Vista and XP dual boot problems

Hi, guys, first of let me say this is a great site and forum, and this helped me a lot to get my first laptop, an asus g1 with vista preinstalled.

These are the problems that i ran into, trying to make first a triple boot, then settle to a dual boot...anyway, i hope somebody with a preinstalled vista ran into the same dificulties and resolved them...so, read on:
this is what i did:
i partitioned the hdd (sata) in several partitions: one of them is c:\, primary, and another is F:\ primary, too...now, i installed vista on c:\, from the recovery dvd, that came with asus...then, my own copy of XP, on F:\....then, because the bootloader in vista was messed up, i installed Vista again in C:\. xp, worked fine, before i installed vista again, but now xp won't boot...vista is fine...when the pc starts, the window boot manager appears and i have a choice, vista or xp...if i chose xp, it will say:
file: ntldr

status: 0xc000000f

the selected entry could not be loaded because the application is missing or corupt

the next step, in vista I installed EasyBCD, where I added XP, change the drive to F:\ and made it the second choice...the funny thing is that, the drive where I installed xp, keep changing back to C:\, wich is not right, in C:\ resides vista. Anyway in EasyBCD, i can see xp, with his BCD ID, the drive which shows C:\ instead of F:\, the bootloader path which is tldr, and Windows directory which is empty...

Then, after some research i found a post to how to edit the window vista boot menu options- BCDedit. Here I changed the letter C: that was next to the legacy os, xp, to F:. I used the bcdedit /set {...}device partition=F:, hit enter, the change was succesfully done...then, i type the other command line,the one with osdevice but somehow it didn't work.

when i boot up again, the xp choice still doesn't work, the letter has somehow changed from C: to F:, but that's it...i really don't know what else to do...so please, if somebody can direct me to a post or an article, or explain to me what i did wrong...because, it seems is not such a hard thing to dual boot, but somehow i can't do it...

sorry for the long post
did any of you, tried to install xp in a second primary partition on notebook with vista preinstalled? i just hope i am not the first one...

thanks, alex

 

Well, it's a little hard to read though this, but here's what I can tell you.

Load XP first, then Vista (do NOT run the installer within XP).
Somehow, and I don't know how, the Vista bootloader DOES make XP think it is on the C drive. For instance, I have Vista on an 80GB (C) partition and XP on 40GB (D). When in Vista, Vista == C and XP == D. When in XP, Vista == D and XP == C. No problems and no conflicts that I've seen.

When I tried to install XP on a Vista install, like you did, I eventually had to give up and install XP then Vista. I haven't been able to get it working the other way around.

 

Use EasyBCD and instead of c:\ or f:\ change it to c:\ windows or f:\ windows and it will work.

I had the same problem

 

For dual-boot, always install the older operating system before the newer one.

 

You are so right about that. But even so, I had the same problem and it bothered me for about 5 hours into the wee morning until I figured it out, you have to add the windows to the drive, else it cant find the NTLDR file.

 

Hey, guys, thanks for your replies...i tried to be as torought as possible...so, what i gather is that i have to install first xp being the older os...the thing is, the laptop comes with a recovery dvd, not a stand alone os dvd...My question is, if i install first xp, which will go automatically on partition C: no matter what, when i will pop the recovery vista dvd for asus, will i have the option to install in any other drive except c:? or, being a recovery disc, it will install in C: only? any of you ran into a problem like this when tried to install a recovery disc in other partition than C:?
that's why i install first vista in c:, then xp in D:, and then again vista in c:, so will be the os installed after the older one, xp...
Datdamnamp, i did that already, i used EasyBCD and the bcdedit in vista prompt, and I was able to change the drive letter, but still the ntldr is missing...so, is more than that...looks that is very important to install xp first on C:, and then vista wherever...in my case, considering i have a recovery disc, i'm not sure that vista will install wherever i chose to, but where asus wants...let me know if i am wrong about this, so i can start the whole process again...
by the way, bcdedit is a very powerful tool, you can change the order of booting, the names of the os's, the wainting time, boot partitions, etc...be sure you back up first your bootloader before making the changes, in case something goes wrong...

 

You should find all the answers you need on this site (if you have the time to digest it all)...

http://www.multibooters.co.uk/

Rc

 

In EasyBCD, for the XP partition, where it ask for the drive letter of the XP partition. Add WINDOWS to it. example, D:\WINDOWS, the bootloader is looking for NTLDR on the root of the drive and the file is in the WINDOWS folder.

 

datdamnamp

how do you set it to eg. C:\WINDOWS ?

neither EasyBCD nor bcdedit allows you to change partition to C:\Windows