Hi everybody,

First off the bat, I am guy who loves to tinker with his computer setup (software wise) just a bit too much, and that is what I am trying rigt now. This way I acquired quite a bit of XP bootloader experience (I had a PC with two bootable har disks, so I could experiment on one, screw it up, boo from the other and restore the first) and I have software that allows m eboth to boot in an unbootable system and fix much of the damage that can be done from that same cd. I know what is relatively safe and what is not, and I have the possibility to experiment without he biggest of risks.

Now for my question... I have a new laptop that has windows Vista preinstalled on it. I got it in my mind that I want to set up partitions for XP and Linux (Debian), so that's what I am going to do. For this purpose I like a seperate boot partition and then putting all my OSes in a big extended partition.
So now I have made a partition before my Vista partition (that was no problem either) and the challenge is to get the Vista bootloader on it. System Bootloader Maintenance of VistaBootPro looks like it can be a huge help in accomplishing this. However, the offline help notes that "Windows Vista requires certain files to be in the right places".

Even though I have written a crap load about my situation, my question is actually quite simple: What files are required for the Windows Vista Bootloader?

Thanks in advance for your help,

Jasper

edit: booloader, what is that?

bootmgr is the file
Boot is the folder and all the contents

That is what my research led me to believe, but I did not post back here because I was still getting a blank screen with nothing but a cursor.
Some more research led to me thinking that the problem is in the fact that windows does not see the partition I want to boot from as the "System" partition, is this correct? (yes, I am positive it sees the partition with vista on it as the System partition, but would this be the cause of such failures?)
If I understand correctly you can't change what partition is labeled such (the only account of someone claiming this to be possible was someone stating "this can be done, but not easily" and nothing more). So instead I thought it might work if instead of having the MBR search for a partition labeled System, I could have Grub start the Vista bootloader, so I quickly installed debian on the place my second NTFS partition used to be and installed grub with it. I am still looking into this solution.
Any comments on my ideas or on the way I am doing things would be appreciated, as I am drawing a bit of a blank if this is not the solution I am looking for.