Vista/XP dual boot problem

[shindu]

Hi everyone, i was wondering if any one could give me a little help. Normally i'm able to work around things in not sure of but this particular issue is a bit out of my knowledge base. for about a year now i have been dual booting vista and xp. recently my 80g HDD (containing xp and my boot record) has shown signs of failure and i fear i have waited to long already to get rid of it. I have tried to ghost it to another hard drive but it has several bad sectors and the ghosting always fails. I am hoping to just do away with the 80g HDD as i do have my vista load on a 250g, but when i try to remove the drive my machine wont boot. I thing the problem is they my boot.ini was on the 80g HDD and so when i only have my 250g HDD in my machine just sits there waiting for instructions. (this is just my interpretation of what the problem is.) now i know its possible to change your boot.ini but i do not know how and if its going to be a problem making vista the sole OS with my current set up.



thanks for the help

[Cmptr-Gy-Dv]

welcome to techmo,

first if you have vista and XP in dual boot, there is no boot.ini file anymore, vista does not have a boot.ini it uses something called BCD

(Boot Configuration Data) that should be on the same drive that vista is on, if XP is on another drive you should still see the dual boot menu, and be able to start vista, XP will not start,

if vista will not start with the drive that vista was installed on than you will need to put your vista disk in and tell it to do a startup repair,

[shindu]

thats odd, i wonder why it wouldn't boot when i last tried it. i will try booting again without the xp drive in and report back.


thanks for help

[Cmptr-Gy-Dv]

does it still show the boot menu

[shindu]

no after a boot without the xp drive in it tells me to insert bootable media

[Cmptr-Gy-Dv]

you have it booting from the hard drive first, and is there another drive installed, not the vista drive, a backup drive or anything,

[shindu]

i had nothing on, my external hdd is turned off so it wouldn't of come up. and it is set to boot form the vista drive when it was the only one in there. also that nifty boot manager vista has comes um if i boot form the xp drive but no the vista. also as i am at college a few hundred miles away from my vista disc i was hoping i could resolve this with out it.


thanks for the help

[Cmptr-Gy-Dv]

what version of vista is it

[Cmptr-Gy-Dv]

VistaBootPRO - Go PRO with Microsoft Windows Vista Boot Manager


download this program, put the old drive back in boot in to vista, and install vista boot pro,

look at what drive the BCD is on and than have boot pro move it to the drive that vista is on,

[shindu]

Windows Vista Home Premium (6.0, Build 6000)

complements of dxdiag