Is there a way to recover the boot menu so I can boot to the other two platforms?

Any and all help is greatly appreciated even if the answer is NO.

[yeshuas]

First, in what order did you install the OS's originally?

When you say separate drives for the Vista OS's, you are talking about physical drives, not partitions of the same drive, correct

Chances are, though if you installed XP first and then the Vista OS's Vista may have put some system files on the XP drive.

Unhide your system files and folders and protected files etc. in "Folder Options" and then look on the Vista drives for the folder "Boot and the file Bootmgr, and let us know if you find them, this will be after you reinstall XP obviously, since you can't boot to anything I take it.

this guide should help too, substitute vista where it says Win 7

reformatted-and-reinstalled-xp-lost-boot-to-windows-7-t114759.html

[pcdoctor123 Profile]

Order of onstall was XP then Vista. The drives are physical drives. The search for the bootmgs returned several files. One in D\Windows\Boot\PCAT and 4 in the D\Windows\winsxs\x86 folders. Searching the other drive(E) returned identical results. FYI I also searched for a .bcd file and found nothing.

I will try following the instructions and let you know what I find.

[yeshuas]

The folder "Boot" and the file "Bootmgr" should be in the root directory of the drive that is marked "System"

[pcdoctor123 Profile]

Thank you so much. It took me days of searching and trial an error, but the link you posted was the key in letting boot pro see the Vista installations. I was able to rebuild the Boot Loger and all is well now. Thank you so much. You may close this thread as solved.

[yeshuas]

Thank you for letting us know you got it solved