Hi, sorry if this question has been asked before but I would be grateful for any help.

Basically I had a perfectly good XP computer before a motherboard failure. My parents kindly bought me a basic vista computer for christmas, unfortunately not including the vista cd. I installed my old xp drive and disconnected the vista drive and I've been happily running xp since then.

Now I've decided to pull my finger out and actually get the Vista drive up and running so reconnected it but I can't make Vista bootable while the xp disk is still connected. I stumbled on some advice to install Vist boot pro, which I have done, but all I get is a lot of errors my BCD registry is missing. What should I be doing?

Cheers

Im guessing you'd need to rebuild the BCD, but without the Vista Media i have no idea how you'd get into it?

Most PC's that come with Vista pre-installed and no DVD have a recovery section partitioned off in the drive, have you got that? Maybe point your BIOS to boot off that recovery partition, then see if you can get in and rebuild you BCD?

Now this is only what i would try, i'd probably find that it wouldn't work, or even worse, is actually impossible, but at least its a starting point?

Best part is that you haven't used the Vista HDD yet, so nothing really to be lost? If its a genuine copy of vista from a proper PC shop there must be something to be able to restore it as you would have paid for the license.

support . microsoft . com / kb / 927392

If you can get into the Windows Recovery Environment, check this link to rebuild. Had to space out the link as i cannot post links on here yet, im just a baby to the forums. lol