WHOA! Life is good...so far

Vista 64 up & running. Vegas Pro 8.1 up & running. AVCHD frame rates are 29.97fps for most of the. Wow.

I see that it drops *slightly* when there's a lot of motion in the volleyball game--when it does, it's maybe to 27.5-28fps...but only for a second. MUCH BETTER than the 32-bit versions. I watched about 5 minutes of footage that would typically put my 32-bit 8c in the single digits, even with a faster quad core.

Now to get the system to dual-boot.

TB

Sheesh JR--where were you BEFORE I screwed it up! LOL...

I used VistaBootPRO which was *supposed* to be a sure-thing, slam-dunk, money-in-the-bank type of deal. Well, it wasn't. After installing and running it, I couldn't boot into XP any longer. So I tried uninstalling that boot manager and installing the one you suggested, but it got me nowhere. I am now repairing the damage and will proceed accordingly...depending upon the results.

More to come.

TB

EDIT: OK JR, got back to Vista by booting from the Vista install CD and repairing the MBR manually, thanks to a nice page I found online. And I am trying to use EaseBCD--and it seems simply enough. I set the two OS with the respect hard drive letters...and then restart. But whatever I do, I cannot get XP to boot. It simply fails each time. I can boot into Vista all day long, but cannot get back to XP.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

I'm not sure what damage VistaBootPRO did. The way it normally works is when XP is installed first, Vista sees it and sets up a dual boot menu with Vista as the default. There is nothing for you to do. It just works right out-of-the-box. EasyBCD just allows you to edit the Vista boot menu (like you could in XP but apparently the downgrade to Vista leaves you with less functionality) so that you can rename the selections and make XP the default if you use XP more than Vista (like me because, as I stated above, Vista64 has no audio drivers for my hardware).

I would use the XP install CD to do a repair and fix the MBR to boot XP. Then use the Vista install CD to fix the MBR back to booting Vista. This should hopefully restore your ability to boot both XP and Vista. Good luck.

~jr

If you're looking for a 3rd party boot manger then I would go with BOOTitNG. I have been using it trouble-free for years. Not only can you boot OS's from just about any source but it also comes with a boatload of extra partitioning tools and such.... including a disk imager. It also has built in BCD edit and boot.ini edit. It's not free. I think the price was 30 or 40 dollars but it does come with a 30 day full trial.

Also.... don't forget with XP.... if you have added partitions or changed partitions or otherwise done something to make xp appear to be on a different partition, then you need to update boot.ini or xp won't boot.

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootit-next-generation.htm

Thanks for the tips guys. It was a long night--Vista never did let me get back to XP (Did I mention Vista SUCKS?) and I had to essentially reinstall XP. This was no big deal though as Vegas was the only thing on that hard drive and all my data and all my project files are on other hard drives. But it's just the irritation of it--Vista took over the machine, lol.

So here's where things stand now...

Vista is on a separate drive, as is XP. My data files are on a third hard drive, and I have some audio samples and a Cinescore library on a fourth drive. But if I try to boot without the XP install disk in, I get an error that the \System32\hal.dll library file is missing. (I found a method to rebuild it from the disk, but it didn't work last night.) But if start the machine with the XP disk in, it goes to the boot manager screen, with options for XP (the default OS, set in that app JR told me about) and Vista. If I select Vista, it boots fine. But if I select XP, it of course fails just link Blink said it would. I get a message though, telling me to restart with the XP disk in the drive (ah, it already IS in the drive...hello?), select my date, and then press "the option for automatic repair" or something like that. So I then restart, only to have this process start all over again! Sheesh...

But I *can* get back to XP though--I simply unplug the SATA cable to the hard drive with Vista on it, and the machine starts and loads XP just like nothing ever happened. I have used that to repair the MBR for XP, thinking that I could simply reconnect the Vista drive and I'd be done...but nope. SSDD.

But I will keep trying tonight--as I said the machine pretty much only had Vegas and SONAR on it, and I have never even used SONAR in it yet, so it doesn't even have to be reinstalled at all right now. And since all my data is protected on separate hard drives, then I can afford to try some more. Ain't no copy of Vista gonna get me down!!!

By the way--I even tried to install a minimal copy of a Linux distro, just to get the GRUB loader, lol. Nope...the curse of the NVIDIA video driver got me there, I think. It certainly didn't work anyway. I dual boot two laptops (each with linux; one with XP and the other with Vista) using the GRUB loader, and it works flawlessly. I have no idea why it didn't work last night. But today is another day...

Bill Gates for President!

TB

I didn't realize you were using separate physical discs. Maybe that has something to do with it? I bought a single WD 640GB drive (the really fast one that everyone was raving about) and partitioned it 320/320 XP/Vista64 and restored my XP image from my 74GB 10K raptor drive and then proceeded to install Vista 64 and, as i said, it all just worked.

I assume the reason it worked on your laptop is because you partitioned a single physical drive. You might want to try the same with a new WD640 drive.

~jr

I don't think so Johnny. All the web pages I found telling how to dual boot the two OS on one machine, seem to indicate that the method they are recommending works with either two partitions on the same HD, or two separate HDs. I can't see why it wouldn't work anyway.

I think I am going to unhook the SATA cable on the Vista drive tonight, and then start into XP and repair its MBR. Then I will hot-plug the SATA cable to the Vista drive, and then reformat the entire Vista drive from inside XP. So then I should have no traces of Vista (or a hosed MBR) on the machine. Then I will *reinstall* Vista on the separate drive, and start the process of dual-booting all over again.

I think that the VistaBootPRO application indeed messed something up--or rather I messed something up via that app. But taking it back to a fresh install should be enough to get things going, I hope. It has to work...others get it to work. I would like to learn more about what Blink talked about though, because I am not sure I did it the right way.

I wouldn't be this persistent if I wouldn't have seen how well Vegas 8.1 handled my AVCHD files--it was very impressive, and in fact the frame rates were every bit as good as with HDV clips in the 32-bit 8c version. So if I could get 8.1 up & running on a Vista drive, then that performance alone would make this whole effort worthwhile.

TB

When you re-installed XP did you physically disconnect the Vista drive? If not then this is most likely your problem. XP likes to install its boot files on C drive... even if you install it to D drive it will try and install its boot files to C. If you did not remove the Vista drive then Xp most likely installed its boot files on the vista drive (which would be seen as C drive).

If you want to use 2 separate drives then what you need to do is install vista as normal, then disconnect that drive, then install XP to its drive. Note... with this method both OS's will see themselves as being on "C" when each respective one is running. (The way it works is that IF you already have a microsoft os on your machine then the next OS to install will look at the drive lettering of the previous os and respect.... and follow that lettering. If an OS is installed on a fresh system WITHOUT another os then it will make its own drive lettering and the first partition on the first drive is usually defaults as C drive.)

From this point, the drive connected to the number one sata connect will be your primary boot drive to which the computer will steer to for booting. Which ever OS you have connected here will be the primary os and you will have to manully edit the boot manager of that OS to include the other OS.
=======================================================

You CAN create them as independent OS's on a SINGLE drive though if you want.... which is what I do..... with this method you do need you do need a 3rd party disk imager that is independant from any OS. BOOTitNG for example (Acronis or Norton will not work because they don't function independently)

Separate you primary drive into 3 partitions . The first 2 will be your OS partitions (of the same size) and the third is an image partition. (You don't NEED to have an image partition on the primary drive if you don't want to, but you will need SOMEPLACE to easily store and recall your disk image.) Install XP as normal to your first partition then do a disk image and follow that with a FULL format of that partition. It must be a full format to erase all traces of xp. Then install Vista as normal to your first partition. Once that is done, recall your disk image of xp to your SECOND partition. Don't forget to edit your BOOT.INI file to reflect the change in partitions!

You will now have 2 fully independent OS's that are all self contained within their respective partitions. From here you can either choose to use a separate boot manger (as I do) or you can do the BCD edit thing in vista so you can boot to xp. Again, with this method each OS will see itself as being on C drive when running

Thanks Blink.

The machine had XP on it, and indeed it was on the C drive. I then had three more drives:

Drive 'D' was a 500gb work drive, where I put all my Vegas project data and VEG files.
Drive 'E' was an 80gb drive for audio samples (SONAR stuff) and Cinescore themes.
Drive 'F' was an 80gb drive that was initially empty and unused.

The plan was to install XP 64-bit on that drive, simply to run Vegas 8.1. That was the only purpose for installing that disk. But when I read in this forum how SCS doesn't support XP 64-bit, I changed the order to Vista. And there's where the problems started.

So last night when I installed Vista, I selected the 'F' drive. The 'F' letter wasn't available in the list of drives during the install process, but I name all the physical drives, so it showed up as "Vista 64-bit Drive" because that's what I named it (just to keep track of things). But when Vista had installed itself, IT had now taken the 'C' drive letter, and demoted the XP OS to the 'F' drive! Nothing I could do would allow me to change it back from inside Vista--and I couldn't get into XP again.

When I had these problems I went and searched the web and found a couple pages that seemed to describe the situation. One described changing the BOOT.INI file, but Vista doesn't let me access it, and I couldn't get back into XP to do this. So the only thing I could do at this point was to reboot to the Vista disk, use the "repair" utility, and do a MBR reset from the command line, using the commands I found online. But that didn't even help get me back to XP and after trying another thing or two with a friend over the phone, I simply pulled the SATA cable on the Vista drive and rebooted to the XP disk. The results from there were as I described above.

So at this point, I think I will try what you suggested in your last post. I have no idea whether or not it will allow me to edit the BOOT.INI file though--but I am not sure I'll need to, according to your post about using two separate drive. Or maybe I misunderstood?

Thanks for the help guys--it's much appreciated!

TB

Was "F" drive formatted as NTFS? vista wants a ntfs drive. If it is fat32 then it won't show up as a usable drive, but it SHOULD give you the option of formatting it as such. If it is LESS then fat32 then it won't show up at all.

My GUESS though is that the "F" drive wasn't visible because you didn't originally install it through XP so it wasn't recorded in the XP registry as such. When Vista took a peek into the XP registry, it couldn't find an "F"

Vista, as well as xp won't allow you to change its drive lettering. You can change the lettering of other drives, but not the OS drive.

One thing you have to understand about drive lettering is that it simply does not exist outside of a microsoft os. It is purely a microsoft made labeling system that is housed within the registry of the OS that is running at the time..... which is why you can have 2 os's in different parttions both thinking they're on Cdrive when they are operating. But you can't change the drive lettering of an OS once it's installed... it won't let you.... self protection thing.

You should really try and install these OS's so that they are completely unaware of each other. This way they function as individuals and don't tie each other up with intertwined drive lettering. The only way to install them independently is to install them in such a way that they don't see each other during the install process. You can do this on the same drive with the above method I mentioned or you can do it on different drives with the first installed OS completely disconnected from the machine.

What I meant about 'F' not being available was that the letter 'F' didn't appear--but the name I had given the drive did. In fact the Vista installer didn't put a letter on ANY of the physical drives--and the only way to tell them apart was by the actual names I had assigned to the drives. Sorry for the confusion... I chose my words poorly in my previous post.

But yes, all the drives were formatted as NTFS from within XP. All drives were visible to both operating systems, as of course I could see them (and write to them) from within XP. I could also see them at the Vista installation stage, when it gave me the option to pick a drive or partition for the install. So there was no accessibility issue as far as I know. The Vista installation went very smoothly, and the whole think took no more than about 20-25 minutes! I couldn't believe how smoothly it went.

I agree about the "oblivious install" idea...I think you are right about that. But at some point, the boot manager *does* need to know about each of them, and that's where Vista messed things up, from what I can tell. I have worked quite a bit in Linux, and am well aware about the Windows drive labeling issues; different partitions versus different physical drives. But I was NOT aware that Vista wouldn't honor the MS drive lettering system already imposed by XP. The problem is that the boot manager needs to know the drive letter of each OS--and I am not sure if this is what each OS "thinks" its drive letter is; or if it refers to the drive letters as assigned by Vista, the OS hosting the boot manager? I hope that made sense...

So I think I'll do just what I said in my last post--unplug the Vista drive, get back into XP and re-format the Vista drive. This will restore my XP drive. Then I could just unplug the XP drive I suppose, and install Vista. The problem then would be that I would need a third-party boot manager utility to facilitate the boot process. It seems FAR easier (at least on paper anyway) to simply have Vista's boot manager handle it--isn't that what MS intended for it to do?


TB

Sorry, I completely miss understood what you meant by not seeing F drive... but I get it now.

"But I was NOT aware that Vista wouldn't honor the MS drive lettering system already imposed by XP"
Yes. Previous OS's do... vista however does not.

"The problem then would be that I would need a third-party boot manager utility to facilitate the boot process."
Not necessarily... although IMO it's best that way. But both vista and xp have their own boot managers. You will simply have to edit the boot manager in the primary os manually so that you are given a choice.

Thanks... I have been studying the problem this morning in my office, and it appears as though a number of knowledgeable folks do in fact recommend the VistaBootPRO application as a nice third-party boot manager.

So it's entirely possible that I just totally and utterly screwed it up! No blood, no foul. I will have another go at it tonight--as I mentioned, this PC is only used for Vegas and SONAR, and I haven't done any audio processing for months... And seeing as how there are only two apps installed on the machine and all my data is on separate hard drives (thank God I was smart enough to do that, lol), it now becomes a "fun little exercise" to occupy my time in the quiet evenings at home!

TB

I've used VistaBootPRO to dual boot between Vista and XP.

If when you installed Vista it could not see the XP disk, then you need to copy the following files from the root of the XP disk to the root of the Vista disk before you can boot XP from the Vista bootloader menu:

NTDETECT.COM
NTLDR

You might also need to copy BOOT.INI. I copied this one, but I'm not sure I needed to.

Well, great ideas... Vista *could* see the XP disk, however I seem to remember that NTLDR was a file mentioned in one or two of the various error messages.

So did you have Vista or XP installed first? I had XP installed first, but I am not so sure it matters. As I type this, I am reinstalling XP without the Vista disk plugged in. Then I am going to re-connect and then re-format the Vista disk from inside of XP (just plug the SATA cable back in the drive). That should eliminate any remnants of Vista's influence on the XP drive's MBR and leave me with a clean drive on which to reinstall Vista. The only thing I am not sure of is whether or not to unplug the XP drive when I install Vista again, as Blink suggested I try. Then I'd have two disks with independent OS installations.

What steps did you take to get this to work?

Thanks again for the post.

TB

I had an existing copy of XP, which had been installed for some time. I then installed Vista on a new disk.

While installing Vista, I had the XP disk unplugged.

Once Vista was set up and working, I plugged the XP disk back in, but kept Vista as the primary disk.

I used VistaBootPRO the add XP to the boot menu, but as you found, I could not get XP to start. Once I copied these files onto the Vista disk, XP works.

Windows always looks on the primary disk for the loader files, regardless of the disk that the rest of the operating system is on.

Great Steve--that helps a lot, actually...

Things are going not-so-good here actually. I installed XP just now, but it's STILL not working, as \system32\hal.dll is still corrupt! LOL. So I am not installing Vista and will reformat the drive that XP was on, to try to get a clean disk. That way the Vista OS will be the only OS on the machine. That should work, as Vista was the only thing that worked last night. Then I will unplug the Vista disk again, and install XP one more time--then use VistaBootPRO or EasyBCD (in Vista) to get a boot menu going. Hopefully I'll be able to copy the files you mentioned into the Vista root, and it'll all work...

God, why didn't I buy a mac?

TB

Well, I think I am stuck here. I have reinstalled BOTH OS, but still get a "corrupt or missing <Windows Root>\System32\hal.dll" error. I have spent several hours researching this issue, and trying as many suggested fixes as I can find--but nothing works.

I can boot into either OS, but only if I have the respective setup disk in the drive. If I try to boot without it in the drive...I get stuck at the same point every time. It happens with the Vista disk unplugged, or the XP disk unplugged. I have one or two more things remaining, and then I am out of options. I have two other machines in the house that both run XP, and I am thinking that I might be able to grab a valid copy of that file from one of those as some people reported this has worked for them. But other than that...

Wow. Good geek-stumper here!

TB

Got it solved... For some strange reason (that I probably caused somehow), the boot sector for the XP disk got put on a *separate* hard drive from the actual OS. So when I reinstalled XP twice after reformatting the drive, the boot sector never got rewritten and thus remained hosed. Hence the new version of XP, while pristine, never got started because the corrupted boot sector lived on another hard drive. So I unhooked all the hard drives except the XP drive, and reinstalled XP. Problem solved.

But as for boot managers, I am not going to use one. It turns out my BIOS has an advanced feature that allows one to select the boot disk.


EDIT: Got everything running--Vegas 8.1 runs very well on Vista 64, and the performance is awesome. Sections of an AVCHD clip that run 8-12fps on my XP 32-bit Vegas 8c application now run at 29.97fps in version 8.1. Of course it helps to have 8gb ram, as with 4gb I would see a slight drop-off to 26-27fps at times. But now the frame rate display hardly flickers at all. And the BIOS boot method works very nicely, so no more boot managers for me!

So thanks for all the help you guys, all the tips helped me piece together what was going wrong and eventually figure it out. It was a strange problem, to say the least.

TB

hey tc, I just posted something on dual boots and the partitions. I too am taping volleyball, so I can make a highlight video for the banquet, it's always more fun to make if they win state GO Eagles !!

P.s.- just read the other threads about not being able to boot xp. if you install vista after xp it will auto setup a boot menu that says start vista or older os when booting the pc. Mine are on the same drive in seperate but equal partitions. seperate drives will work also. The key is to make sure both partitions are set as primary but only one is active. after I installed vista I set that partition to active and not the xp one and I lost xp. By the way I use Acronis disk suite to manage the disks and it works great. You can create a startup cd that is bootable and can help you save a train wreck if it happens. I imagine most good disk programs will do the same. I too was very leary of vista, but after making sure all drivers were up to snuff, I kinda of like it--- but it IS a resource hog

I am supposed to make a highlight video here as well, but I have like 350GB of clips to sort through. Yea, that's gonna take a few hours. And pare it down to the 10-12 minute attention span of the typical 14-15 year old? No problem.

Any other impossible tasks you want solved, coach?

TB

Boy can I relate. The vball and bball booster club had me buy them a NEW hard drive camera so it would be easier for ME to download the clips onto the pc. Low and behold I now have the NEW camera clips, plus my digital 8 clips (I still film with mine for the GOOD clips,kids,crowd etc. ,plus two parents are NICE enough to give me theirs also. As you can relate-- clips everywhere