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[marc90125 Profile]

Hopefully there'll be a quick answer for this & I'm just being stupid. I have BootPro & it boots from a dual OS HDD, vista 64 home & XP home 32, vista first.
I just got around to installing acronis true image & doing backups in case of disaster. Now I need to boot from the DVD first if there is a CD in the drive [E] & then into vista as the default OS or XP if chosen when there's no CD present.
This forum finds hundreds of threads for "boot from DVD" but I can't see anything that's not to do with OS. It should be simple but it reads like I have to have an OS to specify & of course there won't be one on the CD?
Regards Marc

[Grav!ty Profile]

It sounds like you need to get into your BIOS by pressing Del, rapidly, repeatedly and immediately the system starts. Once there look under all the tabs for Boot Priority and set your DVD drive to boot first, the and the HDD second.

That way, If a bootable DVD or CD is not detected in the DVD drive the system will automatically boot from your HDD. Once the HDD boots, it looks for the boot menu and you will then be able to choose which OS you want to boot to. If you go this route you need to save your changes before exiting the BIOS, usually by pressing F10 and then selecting "Save and exit" or similar wording. Care needs to be exercised when messing with the BIOS so be sure to read the instruction when you are in the BIOS.

As an alternative you can also press F8 rapidly, repeatedly and immediately the system starts to access a popup BIOS screen that allows you to choose which device to start from. Well on most systems you can use this method.

Remember to restore your Acronis images to the same drive/partition letters you took them from and also to restore the images to drives/partitions of the same size or larger than they were taken from. Failure to do this invariably results in the inability to boot to the restore images.

For your information, DualBootPRO is simply a utility which provides a user interface to the built in Windows boot system tools and more particularly the BCD (boot configuration data store) of Vista and Windows 7 and the boot.ini of Windows XP. It is not a boot manager as your post seems to imply.