I wanted to install Vista without getting rid of my XP installation, so I left Xp on my C drive, and installed Vista on another physical disk. I started running into problems with the dual booting when i would switch from one OS to the next, and after a while Xp would start hanging on boot, and only after several cold reboots would it load properly. So i was planning on uninstalling Vista, but the hard drive i had it on got formatted by a friend of mine who thought he was doing me a favor. Now when i switch on the computer i get the OS choice menu, typical Vista pre-selected, with the option to select "older windows installations". But there's no vista to boot into, so it crashes. I've looked in the boot.ini and there's only a couple lines that have changed from before when i didn't have it installed, and they're not code, just disclaimers:
;Warning: Boot.ini is used on Windows XP and earlier operating systems.
;Warning: Use BCDEDIT.exe to modify Windows Vista boot options.
I have the boot.bak and bootsect.bak files that are supposed to be deleted when doing a proper uninstall of vista, but you're supposed to fix the ntfsdir and boot file through vista before uninstalling. So how can i get back my regular boot.ini file to load XP automatically without having to install vista again just so i can uninstall it?

too bad I already got rid of Windows Vista due to some very annoying glitches I ran into.

Couldn't you edit boot.ini yourself?

xboxrulz

yes, but that's the thing. boot.ini doesn't contain any references to vista. this is all it has:
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Media Center Edition" /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN /FASTDETECT

odd, apparently Microsoft just redid its booting sequence :s

xboxrulz

I dont know if re-writing the MBR would help in this case, but if you are left with no other option .. then i'd suggest you try this fix out.

>> LINK <<

I had already posted about the MBR issue few minutes back and then came to your post lol.

Tell us if it helps

Regards
Dhanesh.



This post has been edited by dhanesh: Jan 18 2007, 12:25 PM

No, for some strange reason it doesn't change anything. I mean, i fix the mbr and boot record, but on reboot i still get the vista bootloader.

Grafitti, I don't know if you did this already, but did you try to use the fixboot command from the XP recovery CD? It "should" be a simple procedure to remove the vista boot loader, but since it's Microsoft....I guess nothing is always straight-forward

Take a look at:

http://www.tech-recipes.com/microsoft_vista_tips1040.html

Try those steps and see if it helps out. Some steps won't apply to you (like the boot.ini) since that part is already missing the Vista entry.

It hasn't worked so far. I've deleted all boot-related files from the c drive, then copied them off of another computer and then was able to repair the mbr, after which i got a crashing boot seq, so did a repair install over my windows, and now it seems to be running. But very slow on boot. From before Vista, booting in about 15 seconds, to nearly a minute now.

All those files that were causing trouble from the leftover of Vista still had the Vista fileprotection on them, so i wasn't able to take ownership and delete them in XP. I ended up booting with Winternals, deleted the Vista files, then repaired my system files, and everything booted properly after that.

I myself have tried dualbooting with windows XP and Windows Vista. I've never run into any problems with vista during boot or directly after boot. I'm assuming that you're either using RC2 or RTM. The only problem I've ever run into on either of those builds is a slow login. Anyway, the retail seems to have somewhat fixed that problem. Also, the problems that you've described could possibly be hardware related. Some other computers that i've tried vista on had the same problems except the motherboards and cpu were older.