Vista and XP Dual Boot, Possible?

[Mr_Mo]

Hi, I hope this is the correct place to ask the question.

I have made a Norton Ghost Image of a Vista Installation and a XP installation some time ago.

I run with Vista now on the C-drive, before I had XP on the C-drive. Now I want to make a dual boot

What I want to know is, if I can recover the image of XP on the D-drive, and change the boot file, so the computer knows that XP is installed on D.

Then I can choose if I want to boot with vista or with XP.

Is it possible to make this work? What is required? ntdetect.com and ntldr on the C-drive, or can Vistas boot manager work it out?

Or will it simply not work?

Thanks in advance.

Edited May 28, 2007 by Mr_Mo

[Mr_Mo]

Hmm.. no one wants to help

Anyways, I tried to do it. I recovered Windows XP on to d:\. But then I could not boot into Vista nor did I have the option to boot into XP.

So I recovered Vista to c:\. I then added Windows XP to vistas boot manager using EasyBCD 1.6. I tried to boot into Windows XP, however I got an error about ntldr. I went into vista and copied ntdetect.com and ntldr to c:\. I tried again, but got an error about no boot.ini and I think it tried to boot into c:\windows, anyway nothing showed up. Back to vista, and I created a boot.ini file. Now it booted into Windows XP.

BUT, when it comes to the logon screen, no username shows up. Hitting 2xCtrl+alt+del does not bring the classic logon screen. So I'm stuck.

Edit: I also tried safe mode.

Any ideas?

Edited May 28, 2007 by Mr_Mo

[spacesurfer]

If you had installed XP (or recovered the Ghost image) first, then installed Vista to another partition, then Vista would have added your XP to it's boot menu. However, seems you recovered the Ghost image after installing Vista.

But since you are able to boot XP, seems your error is not related to the boot process but because XP wants to load from drive C:\ and not drive D:\.

Your had Ghosted XP partition when it was on C:\ and then you put Vista in C:\ and XP in D:\. Therefore, XP will expect to load things from C:\, not D:\.

Your option is to reinstall XP, then repair Vista boot loader using Vista DVD to get Vista to load as XP will rewrite your MBR.

Edited May 28, 2007 by spacesurfer

[Mr_Mo]

Ok, thanks. Seems like I can't use the images then.