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Xp booting ...Vista disappeared


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#1
maveee

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Hello guys ....

lately i had some problems with my Vista ....so i decided to install XP on the OTHER DRIVE ....so i got it installed on D ....now after the installation was finished i discovered that i cant boot vista anymore ....i thought i might get the windows boot list to choose between the two but that didnt happen ....instead now it jumps to xp right away .....can i fix that ? even the recovery center i had for vista is gone now ... (in toshibas there is a recovery and repair setup if u hit the F8 button while BIOS is launching)......please help ....i just want to be able to boot my vista again ...even if i have to get rid of XP....

thank you all
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#2
The Admiral

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You're ok, don't panic!

Boot into XP, just like normal. Once you're in, go to Start > All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt. Type in diskpart and press Enter, then list disk and press Enter, then you'll see a list of disks, probably 0 and 1. Figure out which one Vista is installed on, judging by the size. We'll pretend it is disk 0, but change it to whatever the Vista disk is! Type in select disk 0 and press Enter, then list partition and press Enter. Here you'll see a list of partitions. Again, judging by the size, figure out which partition Vista is on. We'll pretend it is partition 2, but change it to whatever the Vista partition is! Type in select partition 2 and press Enter, then active and press Enter. You'll get a message that says the partition was marked as active. Type in exit and press Enter, then exit and Enter again, which will close out of the command prompt.

Reboot, and you should be into Vista! Please post back here with the results!

Edited by The Admiral, 15 October 2008 - 05:06 PM.

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#3
onurtaco

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Hey Admiral, great way to solve the problem.

maveee, if you have trouble tryout the software Easy BCD. After you install it on XP, you can just select the vista partition from the list that it will show you. Then you just choose from the combo box below the name of the operating system which in your case is Vista.Which is basically the same thing as Admiral said but you may not want to deal with the command prompt and so(all due respect to Admiral)

See, to dual boot your PC you have the initial operating system. Like you said, you install the second on the other partition. But when you do that, the newly installed operating system overwrites the boot files. Which makes it as if you just have one. So you have to tell the PC that you got the old one too.
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#4
The Admiral

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Just to clarify here:

When the computer turns on, it looks for the "active" operating system and passes control. That operating system then looks for a "bootloader" to load the files the Operating System needs to run. Then, those files run and the Operating System starts up so you can use it.

Right now, Windows XP is the "active" operating system, and so that's the operating system that gets loaded. What my method is going is setting Windows Vista back to the "active" operating system, so that Vista is the one that starts - which is something that EasyBCD can't do automatically.

When I said post back here with the results, assuming you got in to Vista, I was going to have you use EasyBCD to modify the Windows Vista "bootloader" so that you can either load the Windows Vista files, or the Windows XP files. But we have to make the Windows Vista "active" before we can change Windows Vista.
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#5
ghost_reader

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I have the same problem but when i followed ur steps one of the commands -list disk ,according is not a valid command

Edited by ghost_reader, 14 January 2009 - 04:18 PM.

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