Vista XP dual boot problem

[AJ Smith]

Hi everyone, i was wondering if any one could give me a little help. Normally i'm able to work around things in not sure of but this particular issue is a bit out of my knowledge base. for about a year now i have been dual booting vista and xp. recently my 80g HDD (containing xp and my boot record) has shown signs of failure and i fear i have waited to long already to get rid of it. I have tried to ghost it to another hard drive but it has several bad sectors and the ghosting always fails. I am hoping to just do away with the 80g HDD as i do have my vista load on a 250g, but when i try to remove the drive my machine wont boot. I thing the problem is they my boot.ini was on the 80g HDD and so when i only have my 250g HDD in my machine just sits there waiting for instructions. (this is just my interpretation of what the problem is.) now i know its possible to change your boot.ini but i do not know how and if its going to be a problem making vista the sole OS with my current set up.
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[Tracker]

If you just want to make vista the default OS then stick your vista dvd into the drive and use the repair command and that should "in theory" fix the problem.

[bryonhost1]

Hi!
I would suggest you download and install a Vista/2008 boot manager that may help you straighten things out.

http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

I think that will help you. See..Vista/2008 have a seperate bootloader.

See...when I reboot Betsy..the Vista/2008 bootloader runs first..and asks you if you want to boot:

1) 2008 server
2) Earlier versions of Windows
3) Neogrub (linux versions)

If you don't select anything..it will automagically boot 2008.

If you select (2) It will ask you if you want to boot:

1) 2003-C1-Drive1
2) 2003-C2-Drive2

Of course..if you select Neogrub..it will ask you which verison/kernel you wish to boot on one of the linux ext3 partitions.

I have been doing this for years. All my PC's are multi-boot here...as well as five of my servers now. It's not easy..by any means.

>>a few newbie pointers:

1) Never ever make a partition the same size. Always make them..say..at least 5GB size difference.
That way..you'll be less likely to accidently format a partition you don't want to format..simply because different programs/OS's reorder the partitions.

2) Never ever trust windows to partition a drive you want to put Linux on now or later..it is almost impossible. I use gparted-live to do all my fancy partitioning.

Bryon

[sahara9]

When I got to the display settings, i only have the choice for 2 colors or 16 colors. How can I get the other choices? this computer used to have them but we had to reformat it and it no longer has the correct choice. Is a there a driver I may need, and if so, how can I find out which one i do need? Thanx.

[Tracker]

When I got to the display settings, i only have the choice for 2 colors or 16 colors. How can I get the other choices? this computer used to have them but we had to reformat it and it no longer has the correct choice. Is a there a driver I may need, and if so, how can I find out which one i do need? Thanx.

Post Jacking?

Anyway try and make sure you have installed the correct video card drivers