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It appears that Vista no longer uses boot.ini. It ignores boot.ini. Which is fine cause the new bootloader is cool but how do you change boot options now? In boot.ini it talks about BCDEDIT.exe but I'm unable to launch it in XP or Vista. Anyone know how to change the boot options?

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I thought you could edit the boot options through System Propertes >> Advanced >> Startup and Recovery, etc. Just like in WinXP. It works fine for me, as in I was able to change the default OS in the Vista boot manager to WinXP and set the prompt time to 2 seconds.

I thought you could edit the boot options through System Propertes >> Advanced >> Startup and Recovery, etc. Just like in WinXP. It works fine for me, as in I was able to change the default OS in the Vista boot manager to WinXP and set the prompt time to 2 seconds.

Yeah, you can do that but you can't remove or change any of the boot listings.

Basically whats happening is that it keeps restoring two files as the primary boot.ini for the NTFS boot loader, and the Vista bootloader.

If your dual booting 5270.9, and XP, to remove Vista completely.. follow these steps..

You should have a boot folder in your xp partition, go to Command Prompt, move yourself in command prompt (cd .. to go back, cd dir to go to the right dir) untill you get to C:\boot, type in fixntfs -xp, This will write a new boot.ini..

Then delete bootsec.bak, boot.bak, and the boot directory. Reboot, you'll boot directly into XP, if you feel uncomfortable with the text about BCDEdit.exe, just delete it, but be sure to leave the [bOOT LOADER] or something similar and below there or your system will not be able to boot.

I know its rough right now but down the road it'll be fixed. Just before to erase the bootsec.bak, boot.bak, and boot folders before dual booting with newer Vista installations.

login as Administrator and you'll have the privilege

I'm logged in as Administrator but I still can't get permission to run BCDEDIT...I also can't do much file manipulation on the other hard drives on my PC. It's as if I'm a crippled Admin...how can I get full control???

I also can't get the dang dual boot to work...I have 4 different alternatives at bootup time but they all take me to my Vista install...I can't get back to booting up XP or Win2003 (all OS's are on seperate hard drives).

I tried running the NTFSFIX -xp -all but that didn't fix anything. I'm trying to get a copy of boot.ini from the boot.bak file but I'm not allowed to because of the restricted permissions.

Any clear steps I can take to get back to a multi boot configuration??

Thanks for any hlp you can give me.

I also couldn't get BCDEDIT to work. As far as deleting the Vista partitian (dual boot with XP on seperate partitian) I use Acronis Disk Director Suite and it takes about 30 seconds. After reboot I have to edit my Startup and Recovery boot.ini to read:

[boot loader]

timeout=30

default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS

[operating systems]

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

And I'm back in business. If you don't edit the boot.ini it will continually give you the bootloader menu from XP that's branded in XP from the Vista install.

so how do i remove an entry. i have 3 entries. i have 1. win x64 2. (current vista) Vista and 3. is a messed up vista installation

i want to remove the setting for the 3rd which was a messed up vista install, and possibly change the defualt os to my 1. (x64)

does anyone know how to edit this thing?

  • 1 month later...
  • 2 weeks later...

I have XP on C and Vista on D, how do I rename the menu names on the new bootloader?

Right now it says:

"Legacy something" which is XP and "Microsoft Windows" which is Vista. I like to rename them to:

Windows XP Pro

Windows Vista

What commands in bcdedit.exe to change the names? Or is there an easier way?

This site is pretty useful for editing BCDedit

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvi...719d4af778.mspx

I don't like BCDedit either but hope that's because I'm not familar with it. It will make it easier for some to remote change your settings if you get into trouble and should allow for a nice app that'll make it all easy.

Mind you if MS are dropping EFI instead of BIOS why couldn't they have left the boot.ini alone aswell for now.

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