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Dual boot problems with XP and Vista...

F

fretman

Senior member
OK everyone. I?ve nailed down what I?m trying to do with no luck. Hope someone can help.

I?m trying to create a dual-boot system with XP and Vista.

I have a 500gig hard drive.

I created a 70gig partition and installed XP on it.

I then created a 145gig partition and installed Vista on it.

When I get to the dual-boot menu screen, if I choose Vista everything goes fine. I get logged into the system and C: is Vista and D: is XP.

However, if I select XP from the boot menu, it will do a ChkDsk on H: and then it will do a whole lot of re-indexing of files, error correcting of files, and security file checks.

The system does boot up into XP eventually and C: is XP and H: is Vista.

So, question number 1 is. When I boot into XP, why is Vista being recognized as the H: and not the D:

I was able to do it in the past where only the C: and D: were recognized and therefore didn?t have to go through the ChkDsk verifications.

And now question number 2.

When I boot into Vista and try to create another partition for my Data storage, the next time I try and boot into Vista I get an error. The boot menu doesn?t seem to recognize that Vista is there anymore. I have to go back in and delete the Data storage partition and then boot into XP and go through all the ChkDsk verifications again before I can get Vista back.

Anyone can help me on these questions? Thanks.

 
for first one, vista always assigns C: to its partition, regardless whether it is actually 1st of 5th partition on disk

since you created vista partition after you installed xp, xp gave it first free letter (H: in your case)... using disk management tool (diskmgmt.msc) you can change it to D:
 
Thanks for the help.

Do you know why it does all that re-indexing stuff?

And do you know why I can't create a data partition without messing up the Vista partition?

 
Originally posted by: postmortemIA
how are you making the partition?
Click to expand...


Well here's how I'm doing the partitions. I boot up with my Vista installation disk and when I get to the screen to see my drive space I delete everything so I only have 465 gigs of unallocated space. So I'm really starting clean.

Then I start my XP installation. I create one partition with 70 gigs.

I install XP.

Then I boot up with my Vista installation disk again and when I get to the screen with the drives I create a 2nd partition with 145 gigs.

Then I install Vista.

Any more help is appreciated. Thanks.

 
Originally posted by: fretman
Originally posted by: postmortemIA
how are you making the partition?
Click to expand...


Well here's how I'm doing the partitions. I boot up with my Vista installation disk and when I get to the screen to see my drive space I delete everything so I only have 465 gigs of unallocated space. So I'm really starting clean.

Then I start my XP installation. I create one partition with 70 gigs.

I install XP.

Then I boot up with my Vista installation disk again and when I get to the screen with the drives I create a 2nd partition with 145 gigs.

Then I install Vista.

Any more help is appreciated. Thanks.
Click to expand...

The problem is you created the other partitions after XP was installed so it is trying to mount those partitions after the fact. In the process XP thinks there is an error on the disk and it is trying to resolve it through the checkdisk utility and is screwing with all your partitons.

I create all my partitions prior to installing anything to avoid problems. You can use the XP cd to do this before you install or you could use a partition utility like gparted.

I personally use gparted to create the partitions and format them as NTSF. Then when I am installing XP, I format all the partitions again using the quick format option on the XP cd to make certain all the partitions are read correctly by XP.
 
Thanks for the response. So you're both saying that I should have all my partitions created before I install XP or Vista?

Well, that's what I did the very first time. Here's what happened.

I booted up with my Vista installation CD and got to the screen with the Drives. I created 4 primary partitions. A 70gig for XP, a 145gig for Vista, a 200gig for Data, and a 50gig for Data Backup.

I then exited without installing Vista.

I then ran my XP setup disks and it got to the screen where it showed my hard drive space. I guess XP only recognizes a maximum hard drive capacity of 128gigs because it couldn't see any of my partitions that I just created.

So I created my XP (70gig) partition again and installed XP on it.

I then booted back with my Vista installation disk and saw that my 1st partition had XP on it. I then installed Vista on my 2nd partition.

After this, I was able to boot into Vista via the boot menu screen upon startup.

However, when I tried to boot into XP via the boot menu screen, I got an error saying that I had an unmountable disk volume. That never happened to me before. I researched and saw that it might have something to do with my hard drive cable but I doubt that would be the problem as I never touched the hard drive cable. It also said that I might have a corrupted boot.ini file. That seems more reasonable. But all I've done is created my partitions and installed my XP and Vista.

So can you tell me what I did wrong? Or what process I should actually go about this. I had it right once but I can't seem to do it again.

Thanks again for your help.

 
XP without service packs doesn't see more than 128GB.

slipstream sp2 into xp cd
install xp
make partitions
install vista on one of them

as simple as that
 
Good to know. Thanks. Will do that.

But you said to install XP and then make partitions? Does that go against what you said before?

Should I not make all my partitions first and then install XP?

 
just don't use vista to make partitions and you are fine either way. since xp comes with nice disk management tool (diskmgmt.msc), you can make them after you install xp on 1st partition.
 
Originally posted by: postmortemIA
XP without service packs doesn't see more than 128GB.

slipstream sp2 into xp cd
install xp
make partitions
install vista on one of them

as simple as that
Click to expand...

:thumbsup:

This has been the problem all along. I have a good link for you on how to slipstream SP2 into XP so you will have a sp2 cd to install with in the future.

Slipstream XP with SP2 pcstats.com
 
Thanks to all for the great help. I am now able to run a dual-boot without the problems I was having before. I created the XP-SP2 slipstream and created all my partitions before installing XP and Vista. Now everything appears to be fine. When I boot into XP I don't get the error and reindexing messages as before. Cheers!

 
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