So You Want to Add XP to Your Vista Installation (Part 2)

  • Article

In the first post, I laid out what seemed to be a full plan for installing XP after you install Vista and get them to dual boot nicely. That worked fine for me the first time, but then I reinstalled Vista and couldn't use the same method to dual boot. After I booted to the XP recovery console, typed fixboot, and restarted, I kept getting error messages saying that NTLDR could not be found.

A bit more searching on the web revealed a new set of commands that got me up and running.

  1. Boot to the Recovery Console in XP
  2. Run "Attrib -H -R -S" on the C:\Boot.ini file (if it exists)
  3. Delete c:\boot.ini (if it exists)
  4. Run "Bootcfg /Rebuild"
  5. Run "Fixboot"

That got me booting into XP and I was able to run the commands from the first post.

Those steps (and the explanation behind them) can be found on the InformationWeek site.