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Vista XP Dual boot


quinriva

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I'm am trying to install a dual boot with Vista and XP. Unfortuneately I get the dreaded "Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets it's criteria for installation" bug. Currently the only solution that I am aware of that overcomes this problem is to remove all other hard drives before attempting to install Vista. Although this works insofar is getting vista to install, it adds the problem that I have to remove my XP drive in order to install Vista, hence making dual booting difficult.

Currently XP is sitting there but I can't boot into it (I know load the install disk and 'fixboot'). Anyone have a solution to this problem, preferably one that doesn't involve reinstalling both XP and Vista?

Current builds of XP and Vista

AMD Opteron 165

DFI LanParty UT NF4 SLi-DR Expert

XFX 7800GT

2x512Mb Corsair XMS Pro

Seagate 7200.10 320Gb (20Gb Vista Partition, 300Gb Data)

Seagate 7200.10 320Gb (8Gb XP partition, 312Gb Data)

Samsung SpinPoint P120 250Gb (2Gb Primary PageFile Partition, Media partion)

Samsung SpinPoint P120 250Gb (2Gb Secondary PageFile Partition, Media partion)

Seagate 7200.8 160Gb (Data)

Western Digital 80Gb, old PATA drive.

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i had the same issue, once you had loaded vista, go ahead and reconnect all your HDs and make sure they are seen in Vista disk mangement. next boot up with your vista DVD, choose the repair option and have it repair the BCD, this will add an entry to the boot manager for XP also!

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I've been having grief with the new boot loader as well.

First had XP on both drives- loaded Vista on first drive and all worked well but.....

Reloading XP on the second drive kills the boot loader... no problem just fix it with the Vista DVD

then...

Reinstalled Vista by deleting the first drive and reinstalling- I have now lost XP... tried restoring ntldr etc.. and boot.ini... no go... tried adding the {legacy} entry with bcdedit but to no avail.

Even easybcd didn't fix it.

In the furure I won't reformat the first drive but do a clean install and delete the extra windows folder.

It's all a new learning curve.

ciao

EDIT: while in Vista ran bootsect then restored bcd with vistabootpro and all is well again

Edited by jaws75
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Well I figured that now I on summer holidays now is the perfect time to get that triple boot Vista, XP and Linux. You would think that following these very easy intructions (http://www.hevnikov.com/blog/2006/11/13/tr...le-boot-screen/) I could do it. Nope.

Did all that and Vista refused to even recognise my other partitions. The only option in disk management was delete partition. It could see them, I just couldn't mount them or assign a drive letter to them. Which of course meant that I couldn't use EasyBCD (because I didn't have a file path to direct it to).

I even did the 8 hour kill disk to make sure there were absolutely no remenents of any MBR. Well I guess I check out the VistaBootPro. In the meantime I'm heading over to the Ubuntu forums to see if I can get some help there.

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fiz has a good solution. Works great. However, prior solution ended with Vista recognize the drives BUT shown the drives having no data on them (displaying it as a format), over 200gigs, booting into XP reads just fine.

Haven't played with it much to figure out what needs to be done to resolve the issue. forgot to add this is RTM

Edited by epic
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