I have a system with XP Pro on one drive and Vista X64 on a partition of a raid 5 array. Everything dual booted fine until I ghosted the XP Pro drive to a larger drive. Now with that drive installed the system automatically boots directly to XP without the boot options that exist when the other drive is installed.

Thanks for your help.

Hello Figurado, and welcome to PROnetworks!

As you've installed a new drive in the system, you may need to go into the BIOS and alter the settings for Hard Drive boot order and put the drive with Vista on it back to the top. Sometimes the BIOS will automatically pick a new drive as the default HDD to boot from when it's installed.

Thanks for the quick response A-Z. The XP drive has always been at the top of the boot order. If I put the Vista drive/partition at the top of the boot order I get the error message "Reboot and select proper boot device" instead of the Vista Windows Boot Manager screen. How that works exactly is a great mystery; as is BCD. Dual booting with boot.ini was so simple. Sigh........

While you were in the bios did you check to see if your Raid array was still as it was?

yeshuas - Yes I did check the Raid array. It is exactly the same in the bios and in Windows both XP and Vista. I have the latest version 8.2 of Intel Matrix Manager installed.

Note that when I run VistaBootPRO 3.3 I get the message - "VistaBootPRO has detected that Vista is either not installed or is installed on a hidden drive. You may experience minor problems using VistaBootPRO and/or making changes to your BCD Registry." Then VistabootPRO loads and I get my standard BCD info which is shown below. I'll readily admit that I haven't spent enough time to be able to cipher this. Perhaps the fact that Windows Boot Manager and Windows Loader are on different partitions is significant. I didn't plan it that way. This is the result that I got from doing a standard dual boot install of XP before Vista.

Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier {bootmgr}
device partition=D:
description Windows Boot Manager
locale en-US
inherit {globalsettings}
default {current}
resumeobject {3b5cbc67-159e-11dd-826e-c626e2ab502f}
displayorder {ntldr}
{current}
toolsdisplayorder {memdiag}
timeout 15

Windows Legacy OS Loader
------------------------
identifier {ntldr}
device partition=D:
path \ntldr
description Windows XP Professional

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {current}
device partition=C:
path \Windows\system32\winload.exe
description Windows Vista X64
locale en-US
inherit {bootloadersettings}
osdevice partition=C:
systemroot \Windows
resumeobject {3b5cbc67-159e-11dd-826e-c626e2ab502f}
nx Optin

Go to your Disk Management screen and see which drive is listed as the system \ boot drive

Left click Start

Right click Computer

Left click Manage

Left click Disk Management

You will need the file "bootmgr" and the folder and all contents "Boot" on the root of your XP drive. Use VistaBootPro to get your system back to a dual boot.

OR

Insert you Vista disk, boot to it, and do a repair startup......

That should hopefully get your dual boot back.

NT50 - bootmgr and the folder and all contents "Boot" is on the root of the XP drive. Using VistaBootPro to get the system back to dual boot is not really that straight forward. Somewhere I remember bumping into the instructions for your plan B.

yeshaus - The system drive is the XP drive regardless of which operating system is booted.

When booting with the new larger drive as the XP drive and running VistaBootPro I don't get an error message when starting. The drive assignments were much different. I'm sure that could be a problem. The Vista repair approach may get the job done.

Since the system drive/partition is your XP then you may need to use VistaBootPro and delete your Vista entry and re-add it using the drive letter that your XP disk manager is using for your Vista Drive.