Once upon a time...
...I was running XP Pro only. Then Vista came around and changed all that.
Vista was a sweet looking OS with many nice qualities and future promise. I decided to try her out and it wasn't long before I found myself moving more and more of my games, personal files and settings into the Vista HDD.
So far so good, we managed to get along well only because I could still run XP Pro for certain applications (like AH) using a dual-boot configuration. Everything was great for about a year or so, then came the question of hardware upgrade.
The XP Pro drive was master with Vista as slave. When the day came to upgrade our motherboard and CPU, I made a terrible mistake. Exactly what I do not know but these two ladies have not agreed with me since. Let me explain.
I simply swapped the MB and CPU without doing any software changes first. Not even sure if it's possible to install MB drivers of a MB not present, anyway what I did was I just swapped the hardware.
Vista booted fine however XP did not boot at all. I updated Vista with all the new drivers and got her to run well. After a while, and after trying to run AH on Vista in a effort to overcome the huge performance loss, I gave up on Vista and reinstalled XP on its HDD. Now, XP was installed on the C: drive and Vista on D:. I did not know at the time but Vista was keeping her boot files on the C: drive (master drive) thus she's dependent on the XP drive being present. (I was totally oblivious to this at the time I installed Vista, it just came up as a dual boot option and I was like "YAY!")
So, I'm not a hardware professional yeah, did you notice yet?
Anyway, I reinstalled XP Pro on the C: drive and got it running with all the latest updates, drivers and whatnot. When I'd spent a few hours on that, Vista wouldn't boot. The Vista boot files were still present on the XP drive, but Vista wasn't recognized on the system it seemed. I disconnected the XP drive and tried to boot Vista but of course that failed.
So I reinstalled Vista, and the problem came back. I could not boot XP again, and had lost all settings and programs etc in both OSs.
After having done numerous reinstalls, trying to get both to work properly with eachother in different possible and impossible configurations, and failed each time, I'm currently in this situation.
MB: ASUS M3A32-MVP Deluxe - 790FX Chipset (worst MB I've had to work with regarding SATA connectors, they're angled to the front of the case, BAD!)
SATA1: XP Pro as D: HDD (Master)
SATA2: Vista HP as C: HDD (Slave)
XP used to be the C: drive and Vista on the D: drive, how that changed I do not know. I've done numerous reinstalls and also changed their SATA connections to see if it makes any difference, it seems not to. The above configuration is the current one.
Like I said, I'm not a pro at this it's more of a hobby for me. So every once in a while I make a mistake, usually it's not that bad but can be corrected easily. This is the worst problem I've had for as long as I can remember.
If someone could tell me how to set up these moody OSs to work with eachother in a dual boot configuration I'd be eternally grateful. Or something like that.
I've searched the net to see if there's any info on how to set up a dual boot for these OSs but not found much useful. If someone can point toward a guide or simply post the procedure here, that would help out tremedously.
I know this is not a tech support forum for OSs, but don't know where else to turn to. There should be a simple, stupid, fix for this problem I'm having, I just can not get it to work. Have had a near useless PC for several days now and am by this point getting pretty desperate.
