Dual boot issue with Vista and XP

[Orbitech]

I have a problem with making my dual boot work correctly ..
Let's take it from the beginning..

I had Win XP and later I installed Vista on a different HDD. It created by itself a dual boot and I had no issues whatsoever with it..
That was till I decided to format my primary HDD C: and reinstall XP. Vista remained as it were. I remind you that both OSes are on a different HDD.Now I know that you can't possibly make boot.ini in XP to see Vista in dual boot. So I downloaded the EasyBCD program which writes the Vista bootloader for me.
I restarted and it had indeed created the dual boot. Now I can start Vista through this dual boot, but I can't start XP. The only way to make XP work again is to remove from Vista the bootloader through EasyBCD. But this of course removes the dual boot and I can't start Vista

So is there a way to make a permanent "appropriate" dual boot that can run both OSes again?

Thnx in advance

 

[Blazkowicz]

try some other multiboot tool, maybe XOSL?

 

[Ken2012]

With the RC1 I could dual-boot by booting off the Vista ISO via my DVD drive. Don't know if that works with retail Vista though .

 

[chavvdarrr]

I'm dual booting with the help of "bootpart"
google for "bootpart dual boot vista"

Basicly step by step:
1 Install XP
2 Copy bootpart to your XP drive
3 Make partition for Vista active (through drive management)
4 Install Vista
5 make XP part active (through drive management)
6 Boot to XP, start bootpart, see number of partition with Vista, add it to boot.ini via bootpart

cmd line is like:
bootpart 3 Vista c:\vista.bin

where 3 is number of partition, Vista is the boot.ini description, vista.bin is where Vista boot sector is saved
Thats all

In your case, just boot into XP, and go for step 6

 

[Orbitech]

Thnx but I found a much more easy way to do it..

Actually it needed Vista repair, in order to create the lost boot and bootmgr in C: drive again. If you don't backup this folder and this file, before you reinstall Windows XP, they will be logically lost. So you use Vista repair to write them back. (2 times one for each case). Then I used VistaBootPro and created a legacy OS for WinXP. Everything works fine again.