Hi there.

Before I installed Vista this morning I had 2 operating systems, using the XP boot menu, XP Professional and Fedora Core 3. After installing Vista, I wanted to carry on using this menu, so following instructions I found on the internet, I booted to the recovery console and ran fixmbr, fixboot etc.

My boot.ini now looks like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=5
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=OptIn
c:\fedora.mbr="Fedora Core 3 64 bit"
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows Vista beta 1" /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN /FASTDETECT

However when I select the Windows Vista option, all I get is a black screen and nothing happens (as though there is no bootable information)

The relevant hard drives are partitioned as follows:

Disk 0:

NTFS Windows C: 76,322MB

Unallocated space 7.8MB

Disk 1:

Unallocated space 7.8MB

Extended Partition: 78,152MB

- NTFS My Documents F: 30,718MB

- EXT3 Fedora L: 32,130MB

- NTFS Vista M: 13,311MB

- SWAP Linux Swap 1,992MB

Thanks for your help in advance,

Mitch

PS. I have tried Vista with and without the /USENEWMENU switch

Fixboot and Fixmbr might have messed up the Vista boot sector.

I don't see why it would have, but anyways...

Re-install is the best bet then?

Edited August 1, 200521 yr by ricmitch

I don't know much about Vista, but it looks like it is using ANOTHER bootloader, NOT NTLDR.

If you ran fixboot/fixmbr, from within XP, you probably overwrote references to the new bootloader BOOTMGR with ones to NTLDR.

The fixntfs utility "should" be able to correct this, see here:

http://www.pro-networks.org/forum/post-468184.html

(I suppose it does, but you'll have to find the correct switch)

Also, if it works like elder versions, you may have the option of an ® Repair install.

jaclaz

To make it so that windows is default -

This is how I did it.

Control Panel -> System (or right click computer) -> Advanced -> in the bottom section Startup and Recovery Settings, press Advanced -> you can change the default OS here and also change the boot.ini -> in Vista i couldnt edit boot.ini directly and if you have problems with doing it this way, make sur e you are in vista safe mode. Thats how I did it.

Also this is my boot.ini so you can return it to the way it was before

[boot loader]
timeout=20
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN /FASTDETECT
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(4)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows Longhorn" /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN /FASTDETECT /USENEWLOADER

This may fix your problem.

Edited August 3, 200521 yr by TigerWolf