A Digital Age Deserves A Digital Leader

Vista/XP Dual boot; XP won't boot

Forum rules
Please start your own topic for support with problems you experience. Even if it appears to be exactly the same as someone else's problem, system configurations differ significantly. Thank you.

It may take our support staff between 24-48 hours to respond to your problem. We are a small business and strive to answer your questions as soon as possible. We appreciate your patience.

Postby Grav!ty » Thu Feb 08, 2007 10:15 am

Those 4 files and the folder Boot need to be on the root of the system drive. Not in any folder in other words

I'm going to be away for about 4 hours now so hopefully someone else will help you samhfoley
Image

"The great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are." - Niccolo Machiavelli
PROfessional Member
User avatar
Posts: 15790
Joined: Tue Sep 14, 2004 5:22 am
Real Name: Graham

Postby samhfoley » Thu Feb 08, 2007 1:19 pm

I was gone myself for the past 3 hours and am soon off to bed here in Japan. Be back in the morning. You are saying that all 4 files need to be in C/WINDOWS/SYSTEM?

Should I just clean install XP?

I had XP back as the working System drive like you said. Then I did what you said, ran the VISTA repair twice. What that does is cause my PC to boot from Vista and switch the drives so that the D drive becomes the C drive and I cannot boot with XP.

I have booted back with my C drive being XP. I now have a boot folder in my Epson folder (moved to allow me to boot from XP again) and a boot folder just sitting in my C drive. Now I only see the boot folder in the D HD (Vista) not the bootmgr file.

Let me get this right, you want me to copy and paste both the boot file and bootmgr into my C HD. Anywhere in C or a specific location?

Also tell me how I can either combine the boot folders or get rid of the ones I don't need. Thanks again for all of your help

I'll be back in about 8 hrs or so when I get up.
-Sam
PRO Level 2
Posts: 20
Joined: Thu Feb 08, 2007 3:08 am
Location: Japan

Postby samhfoley » Thu Feb 08, 2007 1:54 pm

I have found NTDETECT.Com and ntldr. They are in my C/ folder

I also have the boot folder from Vista in my C/ folder.

What I do not have is my boot.ini or the bootmgr file.

point me in the right direction as to what I should do. both in term of the above as well as what to do about the boot folder now residing in my Epson folder. Thanks.
-Sam
PRO Level 2
Posts: 20
Joined: Thu Feb 08, 2007 3:08 am
Location: Japan

Postby Grav!ty » Thu Feb 08, 2007 3:19 pm

samhfoley wrote: You are saying that all 4 files need to be in C/WINDOWS/SYSTEM?


NOT in any folder but on the root of the system drive. The ones I've marked are the ones you need and that is where they must be.

Image


samhfoley wrote: Should I just clean install XP?


Yes you can but then you will loose the ability to boot to Vista anyway. If you are going to go that route, then format and reinstall XP to your system drive/partition and follow that by a format and clean install of Vista to another drive/partition.
Image

"The great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are." - Niccolo Machiavelli
PROfessional Member
User avatar
Posts: 15790
Joined: Tue Sep 14, 2004 5:22 am
Real Name: Graham

Postby samhfoley » Thu Feb 08, 2007 9:42 pm

so I have no boot.ini file How do I get another one for my XP HD?

and a bit of confusion on this point. The bootmgr is a file native to XP or is that coming from Vista and copied into XP?
I see 3 listings for bootmgr after my search
D/ (vista HD)
C/Program Files/EPSON
C/Programfiles/epson/boot/fi-FI
I can move it back into C/ if you tell me which one.

What do I do about having 2 boot folders? What should I do with the one in the Epson folder?

When you have time let me know. Thanks again
PRO Level 2
Posts: 20
Joined: Thu Feb 08, 2007 3:08 am
Location: Japan

Postby Grav!ty » Thu Feb 08, 2007 11:02 pm

I think you need to do some reading samhfoley. Check out these threads:

Install Windows XP in a Dual Boot with Pre-installed Windows Vista

Reinstalling Windows XP when dual booting with Windows Vista

Unplugged XP Drive for Vista Setup: Can't Dual Boot to XP

Reformatted and Reinstalled XP: Lost Boot to Vista

Once you have a beter understanding of what you need to do go back through this thread of yours - all the answers you need are already here.

To fix your boot.ini to create a new boot.ini file using notepad which you can do by right clicking the desktop and select New>Text document. Copy and paste the above into it and rename the text document to boot.ini and then copy or cut and paste to the root of your System drive.

To find what is your system drive go to Disk Management and see which one is labelled System

Let us know how you get along :)
Image

"The great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are." - Niccolo Machiavelli
PROfessional Member
User avatar
Posts: 15790
Joined: Tue Sep 14, 2004 5:22 am
Real Name: Graham

Postby samhfoley » Thu Feb 08, 2007 11:25 pm

"Copy and paste the above into it" what is the above? sorry but I don't follow. I will read the other posts when I get home this afternoon. thanks again for always helping me out
PRO Level 2
Posts: 20
Joined: Thu Feb 08, 2007 3:08 am
Location: Japan

Postby Grav!ty » Thu Feb 08, 2007 11:32 pm

samhfoley wrote:"Copy and paste the above into it" what is the above? sorry but I don't follow. I will read the other posts when I get home this afternoon. thanks again for always helping me out


Sorry I copied that from another post and the info doesn't apply to you. If you post a screenshot of your Disk Management and indicate which is your XP drive/partition I'll help you structure a new boot.ini
Image

"The great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are." - Niccolo Machiavelli
PROfessional Member
User avatar
Posts: 15790
Joined: Tue Sep 14, 2004 5:22 am
Real Name: Graham

Postby JabbaPapa » Fri Feb 09, 2007 6:20 am

samhfoley wrote:OK, so I managed to move the boot folder and the startupmgr to a programs folder on XP HD, then was able to boot up in XP again...wooohoo. Deleted the bad boot/bootmgr files and started again fresh. did the Vista repair twice and guess what? Same thing...back to booting my XP HD directly onto vista. What to do?
-Sam


You know, if your system is currently back to behaving as it was, I would actually follow your own initial suggestion, and switch the XP drive to be Disk 0

As it was initially ghosted, it should be a bootable drive (make sure of this by testing this setup with the second drive unplugged).

If you can get it set up like this (so that XP boots but not Vista), it should then be a simple matter of running VistaBootPRO from XP to install the Vista boot loader in your XP drive, which would provide you with the dual boot capabilities :yesnod:
Image
PRO VETERAN
User avatar
Posts: 9538
Joined: Sun Feb 22, 2004 5:17 pm
Location: Monte-Carlo
Real Name: Julian Lord

Previous

Return to Windows Boot Problems

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 0 guests