Fixing Dual Boot MBR

[Hunter_Thompson]

Hi Everyone,

Just been playing around with installing Vista and different versions of XP... Not ready for Vista yet, so now I am trying to dual boot 2 installs of XP.

Now when I boot up, I am not getting the option of choosing what XP loads - it is like my MBR has no record of multiple operating systems, and does not allow me to elect the first XP install I did, it just defaults to the most recent one. I really would like to be able to get back that first XP OS as an option to boot to.

Thanks for any advice!

Hunter

[TheBaron]

you need to edit the windows boot loader, or more specifically, the boot.ini file

press windows+pause, go to advanced, go to startup and recovery
click edit

leave the default alone, but you can feel free to add another entry to the operating systems section. it should be almost identical to the one currently there, except with a different partition number.

From Microsoft's support page on the subject:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289022
Sample Boot.ini File

This is a sample of a default Boot.ini file from a Windows XP Professional computer.

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

This is a sample of the above Boot.ini file with a previous installation of Windows 2000 on a separate partition.

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect