how to dual boot with vista installed first

i have a gatway p6831fx and i have done this before i think vista sp2 messed everything up. i have 2 hdds on the first hdd vista 64 is installed and on the second xp was installed. it would only boot to xp so i put the vista dvd in and restored the startup. now the pc boots up only to vista and i opened easybcd and it no other os is showing. so in either mbr another os cannot be see.

 

You can try to re-install XP and after booting up it would recognize that an XP installation is present. Choose repair to continue. Give it a shot.

 

You should be able to use " EasyBCD" to set up your boot partitions again. It's freeware (recently recommended to me after spending $10 on VistaBootPro that does the same thing! D'oh!)

 

i believe if your dual booting, even from two separate hard drives, you should install XP first and then Vista because of the different boot.ini files.

next time, you should set a default OS to boot in case the boot selection screen does not appear.

 

As long as your XP install is still there and not corrupt you can manually add it with easybcd if you had too.

id first "repair" your xp install to make sure its ok, then go back and use easybcd.

the auto repair does not always work so i use the command line commands.

XP command is "fixboot" but for Vista I use "bootrec" and I always run all the options

bootrec - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392

Between what I linked there and fixboot and the recovery option for the OS DVD you will have it fixed for sure.

 

As usual Vicious, you have some great suggestions. Thanks for the link too, btw. Surprisingly Microsoft has some pretty detailed solutions written to most issues.

Vista repair is usually pretty good, but it will usually pork any other OS that is there (ie XP). But VistaBootPro has always worked for me. I'm sure EasyBCD will too - they're both GUI forms of BCDEdit.

 

how do you manually put it in for easy bcd like what command do i use?