XP/Vista dual boot problem

[Smenelian]

I had them set up on separate hard drives and everything was fine originally, but my drive with XP crashed and I had to reinstall it. The drive with Vista didn't crash with XP, but when I plugged it in after I had XP up and running, there was no more dual boot screen at startup. I can't load Vista at all. Is this normal under the circumstances or is there a way to fix it without reinstalling Vista?

 

[Cutthroat]

It kinda depends on what your config was when you installed Vista. When you installed Vista was the drive with XP on it plugged in? If so Vista wrote it's BCD over the top of XP's MBR, then when you reinstalled XP it ovewrote the Vista BCD again with it's MBR. To fix this, boot to the Vista DVD, when it gets to the repair options it will likely tell you your BCD is missing and want to recreate it, or you can choose to fix the BCD from the menu.

On the other hand, when you installed Vista if the drive with XP was not plugged in, and when you reinstalled Xp the drive with Vista was not plugged in, they would have kept their seperate boot records, so you could just use your motherboard's boot disk options to choos which drive to boot from.

 

[anandk]

If you have installed, say, XP, on a Vista machine, in the Boot Menu, you may no longer be able to see Vista as an option. This occurs because when a different version of Windows is installed, it rewrites the MBR to call its own boot loader.

So if you install Vista on a PC where XP is already installed, the Vista boot menu incorporates the options from the older OS's boot menu. But, on the other hand, if you install XP on Vista, it will overwrite the MBR with one that does not recognize the newer Vista's Boot Loader.

So if you find that Vista is missing as an option in a multi-boot computer, you can resolve this issue, as follows : Open cmd in XP.
Run <D>:\Boot\ Bootsect.exe ?NT60 All
Where <D> is the Drive letter.
Reboot. You will now be able to see the Vista menu option/s.
Now To restore the entry for XP, open an elevated command prompt and enter this:
Bcdedit ?create {ntldr} ?d ?Put Description of Menu here?
Restart Computer.