recovery disc weird problem

I decided to dual boot vista and xp, with vista already installed, everything went fine until I tried to use easybcd where for some reason would not run on my computer. I tried to find another way and came across a vista repair disc which I downloaded and burned then went into it that was picking up that vista was installed but I accidentally used the fixmbr option which screwed it up. That was fine I didn't care too much about that as I had burned the recovery discs (also verified after burning) and figured I'll just do a fresh install of it, so I put in the discs and got up to 100% and an error came up I'm not too sure but I think it was 0xd0000009 so tried it again and got a new error 0xd000000a and tried it for a third time and this time it worked. After it went into vista to finalize the settings another problem came up I forget the exact problem at the moment but it said that it was going to restart the computer which it did and still no luck.

Anyway I had to format and reinstall xp which I'm currently using but I want to be able to use vista. Does anyone have any ideas on how to remedy this? maybe a way to use the recovery partition instead of the dvd's?

 

Your problem is that if vista is installed you CAN NOT install XP and dual boot. If you have XP and put vista on you CAN dual boot.

It comes down the the way Vista handles your MBR on your hard drive. And this is a common and well documented issue (and complaint) with vista - http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/wind...on-your-pre-installed-windows-vista-computer/

Basically it is a PITA, but it can be done with 3rd party tools to manually modify your MBR. I highly HIGHLY suggest you pick up a copy of Acronis True Image (follow the link in my signature) and make a FULL BACKUP of your HDD before you attempt any of this.

That way you have a safety net.

-=ssx=-

 

thanks for the reply SSX4life, however I actually read all about dual booting vista and xp with vista being installed first and isn't the problem I'm having now it's that the recovery isn't working correctly. I'm hoping there's a way to boot into the pqservice parition and see if it'll work that way or some kind of work around to get it to run properly.

 

If you own a copy of XP that is not tied to any hardware (OEM) you can always manually install using the disks provided

 

Thanks for the suggestion but I think I'll do without xp for now lol. I have no idea what happened after but I got vista working again for some reason I had to partition the c and d drives into one and format it. The second last try I did the recovery disc put it on the d drive where my xp install was and for some reason said it vista was on both partitions. weird problems, I'm going to see if anyone I know has a vista disc so I don't even need to use the recovery discs before trying to install xp again.