Partioning HD of Toshiba sattelite laptop

[t33lo]

I have a toshiba satellite laptop and it came with a HD about 95gb. I installed windows vista on it. After that, I booted up Gparted and made a partition cutting the original HD in half using NTFS. After that, I put in XP and installed it on the unallocated space (the new HD partition). After XP got installed, Vista was unbootable. It recognized the HD in xp and shows the files that were installed on Vista, but when I restart, it always goes to Xp right away and doens't give you the option to choose which OS to boot up in. My other computer works fine using the same methods above and I can choose which to boot in. Any reasons why I can't choose? Is it a bios option? The bios that comes with the comp is crap, what you would expect from a store bought comp.

 

[aoe]

WinXP uses the boot.ini file during boot to determine which operating systems are available and how to process these at startup.

Looks something like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptOut

I'm not sure how Vista boots, but maybe it's something similar. If so, then you may need to combine the 2 boot files into 1.

It may look something like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptOut
multi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Vista" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptOut

Note: Please do not use the above - I have no idea what the Vista entry should look like - I just made this up as an example.

You can also control how long the list of operating systems are displayed during boot in the System Properties in WinXP (Advanced ~> Startup and Recovery) or simply change the timeout value in boot.ini

Unfortunately, I have no idea how Vista does this :?