HELP Unable to dual boot XP and Vista

Here is what I have 500G sata and a 250g ide1(master). The BIOS says to boot
off the sata 500g. I had Xp on the 1st partition with 3 other partitions on
sata drive. I had 2 partitions on the 250g drive. The 1st partition on the
250g was 50g formatted ntfs, by XP, to be where vista is installed.

I installed Vista after booting to DVD. Went ok, then it re-booted and
there was no boot menu. It always booted to Vista. So, I figured I did
something wrong tried again. This time it only booted to XP. Now both XP
and Vista did not work.

I need to install XP(1st) then Vista and have a dual boot. Why do I not get
a boot menu?

bruce wrote:
> Here is what I have 500G sata and a 250g ide1(master). The BIOS says to boot
> off the sata 500g. I had Xp on the 1st partition with 3 other partitions on
> sata drive. I had 2 partitions on the 250g drive. The 1st partition on the
> 250g was 50g formatted ntfs, by XP, to be where vista is installed.
>
> I installed Vista after booting to DVD. Went ok, then it re-booted and
> there was no boot menu. It always booted to Vista. So, I figured I did
> something wrong tried again. This time it only booted to XP. Now both XP
> and Vista did not work.
>
> I need to install XP(1st) then Vista and have a dual boot. Why do I not get
> a boot menu?

It may be that everything is installed correctly except for the BCD
(boot manager) store on your C: drive.
If you had either of the Operating Systems working, you might install
VistaBoot Pro and/or EasyBCD and allow them to simply rewrite the Vista
bootmgr files on your C: drive.
To do this, you can probably boot from your Windows XP CD and elect
"Repair." In Recovery Console, your can enter "fixmbr" and "fixboot"
commands, after which you should at least be able to get into XP.
I've not tried this with Vista, but it may work the same way and allow
you to rewrite the MBR and BCD store so that Vista boots. If you can
get into Vista, either of the little freeware programs mentioned above
may allow you to get a boot menu established.

bruce <bruce@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

> Here is what I have 500G sata and a 250g ide1(master). The BIOS says to boot
> off the sata 500g. I had Xp on the 1st partition with 3 other partitions on
> sata drive. I had 2 partitions on the 250g drive. The 1st partition on the
> 250g was 50g formatted ntfs, by XP, to be where vista is installed.
>
> I installed Vista after booting to DVD. Went ok, then it re-booted and
> there was no boot menu. It always booted to Vista. So, I figured I did
> something wrong tried again. This time it only booted to XP. Now both XP
> and Vista did not work.
>
> I need to install XP(1st) then Vista and have a dual boot. Why do I not get
> a boot menu?

You might try getting a Macintosh and run Parallels. You can easily run
4-5 OSs in a multi-boot configuration. So in other words you can run
Windows XP, Windows Vista, Linux and OSX all inside one box, very, very
sweet. (Plus you don't have deal with compatibility issues since it's
all high quality Apple hardware). You can check it out here:

http://www.parallels.com/en/products/workstation/mac/

No thanks on the Apple offer. Apple hardware is outrageously priced, just
like Windows software. Anyway, I prefer to build by own machines.

For anyone who wants to know, I figured it out. Apparently the xp and then
vista install did work properly, but the timeout on the boot loader was
defaulted to 3 seconds, this did not give my monitor enough time to display
it and therefore it always defaulted to Vista. Under Control Panel System
Advanced system settings, I changed the default time to 20 seconds and I am
good now.

Thanks