helping you stay protected in the digital age

I recently succeeded in dual-booting Windows XP and Vista on my laptop. I started using VistaBootPro (VBP) for managing the boot loader as it is an amazing program designed for quickly editing the boot manager for either XP, Vista, or Windows 7 (and other operating systems too).

From their website:

“Windows Vista and Windows 7 have both made the task of directly editing the BCDedit file complicated as it is no longer text based as the boot.ini file was, and VistaBootPRO is here to help. Users can make changes to the Windows Boot Configuration Data (BCD) registry quickly and easily, doing the job in a fraction of the time it would take using the alternative DOS based command lines. There is no longer the need to become familiar with the ins and outs of the bcdedit.exe switches and options.”

In my case, Windows XP was my main/default operating system. Once I installed Windows Vista the in-house Vista boot manager took over. I installed VBP on Windows XP without problem and made changes that I thought were necessary (renaming the OS, changing timeout, etc…). One problem I ran into though was making the mistake of running, and editing, entries using VBP while in Windows Vista. For whatever reason after I made changes while in the Vista OS every attempt to load Windows XP returned a “NTLDR missing” or “NTLDR corrupt” message. Making changes in VBP was the most recent thing I did (and prior to that XP was loading fine) so I knew it was something I did with VBP.

I booted into Vista and opened up VBP. At this point I was spitting in the wind. Not quite sure what route to take I went to the “System Bootloader” tab, selected “Windows Legacy Bootloader” (since XP wasn’t booting),  selected “All Drives” and re-installed the legacy boot loader. Remember, I did this in Vista so installing the legacy boot loader would prevent me from loading Vista until the Vista bootloader was reinstalled.

I restarted my laptop and was excited when Windows XP booted; the NTLDR error was gone (and so was an entry for Windows Vista). Once I got into XP, I opened VBP and did the same thing except I installed the “Windows Vista Bootloader” on “All Drives”. I restarted and was presented with both the XP and Vista operating system (and both booted as well).

This easy fix saved me a good half-hour of doing a repair-install of Windows XP.

~ by johndball on March 4, 2009.