Acronis settings for dual boot? change Extended Partition to Primary?

I'm having agonies w/ repair of a dual boot XP pro and Vista that worked for two brief shining hours. I have the two operating systems on two partitions on a single disk. XP pro (C boots now. But it is on an extended partition/logical drive (who knows how??). Can Acronis DDS change an Extended Partition to a Primary Partition? Do I need to? Vista OS is on an active partition(E, but it doesn't boot. There is also a Boot Partition (D When I I boot into XP and try Acronis Boot Manager to reinstall the vista boot loader and I click write MBR what drive should the Back up and restore bootloader settings show? (The default is C If I do this correctly, as I understand things, it will wipe out my XP boot files and i need to do something to restore them. Right now if I go to the Acronis "add/remove entries,manage existing entries" menu the XP OS shows, along with the Vista. Do I still need to add another windows XP entity to be sure it is not overwritten? This is my first time w/ easybcd, and I don't want to lose my one good os....Thanks. olivia

 

What version and build of DD are you using?

Is OSS installed? If not, are you using Vista's boot manager?

What is the Boot Partition? What files are there?

How are things different now from when the computer was dual-booting correctly?

To me, when I read your post, it's not really clear what you did and how your system is currently setup.