Dual boot issues with XP Pro and Vista Professional

• 21 Nopember 2011 5:46

   

   
  

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  I don't know if this is the correct forum for this, but it seems to be the best choice.

  I have a Lenovo laptop that I use for business.  During my travels, I sometimes need to access the information from my personal laptop.  Because I do a lot of traveling, it is not feasible to carry two laptops. To resolve this, I have 2 seperate SATA hard drives that I use. One has the business info on it (running XP Pro), and the other has the personal stuff (running Vista Pro).  I would like to combine the info from these into 1 hard drive and use dual boot.  What I have tried so far is:

  1.  Image backup the business drive (XP Pro) and restore it to the 1st partition on a new drive that is large enough to hold all of the information.  I then created a second partition and installed Vista Pro to that partition.  At this point, I thought that I had solved my problem,  because I could boot the XP partition and it had all of my business material, and the Vista partition seemed to boot ok.  I then created an image of the drive with my personal info and tried to restore that to the Vista partition.  After the restore, the Vista partition doesen't see my profile, and logs me in as a temporary user.

  2.  Next, I tried the reverse, using the Vista Pro as the first partition, and the XP (imaged) as the second partition (I did not run XP setup disk to set this up, just used the image created from the XP drive.  I then used EasyBCD to create the bootloader.  When I try to boot, I get an error that NTLDR is missing or corrupt.

  3.  I then tried #2 above, but used the XP setup disk to try to set up XP.  This blue screened with a missing boot device message before loading the recovery console.  I soon realized that the laptop is using AHCI for the SATA drive, and XP will not recognize the SATA drive without an additional driver. I switched the BIOS to COMPATIBILITY mode, and the XP setup disk worked.  After I completed the setup, I went back into the BIOS and set it back to AHCI.  Again it couldn't find the bootable hard disk.  Then I discovered that I needed to install a driver from Lenovo in order for XP to see the SATA drive in AHCI mode. (I tried to run the laptop in COMPATIBILITY mode, but then the Vista partition blue screened.) 

  4. Next I tried to setup the XP partition as the 1st partition, adding the driver as instructed by Lenovo's instructions, and this did allow the installed XP to run in AHCI mode (installed from the XP setup disk and the new driver).  So, I went back to scenario #2 above, with the Vista partition as the 1st partition, and followed the procedure that I had used for the XP as 1st partition in #3.  This scenario would not allow the driver to load, and hence, the familiar blue screen for no boot device.

  1 final note.  Whichever partition is first becomes "C:" and the second partition becomes "E:"  I think this is the reason that the images do not work as the second partition, because they are looking to the wrong drive for info.

  Sorry for the lenghty narrative, but after all of the time spent, it seems that the only solution that I have is to use scenario #1 above, but don't copy the image from the Vista drive to the second partition. That seems to work, but it means that I have to reinstall ALL of the software and migrate the data from the Vista drive manually. 

  DO you have any suggestions that might make this situation work using the images from the 2 drives?  It would be a very tedious job to recreate all of the info onto the new Vista partition (not to mention the possibility of error).

   

   

   

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