Dualboot XP/Vista doesnt work.

[core2kid]

I have 2 SATA hard drives. A 200GB With Vista and a 250GB with XP. currently have Vista as the boot drive in the BIOS. I used to have it so that the Vista bootloader would allow me to access XP on the 2nd hard drive. I tried to do that again with EasyBCD but I keep getting an error when trying to load XP as though it cannot find XP. What could be the problem?

 

[zagood]

manual instructions on fixing the MBR:
http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/showtopic26756.htm

-z

 

[core2kid]

I'll give that a try. One question, what should my boot hard drive be set to in the BIOS? XP or Vista? They are 2 separate hard drives.

 

[core2kid]

Didn't work. "System cannot find the file specified" and I copied and pasted the code.

 

[Brainonska511]

In your BIOS, you can also do the following instead of relying on the OS's boot loader:
1) enable the option to choose which drive to boot from through the BIOS's own boot loader (so it chooses the hard drive)
or
2) set the default boot drive to the OS you use the most, and use the appropriate F key to bring you to the boot selection menu when you want to boot off the other drive.

Of course, this should be set up on a clean install - you disconnect one drive, install OS, reconnect 2nd drive and disconnect first, install 2nd OS, connect both drives and adjust BIOS boot settings.

 

[core2kid]

I used to do that but it was too much of a pain. My board requires a restart after even the slightest setting and there is no F12 boot menu like Dells. I did figure it out by the way. I used a program called VistaBootPRO which worked on the second try. I had to set it to the D Drive and it worked. For some reason EasyBCD couldn't change those settings correctly. When changing it to the D Drive and selecting XP, the computer would just hard reboot. Very odd.

I'm waiting on Suse Linux or the new Ubuntu and I'm gonna install those too. Anybody know how to set linux to use the same swap space for 2 installs?