Help using 2 OS's

[herschbach3]

i hope someone can help me. i just got windows vista rc1 and upgraded my xp home sp2 to it. its fine so far but not really stable of course so i decided to reinstall xp to my second drive. i changed nothing on the original drive with vista on it and i am now using a clean install of xp on my other drive. heres where i lost my way. i cant figure out how to boot into vista i tried using my boot menu to boot to drive c: the original with vista but it still loads xp from drive d: what do i do???

[ctaylor]

Here's a guess - the advice is free and worth every penney......

Perhaps the Windows XP boot loader doesn't recognize the Vista boot loader and overwrote its Master Boot Record. The solution might be to load XP first, then load Vista. I expect that Vista will see and recognize the XP boot loader as a legitimate Microsoft boot loader and not overwrite it.

CAVEAT: I don't know Vista at all, but do know that in the old NT 4 days install sequence for a multiboot Windows machine was key.

[herschbach3]

thanks for the advice but in my research i found a program suggested to another person with a similar problem and i tried that. BUT NOW my default os is vista which is loading just fine now. it gives me the option to load vista or xp which is on the d drive but when i select xp it says ntloader file missing. to me this shows that your advice is correct and order is key but since i have had my computer for a while my xp key is no longer usable so i cant try to reinstall until i get a new key. thanks for the help!