OK heres the problem (go get a coke and popcorn this may take a little while. Recently got a new PC, and after using vista for a few weeks was pretty over it. So like most normal people I decided instead of getting rid of vista id just dual boot Vista and XP. Heres where things went wrong. First off my DVD burner is screwed so it couldnt burn the Vista recovery disks, so no vista recovery on CD. Second of all the XP install disk was slightly scratched (though I did not know this at the time) so halfway through the windows XP install it gave me read errors and could not finish the install of XP. Now every time I boot my PC it would start up the windows XP setup and just continue to get stuck at the same point. Failing to boot Vista past the XP setup I decided the easiest was was to delete the XP partition (with the incomplete install on it) completely. OK sweet no more XP setup screen, instead I get an error telling me theres a system32 .dll file missing (well no duh!). This leads me to assume that the windows boot.ini is telling my PC to boot up a partition that no longer exsists. Heres where I decided to download linux and run that off live CD, used it for 2 days, fucking love it. Installed it on seperate partition. Using GRUB as my new bootloader I now boot ubuntu off its partition flawlessly. SWEET! Though linux doesnt do everything I need so I still wish to dualboot linux and vista. All of my vista partition is still perfectly intact with everything I need on it. The problem is when I try to boot it, it flicks me strait back to the windows error because of the deleted XP partition. OK well that was a heap of crap and you didnt really need to read it so heres my real question: How can I edit the boot.ini file (I assume thats the problem) to point to booting the windows vista partition instead of the non exsistant XP partition. Im sure getting either a new XP install disk or a new Vista install disk would solve my problem but I dont have the spare $150 they want me to pay for it.
Open the boot.ini in a text editor (make sure you remove the readonly permission) and if its not obvious what you need to change, post the contents here.
grabbed my mates XP install disk and used that to install XP, everything went great (though on a mission to find drivers now ) Will paste in the boot ini file when I get home, need to remove some lines (though I dont know which ones) since now I have "Windows Xp Professional" listed 4 times, one which boots, the rest which fail.
will give that a go when I get home. The only reason I need windows is to run adobe applications. CS2 is said to run well under wine (which I know nothing about lol) and CS3 is apparently close, If I can get most adobe applications running in linux then ill say goodbye to windows for good.
Cheers for that, might look into it. VMware is suposed to be good but its all a little over my head at the moment.
