Vista and XP installed on MBP - trouble with bootloader

[Cyman]

I am sorry to post the same thread in several forums sections, but I don't know where it belongs to (and maybe there is also a greater chance that someone can help me).

 

Here is a link to the original thread: Vista installed on MBP - trouble with bootloader.

 

Finally I have done it, I installed Vista on my external hard disk, connected to my MBP.

It was a bit of a hassle and there are some problems left to sort out, but here is how I have installed Vista.

 

First of all I decided to install Windows XP via BootCamp on my MacBook Pro. This went fine, although I had to defrag the hard disk before BootCamp let me partition it.

So, then I installed Acronis Disk Director to change the partition status where I wanted to install Vista on, to 'Active'. It turned out that this wasn't necessary at all since it was already set 'Active'.

Then I did the following: I thought it should be possible to run the Vista installation from within Windows XP, so I started it. Surprisingly, Vista let me install on the desired partition (on my external SATA disk) without any problems, no more error messages, even the Sil 3132 driver was loaded automatically.

During the installation, the system was rebooting several times (which is normal). After the first time I got an error message, so I restarted the machine a second time, manually.

Then, the installation went on. The system rebooted again, this time I inserted my flash drive with rEFIt to choose what to boot. I continued the installation of Vista which still wasn't finished and needed to be completed.

After finishing the installation it rebooted my MBP once again and booted for the first time into the Vista desktop where it crashed like immediately causing another reboot (what a motivating beginning)!

I used rEFIt to choose to boot Vista and this time I got another error message during start up, caused by the Vista boot loader which detected that my HFS+ partitions weren't recognized and supported correctly by Windows. Luckily it continued booting and went right into the Vista desktop, this time without crashing - finally!

So the problems which remain have to do with this Vista boot loader which now always wants me to choose if I want to boot my previously installed Windows XP or Vista. Unfortunately choosing to boot XP causes an ntldr is missing error, though I can still run it through VMWare Fusion (yes, right on my BootCamp partition).

My question is if and how I can get rid of this nasty bootmanager, because it only causes error messages (it seems to be good for nothing)! Even when I am not fast enough (i.e. two seconds) it automatically chooses Vista to boot (which is, of course, resulting in another error message when I want to boot my XP partition under VMWare).

Can I use EasyBCD for this purpose or do I have to remove it under Windows XP? What is needed to be done so that both Operating Systems will still be bootable after all?

 

Please check out the original thread with more detailed information, including screenshots describing the problems.