Dual Boot Gone Wrong...HELP!

[joetheone]

Hey guys, I recently got a free copy of Vista Business 32 bit from my university. Anyways, since i have 2 HDD's and was barely using the second one, i decided to try a dual boot, since i wanted vista to game on and play around with but still do most of my programing work and daily tasks on XP pro 32 bit.

So i delete the partition on my second drive that i was using for extra storage, make a new one, and install vista on it. Everything seemed to go fine, and i put some drivers on the vista boot and added SP1 and stuff, but when i tried to switch the drive priority and boot into XP, i get a black screen that asks which version of windows i want to boot in, and lists XP Pro, but quickly disappears, leaving my computer hanging with a black screen.

When i boot into Vista, i can still see and access all of the files i have on the XP drive, so they're definitely still there. But i'm totally lost on how to solve this problem. I would just wipe everything and install a clean copy of XP, but i have finals in a week and really don't want to have to do all that until winter break.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

 

[notherdude]

not sure what happened, perhaps someone else will be able to tell you exactly, but I think I know what ought to fix it:

try taking the Vista disk out of system, (just to keep things simple and safe) and then boot from an XP install disk - from there go to repair console and try a 'fixboot' which would be "fixboot c:" here is a tutorial: http://www.filecluster.com/reviews/082008/how-to-recover-the-boot-record-in-windows-xp/

you could also try "fixmbr c:" too.

In future when you do a dual boot remove the XP drive from the system completely and install Vista fresh to a lone hard drive - then put back the XP drive and select which drive to boot from by using your 'pop up' boot menu - this is usually a function key such as f8 or f12 that you press immediately after power on

 

[joetheone]

Thanks for the reply.

First thing i did was simply disconnect the vista drive and try to boot from the XP drive. Now after flashing the "pop up boot menu" for a second i get this error:

"Windows could not start becuase of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. Ceck boot path and disk hardware. "

I tried then did a "fixboot c:" and rebooted, same error. Then i did a "fixmbr c:" and rebooted. same error.

Any additional help would be appreciated.

 

[notherdude]

Thanks for the reply.

First thing i did was simply disconnect the vista drive and try to boot from the XP drive. Now after flashing the "pop up boot menu" for a second i get this error:

"Windows could not start becuase of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. Ceck boot path and disk hardware. "

I tried then did a "fixboot c:" and rebooted, same error. Then i did a "fixmbr c:" and rebooted. same error.

Any additional help would be appreciated.

To be clear there are two possible 'pop up boot' menus. The OS installs a bootloader set to run when you do an official 'dual boot' - you get an option to boot whatever OS are installed and if you choose neither the default boots after a specified period of time. Sounds like you are seeing this one very briefly and in any event it is only showing one option, correct?

The other pop up boot menu is BIOS controlled and ONLY runs if you press a function key at power on and it does not offer OS boot options, it offers hard drive boot options. It's just like setting your drive order and boot priority in BIOS except that it allows you to do this on the fly without actually entering BIOS setup. The last ione was the one I was talking about.

Anyway, sounds like you are beyond the help of merely fixing your boot config at this point.

While in the repair console have you tried chkdsk on c? You may have data corruption in addition to having lost your boot config files.

 

[4Ryan6]

@ joetheone

PM badge with your problem, he's helped a lot of people with similar problems.