Vista Multiboot, Part II

>>Now comes the strange part. I was troubleshooting a different hardware
problem and I disconnected both SATA drives (Drive 1 and 2).

When I booted the system, there was no Vista Boot Manager asking me which OS
to boot into. Instead, my WXP system started right up. I verified it
worked, and when I looked at the drives, the F: drive still contained the
Vista OS.

I then reconnected those drives and rebooted, and then Vista's Boot Manager
took control, and WXP does not start. Vista works fine.

Jeff:

Because your first SATA drive is the boot drive.

Did you do what my other post suggested?

My other post:

Jeff:

Copy the ntldr and boot.ini files to the root of D:
Also, do you see a "boot" folder in the root of D: ?


Theory:
The "ntldr is missing" error message tells us that boot process control has
been passed to a vol that knows to load the ntldr file (which it cannot
find).
If the above works, then you are booting from disk 01 which is your first
SATA drive and not disk 00 which is your IDE drive.


Your previous post:

>> Drive 0: Partition 1, WXP, C: Partition 2, Vista, F:

Drive 1: Partition 1, D:
Drive 2: Partition 1, E:

>> C:\Windows\system32>bcdedit

Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier {bootmgr}
device partition=D:
description Windows Boot Manager
locale en-US
inherit {globalsettings}
default {current}
displayorder {current}
{ntldr}
toolsdisplayorder {memdiag}
timeout 30

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {current}
device partition=C:
path \Windows\system32\winload.exe
description Microsoft Windows Vista
locale en-US
inherit {bootloadersettings}
osdevice partition=C:
systemroot \Windows
resumeobject {610e6eb1-c128-11db-86bc-91f2d356bda0}
nx OptIn

Windows Legacy OS Loader
------------------------
identifier {ntldr}
device partition=F:
path \ntldr
description Earlier Version of Windows


boot.ini
[boot loader]
timeout=3
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 /NoExecute=OptIn