I've been trialist Vista Business on a spare machine of mine. I've decided to remove it & stick XP back on it as it's going to my parents, but now when I try & boot the machine it says it brings up an error about vista & boot records. The wierd thing is that when i remove the secondary hard drive it boots fine! Does Vista install something onto any secondary hard drives in your system? I've tried looking on the web but cant find anything. thanks
I suppose it's possible that an MBR may have been written to the second drive and the system has been set to boot from there (I've done it a number of times). Try checking the BIOS or something.
You may consider it the secondary drive, but it might very well be installed first on the SATA controller or as Master on a PATA chain. In either situation, Windows puts a bit of information in the MBR of the drive. Vista's info might be different than XP's, leaving XP blind. Try swapping the two drives and see if your problem goes away.
Boot the XP disc and go into the recovery console, then try running the commands "fixboot" and "fixmbr" which should fix your problem. Try doing this with both drives connected at the same time, and also check your BIOS settings to make sure your hard drive boot order is correct, with the drive with your XP install directly after your CD-ROM/floppy drive(s) if you boot from CDs often. Hope this helps! ckrieger
