[Grav!ty]

Reinstalling Windows XP when dual booting with Windows Vista


Recently I set about a reinstall of Windows XP which is on the system drive, drive C. Windows Vista is installed on drive D and all the boot system files for both XP and Vista are on the XP installation drive. One can make sure which is the System drive by going to My Computer>Right click>Manage>Disk Management and look for the drive/partition tagged "System".

The problem here is that when formatting the XP drive, if XP is installed on the System drive, one will lose the ability to boot to Windows Vista. If the steps below are taken, then one can easily restore the ability to boot to either Vista or XP after the reformat and clean install of Windows XP is complete.


Preparation

I did not want to disturb my Windows Vista installation, so this is the process I followed:

Copy and paste the folder Boot to the drive on which Vista is installed
Copy and paste the file bootmgr to the drive on which Vista is installed
As a precaution, create a backup of the BCD Store with VistaBootPRO and select the drive on which Vista is installed as the save location.
Uninstall the Vista bootloader using VistaBootPRO, from the Bootloader page.
Delete ALL entries from the Manage OS Entries page of VistaBootPRO

Once this was done, I rebooted to the Windows XP CD and reformatted and reinstalled Windows XP.


Reinstating the Windows Vista Dual Boot

After I had installed all drivers and some of the programs I use to Windows XP it was time to get my dual boot with Vista working again. Here is the process to follow to resinstate the dual boot:

Downloaded and install VistaBootPRO.
Cut and paste the folder Boot from the Vista installation drive back to the XP installation drive
Cut and paste the file bootmgr from the Vista installation drive back to the XP installation drive
Go to the Bootloader page of VistaBootPRO, select "Reinstall the Vista bootloader" and Apply

Reboot and you will find that the dual boot menu to both Windows XP and Windows Vista has been restored.

[Computerwiz2489]

Great guide I really don't like how inflexible Microsoft's loaders are.

Thanks for the guide though

[orbitech]

Smart.. So what you basically did was to backup the boot folder and the bootmgr file in Vista root ,so that you could replace them later when you have again installed XP in C:/Root.

The problem is that I had reinstalled XP w/o knowing of such issues with dual boot. And now I don't have backups of those files..
So is there anything I can do in this case?

Thnx in advance

[kd1966]

Smart.. So what you basically did was to backup the boot folder and the bootmgr file in Vista root ,so that you could replace them later when you have again installed XP in C:/Root.

The problem is that I had reinstalled XP w/o knowing of such issues with dual boot. And now I don't have backups of those files..
So is there anything I can do in this case?

Thnx in advance

Yes! Azzuming you can boot into XP, you can simply install and run VistaBootPRO 3.1 and then REINSTALL THE VISTA BOOTLOADER. Should be as simple as that

[samhfoley]

I reinstalled VISTA as there were 2 bootloader sections. one for VISTA and one for ntldr. Fresh copy of VISTA. created a new boot.ini file. Did that


1. Plug both drives in and set the Windows XP drive to be the boot drive in the BIOS. This will make it the system drive and although it doesn

[JabbaPapa]

Difficulties arise only in working dual-boot systems when you reinstall the Windows version that resides in the System partition.

If XP resides elsewhere than in this partition, ie Vista is your main system, and installed prior to XP, then running VistaBootPRO in XP post-install, and reinstalling the Vista bootloader, should restore dual-boot. In fact, in most cases VBP can be used to do this, although when the System drive has been formatted some extra post-installation config tasks may be required ...

Issues can sometimes occur if Vista resides on the system drive, but you need to format that drive, which may delete the XP boot files.

[JabbaPapa]

Issues can sometimes occur if Vista resides on the system drive, but you need to format that drive, which may delete the XP boot files.

[orbitech]

Smart.. So what you basically did was to backup the boot folder and the bootmgr file in Vista root ,so that you could replace them later when you have again installed XP in C:/Root.

The problem is that I had reinstalled XP w/o knowing of such issues with dual boot. And now I don't have backups of those files..
So is there anything I can do in this case?

Thnx in advance

Yes! Azzuming you can boot into XP, you can simply install and run VistaBootPRO 3.1 and then REINSTALL THE VISTA BOOTLOADER. Should be as simple as that

Actually that was what I was doing but since the boot folder and the bootmgr in c:\Root were not the appropriate files since drive c: was formatted and the appropriate entries (from previous dual boot with Vista) were lost. So if you haven't backed them up before you format your c: drive then you couldn't possibly make the Vista bootloader work correctly. Following Gravity's instructions I repaired 2 times the Vista installation to write again correctly the necessary entries in c:\root and then I went to Vistabootpro in Vista and added the XP entry(legacy OS). That was it!! No need to write the Vista bootloader through the program..

[kd1966]

VBPro is simply a more intuitive way to work with MS's bcdedit.exe and the Vista bootloader and NOT a replacement for them. Glad you got it working!!

[orbitech]

VBPro is simply a more intuitive way to work with MS's bcdedit.exe and the Vista bootloader and NOT a replacement for them. Glad you got it working!!

Yeap thanx m8. I was seeing a similar solution in other sites, which was asking to manually copy and paste the boot folder and bootmgr of Vista installation to c:\root. But I couldn't achieve that since there was no way the XP would let me replace the original files in c:\root(read only files that I couldn't uncheck). Until I saw that through repair Vista it was doing that automatically.