brocher

I have a SATA HDD with XP pro on it. I have partitioned it in half and installed VISTA x 64 and have no problems. After doing the first update and re-booting, it goes straight in to XP and once there i can find no way of getting it to boot to VISTA going through the "My Computer, properties, advanced, start up and recovery then edit the boot file" there is absolutly no evidence of VISTA being installed. How can i get the choice of VISTA or XP back again.

wasted_d

sounds like your boot loader has been messed up hence its going straight to xp instead of giving you the menu, theres a program called vista boot pro which runs in xp and in vista which has a nice feature that allows you to remove an replace the vista boot. It should fix your problem if you simply restore the boot.

http://www.vistabootpro.org/index.php

hope this helps

NetRyder

I'll second the VistaBootPRO recommendation. It's a handy little tool.

---

brocher

ok, downloaded and installed VISTABOOTPRO, did a back up and then went to MANAGE OS ENTRIES. Guess what it didnt find ANY OS. The only way i can boot to VISTA is to have the DVD in the drive @ bootup. Any other ideas would be a help. Could i manually change the boot.ini file myself?

Electronic Punk

Vista doesn't use the boot.ini anymore I believe.

---

brocher

Vista only boots when the dvd is in the drive. Now heres what maybe going wrong. I have both OS on same HDD, but the XP is on one partition and Vista on another. XP was installed first. When in XP the vista drive is drive K. Would changing the drive letters make any difference. Also i can now see the OS's in thr vistabootpro and set it up, but it keeps booting from the XP partition.

wasted_d

did you try using the boot looder section in vistabootpro. goto it an remove the vista boot press apply then re activate the vista boot and again press apply. see if that works
As a matter of interest i too have xp an vista on 1 drive over 2 partitions but i force all my other drives to move up a letter so that the vista partition becomes "d" when im in xp then when i boot into vista "d" becomes "c" and "c" becomes "d"
Though regarding you problem what drive letter vista is shouldnt really matter as the boot loader is held on the C drive.

brocher

Tried your solution WASTED but still didn't make a difference.

brocher

OK i have just reinstalled Vista but the x32 edition for obvious compatability reasons. Now the same thing happened, wouldn't boot without dvd in drive. Managed to sort it by unplugging the IDE drive and doing a repair of the installation "twice" before it recognised it. Now it works a treat. Now if you are installing this on a SATA drive and have a IDE drive as well, i would recommend that you unplug the IDE drive until you have completed the installation and make sure it boots without the disk before powering down and plugging in the IDE.

Tuffgong4

easybcd is handy for this as well. I had vista and xp (vista first) installed on one hard drive on my laptop, and easybcd helped me out greatly...there are also cmd commands that do this as well and they worked for someone else I know...need to google for them.

---