Vista - XP - OSX

I currently have osx, vista, and OSX installed on my dell inspirion e1705 laptop.

I guess where I messed up is not having (during the XP install) the vista partition hidden. I CAN boot all the OS's but to boot either vista or XP I am using an edited boot.ini file...

Is there a way I can have Acronis OS selector boot to the xp partition on its own? Right now I am using the Windows OS selector thru the boot.ini file, which works, but I would enjoy having the acronis see all the OS's by itself... right now it sees OSX on its own and VISTA/XP as one... I click the vista/xp icon, and it boots to the windows os selector, which is fine i guess but i would like to be totally independent from that.. I would like to use Acronis to select between xp vista... is there a way i can make the xp / vista os's indepentent at this point WITHOUT a reinstall of XP? If not i guess I'll live.

Thanks alot
Adam

 

yeah, osx86.. cool as heck....


but this booting issue sux.

 

As you've seen, not a good thing to not hide a windows system when installing a second one on another partition.
Especially if the last installed is an older Win version than the former.

Then there's the question of whether you made the target partition for xp active before installing it, or was the vista partition still active? In the later case, xp will have used vista's partition to put its boot files; if you're in the first situation though, it could be easier.

Anyway... the main idea is to get each system to be independently bootable.

• Firstly, and most importantly, make a cd/dvd backup of all irreplaceable files on your systems.
• Then, also important, make the acronis bootable cd (abcd) (including oss and diskdirector). This will serve when you'll have to reactivate os selector.
• Then disable os selector (it'll probably be nuked anyway when trying to fix vista's own booting).
• And before any other step, you take full responsibility if you apply the following procedures (as you did when you installed a hacked osx...).

XP should be easiest:

• make sure its bootfiles are in the root of its own partition: boot.ini (modified, only one system on it), ntldr, ntdetect.com (any other files?).
• Then make its partition active (use diskdirector on abcd if needed).
• Upon reboot you should get only XP boot.
• If it doesn't, then hide vista's partition, boot on xp's cd, go to the recovery console and try to repair.

Now Vista. XP probably messed with its boot sector, or maybe not.

• Just make Vista's partition active now, and make XP's partition hidden, and reboot.
• If you don't get vista's to boot, you could now try to use vista's install dvd to repair its booting ability.
• Reboot and hope it works.

If the above worked, you should now have vista and xp independently booting, depending on which partition is active. If fixing vista with its dvd messed with osx's own booting, refer to appropriate forums to solve this (you know where they are; you won't get official help here).

Now you can reactivate os selector with the abcd, and hopefully it will pickup the three os's.

The above is only an outline, an idea on how it could be done, but without certainty... maybe there's an easier way; or maybe it'll be tougher.
It will be your own responsibility to see whether the above makes sense, whether there are tiny details missing, and finally whether to apply or forget them.

Good luck.

 

cool i give it a shot... xp did mess up the vista bootloader but i used um vistabootpro 3.1 to restore it... my vista dvd's repair wouldnt see the vista installation.

thanks