Triple Boot across 2 disks and 3 partitions

MondoCane · #1 July 18th, 2008, 05:48 AM

Hi everyone, I've searched through the forums and have a problem that I didn't see. I hope that someone has experience in this situation. My system began with 32bit XPPro on the c: on a single drive. I got a new drive and two new operating systems and 2Gigs of additional ram(now 4G total). I have 3 partitions on the new drive, which may have been created with Acronis disk director, I don't recall. I have installed XPPro x64 on one partition and just tried to put Vista Ultimate x64 on another partition. Everythings all screwed up. I also tried to use EasyBcd before to no avail. So now when system boots, I get the Vista menu that says: Previous version of windows (says \ntldr missing when chosen); Windows Vista( When chosen gives non-specific blue screen sometimes and on occasionally boots properly, The Vista drive is now the C: however) there are previous entries that I added. XP32, and XP64 when I hit XP64 it says the \ntldr thing. and when I choose the XP32 a separate menu comes up which allows me to choose between 32 and 64 bit. These choices work. So now that I have thoroughly screwed things up, heres what I'd like to end up with. My old drive I want to convert to just data files and remove the xp32 without removing other files. The new drive I'd like a dual boot with XP64 and Vista64, and keep a 3rd partition for program files. Any ideas on how I can accomplish this without wiping my data files on the old and new drives? Wow that was alot of typing, I appreciate any suggestions. Thanks very much. Sincerely Mondo

Terry60 · #2 July 18th, 2008, 10:00 AM

Hi Mondo, welcome to NST.
I can recommend you read the 2 links in this post,
http://neosmart.net/forums/showpost....87&postcount=2
which will explain the bootloader chaining, so you understand what's supposed to happen(link 2), and what's causing the NTLDR error (link 1).
I don't know why your Vista doesn't boot identically each time though !
Disk lettering is an internal construct (in the registry) on each system and won't necessarily agree from system to system, unless you take steps at installation time to make them do so.