Vista DualBoot woes

Read my earlier woes boot (BCD issues) with Vista Beta

After completing the download of Vista RTM, I got ready to setup my Laptop. Used Acronis Disk Director to create 3 partitions (C:\ Vista, D:\Data, E:\WinXP) and formatted all of them using Acronis. Installed WinXP SP2 in E:\, installed Office 2007, AV and other softwares – got the entire WinXP setup completely.

Then I started Vista setup in C:\, Setup copied the contents from CD to HDD and machine rebooted. Nothing happened, I got a blinking cursor and that’s about it.

I guess Vista doesn’t like the boot partition to be formatted by any other OS other than itself. So I used Vista Recovery Console

• Format C:\ /FS:NTFS
• Bootrec.exe /fixmbr (Refer earlier post)
• bootrec.exe /fixboot (Refer earlier post)

Now I needed to fix Windows XP to boot. So booted using WinXPSP2 CD and went to XP Recovery console and executed the following:

• FixMBR.exe (this said there is a non-standard MBR, understandable, as we have Vista MBR now, so skipped it)
• FixBoot.exe C:\
• Copied NTLDR and NTDetect.com to C:\ from CD i386 folder
• BootCFG.exe /Scan
• BootCFG.exe /Add to add a new boot.ini file and entry

Rebooted – Windows XP SP2 from E:\ booted and ran perfectly.

Started Windows Vista Installation again. Since this time the C:\ was partitioned by Vista itself and MBR is Vista MBR things went fine and Vista installed & booted fine. I am able to Multi-boot to previous version of Windows (XP SP2) as well.

In my HP nx7010 the display (ATI Mobility Radeon 9200) problem continued, I was happy to see a Windows Update coming up with a new driver for it, but that too didn’t work. Then I had to do:

• Boot Vista in safe mode
• Enable Remote desktop
• Login again
• Uninstall the Default Vista Driver for ATI Radeon 9000/9200 (Microsoft), Reboot
• Install the latest HP (SP30204) WinXP driver through Windows Device manager (Don’t install through Driver Setup)