Greetings,
I've been running a dual boot Vista / XP successfully after help from the folk here and the use of VistaBootPro.

Recently, I had a disk crash that knocked out the Vista partition. I have successfully reloaded that Vista and made it accessible.

There were some other partitions on the drive, too. I used Paragon Partition Manager to deal with putting it all back together. During this process, the contents of the Xp partition were left untouched, except for manipulating the boot.ini file. In other words, all of the boot code and so forth is still there, untouched on the XP partition.

The XP partition is not bootable. I have tried to get boot capability again using both Vistaboot pro and Paragon Partition Manager but have not had any success.

I suspect that, with a little help from Jabba and / or others here, I can solve this problem.

The XP partition is accessible when the system is booted into Vista; the filing system is intact and I can edit the boot.ini file in it.

1. Here is the first problem: how can I determine the correct partition number to put into the boot.ini file?

2. Does the boot.ini file have to be in both the Vista system partition and the XP partition? Does ntldr have to be in both partitions? What other files have to be in either of these partitions (autoexed.bat / config. sys, etc., etc) to get the book process working?

3. My XP partition used to be E:. When I boot in Vista, it does show as E: so I am presuming that it still works as E: when the system is booted from XP. I have used VistaBootPro to set E: as the partition for the XP partition.

if you could give me some pointers to start, I'll try it and be back for more...

Thanks very much in advance,
Tony Duff

Boot.ini for XP

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /FASTDETECT

Can you post an image of your disk manangement screen;
This is how you get to the Disk Manangement Screen; left click start button, right click Computer and left click Manange, then left click Disk Manangement.

Heere is how you post an image http://www.pronetworks.org/index.php/guides/post/how_to_post_an_image_at_pronetworks/

tony have u used vistaproboot to set xp as the first boot operating system