Dualboot problem..vista/xp

Greetings ppl,
I think i did something very stupid now..One of my friends brought his toshiba laptop with windows vista pre installed without a cd..He wanted to use xp because nothing or very little is compatible with vista with regards to the programs he has..

To make a long story short i installed his original win xp with sp2 on a seperate partition and boots fine with xp and can access files within drive c:which is vista..Is it possible to make a dualboot without damaging vista..

I have tried to edit the boot ini file to add the command for loading but comes up with the error WINDOWS COULD NOT START BECAUSE OF A COMPUTER DISK HARDWARE CONFIGURATION PROBLEM..COULD NOT READ FROM THE SELECTED BOOT DISK.CHECK BOOTPATH AND DISK HARDWARE..

please help:confused:
thx
vanman

Wouldn't it have just been easier to leave Vista alone and run the incompatible (for now) programs in compatibility mode until patches are released for the offending software?

It seems that you have screwed with the MBR (master boot record) and are now in a world of hurt.

Are you sure that there is no "recovery CD" that came with the machine?

If not, FDISK and erase the partition that XP is on, and if that fails, 'format /mbr' at a command prompt.

Good luck.

Post the contents of your boot.ini file here.

Good day all,
Sorry for the late response..I have some good and some bad news..Upon searching the net for a few hours litterally i came upon this http://www.pro-networks.org/forum/about88231.html and it worked after installing http://www.vistabootpro.org/index.php ..Afterwards i had the problem of fixing the masterbootloader for win xp within vistabootpro because when done i restarted selected win xp and it said cannot find ntldr..I then searched for this problem on google and got to this http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000465.htm#b ..Did the changes and whalla they both boot..

Please be adviced DO NOT USE VISTABOOTPRO (BOATLOADER OPTION AFTER)..Buggers up everything and you have to start all over..This is the good news..

Now after booting to xp with sp2 itried to install the drivers outstanding in system..No luck!!The only thing i got going is the lan driver which i got from vistas system 32 and inf files..The rest like screencard,pci devices,etc no luck at all..Is it possible that xp drivers are not yet compatible for this toshiba satelite l40 notebook?? Had a look here http://forums.computers.toshiba-euro...threadID=26059 and it seems that it is possible..Thread by Dennis farina Should i try any further??
thx
vanman

Phone the laptop manufacturer and request an OS disk

I didnt think OEMs could sell a computer without an OS ...or a recovery disk???

MLF

What they have done is to load the recovery program on a different partition which restores the machine to it,s original state upon restarting and using the f12 key to boot from it..Yes i agree that there should be a disk especially with oem bundles but he has nothing and i told him to try and get a disk and also find out if he is allowed to make a dualboot partition and how does this affect his guarantee..

Hi to all,
I don't know about Toshiba, but this year I bought a Hewlett Packard desktop. It didn't come with recovery disks. You make them yourself from a program that comes with the computer. You can only make one set. Probably other makers are doing it too.

Quite correct,i have a hp 530 notebook and with vista basic and at the very first boot you are reqiured to do that..