Shoutbox

Problems problems problems...

I've done this many times before and now I only get trouble.
Although it is a weird situation. Let me sketch it:

I have a broken external 250G harddrive from seagate; from which the power supply gave up on it. So I opened the case, got out the harddrive and put it into my PC.

Everything in the PC works on SATA apart from the recycled "new" harddrive which is IDE and is connected as Slave with the grey IDE connector.
I formatted the disk in NTFS and started installing XP on the new drive.

XP booted up of course as XP doesn't recognize Vista, which seems not to exist anymore at this point.

Then I recovered the Vista bootfile with Vista's install disk, which allowed me to boot back up in Vista. The original SATA harddive has been the boot-disk all the time by the way.

Then I ran EasyBCD. The partition where XP is on has the letter E: in Vista, so I added a Windows XP entry on drive E: .

This is how it looks like:

quote:

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There are a total of 2 entries listed in the Vista Bootloader.
Bootloader Timeout: 30 seconds.
Default OS: Windows Vista (TM) Home Premium

Entry #1

Name:  Microsoft Windows XP
BCD ID:  {0ffa5090-c7be-11dd-b7e5-001e8c6dbecc}
Drive:  C:\
Bootloader Path:  \NTLDR

Entry #2

Name:  Windows Vista (TM) Home Premium
BCD ID:  {current}
Drive:  E:\
Bootloader Path:  \WINDOWS\system32\winload.exe
Windows Directory:  \WINDOWS

---

However, when selecting Microsoft Windows XP in the bootup-screen; all it does is restarting the PC and bring me back to the selectionscreen. All I can do is booting up Vista or else I get in a loop.

Things I tried:
- Setting every other possible driveletter in EasyBCD for the XP installation. All they say \NTLDR is missing; so E: must be correct.

- Connected the harddrive to Primary (black connector); nothing changed.

- Removed the jumper on the new harddrive which was set to Cable Select; no effect (there is no jumper set on the original harddrive too).

- Repaired Windows XP (installation is recognized by the XP install CD..) -> got me back into XP; but after booting Vista again and beginning from scratch again with setting EasyBCD, I ran in the same problem.

- Setting the IDE drive to boot first, also that just brings me to the dual-bootup screen and give me the same shit.

What I do experience in Vista is that the IDE drive goes into standby after one minute no-activity. It sometimes restarts like when opening 'This Computer'... but it's working at bootup so it must be recognized.


Help please; i don't know what else...

Do it in the reverse order:

Once you get back into Windows XP setup and run EasyBCD.
Install the Vista Boot Loader from EasyBCD within Windows XP
Add the Windows XP boot option to the Vista Boot Loader through EasyBCD.

You should at this point be able to boot into XP.

The reason this would happen is because Windows XP drive letter reverts to the C Drive when you are booting it up however the Vista Boot Loader is telling the system to look on the E drive. It is quite confusing just know that if you run EasyBCD from within Windows XP the drive mapping will match up and all should work

Cheers!

Hi!

Thanks for the answer Matty! I already got it solved though, I did the same I guess but in a different way.

I have set the XP disk als the bootup-disk, then the BCD cleared itself again, added the XP entry again in Vista, and all worked. Because it booted Vista wih the XP disk as the systemdisk the driveletters were now okay for linking.

Thanks!