Dual Boot is not Installing and Upgrading Vista Discuss Dual Boot is not in the Windows Vista forums; I am trying to get Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit to dual boot, but am having issues. I have a homebuilt computer with an ASUS A8N-SLI Premium motherboard and ...

[Phlerb]

I am trying to get Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit to dual boot, but am having issues.

I have a homebuilt computer with an ASUS A8N-SLI Premium motherboard and an Opteron 185 processor. I have 4 harddrives in the machine. 2 are in a Raid with Windows XP on it and of the 2 that are left 1 is a 500 GB SATA drive and the other is a 120 GB IDE drive.

Under XP everything works fine.

I decided to try for a dual boot set up so I could test out Vista and see if I would be disappointed with the processing power of my computer or not (was Vista a pig on my computer or not?)

I decided to install it on the 500 GB drive and leave XP on the RAID0 set up.

The installation went fine and I logged in for the 1st time. I noticed that I could not get the native resolution of 1440 x 900 in the generic monitor control panel, so I downloaded and updated the drivers to the latest 64 bit drivers from NVidia.

Upon reboot the system hangs at the device listing of the POST. It seems that it is looking for a drive to boot from.

In the BIOS, if I set the primary boot drive to the XP RAID drive it boots directly into XP. If I set the 500 GB drive to be the 1st HDD to boot from it hangs.

I have run the Startup Recovery part of the Install DVD, and it says there is no problems. I did get back into the Vista side and got to play a bit after booting from the DVD, but if I take out the DVD it hangs on the List devoces screen of the POST.

I downloaded VistaBootPRO and ran it under the XP side and got many errors:
"VistaBootPRO has detected that your BCD registry is either missing or corrupt. It is recommended that you fix this problem in order to suppress this message on further uses."

I get 4 of these popups, then one about there being no backup for the BCD Registry.

What is wrong and how can I fix it?

Thanks,
-P

[Sandi]

When you install Vista to dual boot, Vista will write the boot loader to the XP drive by default. Therefore your XP drive must be listed first in BIOS in order to get the boot choice menu.

[Phlerb]

When I set the RAID as the 1st boot drive under the BIOS (F8), it automatically boots into XP. If I set it to the 500 GB Vista drive, it hangs.

Also, I can't find a Boot Folder anywhere... is this an issue?

[Phlerb]

Update:

If I have the BIOS set to boot off the CD/DVD drive before the HDD, and I have the Vista DVD in the Drive Bay, but don't hit anykey to launch the DVD, It boots into Vista.

An aside: I installed Vista from a DVD that is my brothers. I bought a copy of Vista from my brothers old roommate who works for MS now, and asked him to send me the code before he sent me the physical DVD. I ended up installing from my brothers DVD, not mine, which is still in the mail,but I used my code. Could this be an issue?

[Znod]

The disk/key thing should not be an issue unless, perhaps, the disk is an OEM. Even then things are likely to be OK on this frontier. When I did a dual boot with Vista32/Raid 0 and Vista64 on a separate drive, I took the easy way. I unplugged the two raid drives when I installed Vista64. You might want to use this, perhaps, easier approach. I am not sure how to help you get from where you are to where you want to be at this point. I'll think about it. Sandi is very good on boot issues; I suspect that she will be back.

[Phlerb]

Update 2:

I ran the Repair DVD and went to the console and used:

bootrec.exe /RebuildBcd

It came back with:

scanning all disks for windows installations.

Successfully scanned windows installations.
Total identified windows installations: 0
The operation was completed successfully

hrm..

At the beginning of the operation when I selected the repair option in showed that there is Microsoft Windows Vista on (Dsmile.

Odder and Odder.

[Sandi]

It sounds like your XP drive is set for NTLDR instead of Vista BOOTMGR.

Put your Vista DVD in the drive, then in a command prompt cd to that drive. Then type:

X:\boot\bootsect /nt60 C:

Where X: is your Vista DVD drive, and C: is your XP hard drive. That will restore your Vista boot manager to your XP drive.

[Phlerb]

After much searching and stuff.. I figured out my system drive was the one without an OS. Go Figure. So I copied the boot.ini, NTLDR, and NTDETECT along with the boot folder and bootmgr to that disk and set the BIOS to use that disk for booting from. It actually works... for VISTA.

I now get the dreaded hal.dll error now if I try to boot into XP.

This is the Boot.ini on the non OS disk:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

This picture is of my Disk Manager from Vista....

http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...iskmanager.jpg

Hopefully this will work and you can see the disk manager screen capture...

C: Music Master Disk has Vista on it,

E: has XP and is a RAID0

D: MP3 Backup is the disk without an OS on it...

[Phlerb]

I changed the rdisk(0) to rdisk (1) and now it boots to both XP and Vista.

Thanks for your help!