[RESOLVED] Dual Booting in Laptop

you installed vista first?

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Originally Posted by kleinma

you installed vista first?

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Vista came pre-installed with the Laptop

Yeah Vista was preinstalled on mine too, that didn't stop me from formatting the HD and starting over.

What you might be seeing, could be due to how Vista installs its boot loader.

Vista installs its bootloader on the primary partition.

So lets say you installed in this order:

XP
Vista

When you install Vista, it will actually create a folder called boot in the root of the XP drive. This is where the bootloader files are.

So I know you didn't install in that order, but perhaps you did something when creating your XP partition that overwrote your bootloader directory, depending on what partition it was actually on.

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that didn't stop me from formatting the HD and starting over.

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That is what I am planning to do now :)

Then the easiest method (starting from a blank HD) is to install XP, then install Vista.

If you do it in that order, you should not have to play around with boot configs at all, unless you want to change it to select XP instead of Vista by default, or shorten the selection timeout length

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Then the easiest method (starting from a blank HD) is to install XP, then install Vista.

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Now that I have nLite, I agree with you :)

i found a really easy way to get this working. Download a program called EasyBCD 1.7.2 and run it from xp. It can reinstall the vista boot loader from xp and then you can use it to install into the vista bootloader other oses you already have installed (such as xp but also linux)