I'm dual-booting xp and vista. XP is installed first on C:, Vista is on I:. Some questions:

1. Why is it I can't see the bootmenu? Boot.ini in C: doesn't have the Vista entry. Only way I can get into Vista is by inserting the installation DVD and ignoring the boot from dvd message after I boot the PC.

2. Why are the two files 'bootmgr' and 'bootsect.bak' in my drive F:? The 'boot' folder is also in this partition. WHich is weird because I specifically remember that the folder and the 2 files are always in C: during beta/rc days.

How do I fix all these issues? It looks like Vista did not see my XP installation at all. If that's the case, why did Vista re-letter its own partition from I to C? And change the drive letter of my XP from C to E? Note: This only happens when I'm in Vista. When in XP, the drive letters are as per originally lettered i.e. XP partition is C and Vista partition is I.

Anyone encounter these wierd, weird problems?

I fixed the bootmenu problem of not appearing. It seems that XP must be on Disk0 (mine was on Disk1) in order for Vista to recognize that that is the active partition and hence to properly configure the bootloader. Of course, I had to reinstall Vista, for the 6th time now, for this to work.

Anyone managed to have both the bootsect.bak and bootmgr files in the same partition as Vista (applies only to dual-booters)?

Hmm, EasyBCD only seems to be used to add/edit/remove multi-boot entries. I cannot find a feature the moves the files I mentioned.

After a little research, I found it could not be done (for now at least). Excerpt from Multibooters UK