Triple Boot Nightmare!!!!!

[jontydog]

Okie doke. On my pc I had a nicely running dual boot system comprising of XP and Vista. Now being a person who can't leave things alone I installed Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon on it. At the first reboot I only had the choice of Kubuntu or Vista/Longhorn and XP had disappeared altogether. When I went to boot into Vista it said "partition not found" I had a look on Google and came across a program called Gag 1.49 which allows you to boot up to 9 Operating Systems. Just the job I thought. How wrong I was. The way my pc is at the moment I can only get into Vista and that is through the gag boot up.

Is there any way to get my system back to triple booting without reformatting. I have Vista on a sata 250gig drive which also has a 17gig partition for linux and xp on my 40 gig ide drive. To add to the confusion the original install was xp to my c drive (40 gig ide drive) then I installed vista to the sata drive but in Vista the drives are the other way round ( sata drive is c drive ide drive is d drive) If I uninstall gag I have no operating system at all I just get ntldr not found or something similar.

Any help advice most gratefully accepted

[Mickha]

As you have two separate hard drives you can use your BIOS to boot into XP.
Enter your BIOS at boot up, usually by pressing the delete key, but it is sometimes different depending upon your motherboard, it will tell you how to enter the BIOS at the beginning of boot up.
Once in the BIOS look for Boot Options and alter the boot up accordingly, it varies with different BIOS's, look for IDE 0 option as you have a SATA and IDE drive.
Which ever drive you boot into becomes the C Drive.
If you can't enter XP please post back with details of your motherboard and BIOS.
Also at boot up check if their is a boot up select option by pressing an F key.

[Jimdefruit]

It looks as if you had XP and Vista boot sector controlled by Vista which is what MS do if you let them have their own way. Unfortunately by installing linux on a separate partition of the sata hard drive, it has taken over the boot sector and has not found a boot sector for XP.

Its a bit late now but the best way is to have Vista and XP on separate hard drives each installed as stand alone operating systems and with their own hard drive boot sectors and install linux on a third hard drive with its own boot sector but with the Vista and XP hard drives connected. When you boot the PC, make the linux hard drive the first system to boot via bios and it will list the all operating systems. You can then edit the boot sequence in linux using the command 'sudo gedit' and alter the default boot system.

MS, by default, hide the different operating systems from each other but if you install them by only connecting one hard drive at a time when installing the operating system you can see both XP and Vista drives at the same time. It is very handy for tranferring data files between the systems.

Whilst you can have separate partitions on a hard drive, you can only have one boot sector on that hard drive. Hence the need to keep the operating systems on separate bootable hard drives. MS in their wisdom have hidden the XP system via the Vista boot sequence so linux cant see it.

[jontydog]

Still no joy stuck with Vista at the moment. Been into the bios and the only option is boot from cd - hard drive - usb etc there is no hd 0 or 1.

Been looking to see if there is a file I can just edit to put things right and have come across a file in Vista called bcedit.exe but can't open it even as an administrator.

[Mickha]

In the BIOS you will usually find boot options, which can be altered to boot from certain choices, in the old days it used to be:
1 Floppy Drive
2 IDE 0 or name of hard drive
3 CD ROM
Can you please post some information on your BIOS.
What information do you see when you enter the BIOS, if possible can you please post some pictures.

[jontydog]

cheers but I have ended up reinstalling both xp and vista without reformatting. trouble is I now have 2 versions of each on my system taking up space

[spangle]

This is probably a bit late but to edit Vista's boot options use Vista Boot Pro . Vista doesn't store the boot ini like XP did hence why you can't edit it simply.

HTH