Dual Boot issue

[ViviTheMage]

My laptop was using Vista Ultimate, and through Vista I repartitioned the drive to have a free sector of 47gig.

I installed windows xp into that, XP works great, installed drivers. Now I see two drives (C being the Vista partition, and E being the XP one).

My issue is that, I do not see a bootloader giving me options as to which one to boot to. Is there a simple way of doing this? I only have access to Windows XP right now, as Vista boot option does not show up.

 

[Markbnj]

When you installed XP you replaced Vista's boot loader on the active partition. Vista is aware of XP, and will look for it during install and ask if you want to upgrade, replace, etc., but XP is not aware of Vista. If you had done it in the opposite order it would probably work without any further tweaking. What you need to do is boot Vista (probably from the install CD as you can't boot it off the hard disk) and do a repair on the master boot record. That should restore the Vista loader, and you can then use bcdedit to enable booting XP as well. I don't use Vista, so I won't try to give the precise steps, but someone else here will know.

 

[Pirotech]

Look at this guide
I've used Disk Director for installing two OSes. Works well for me.