Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

General discussion

Windows Vista Technical Boot Problem

Oct 13, 2008 1:15AM PDT

I had vista working fine. I installed XP and then ran the vista startup disk to repair the vista bootloader. It loaded fine and I had XP and Vista dual booting fine. A week later, I was trying to get OS X to boot also. I added a entry to the XP bootloader. In case you don't know, the vista boot loader has two options, XP and Vista. Selecting the XP option goes to the XP boot loader, and give you another 30 seconds to chose. I edited this boot loader, adding disk 0, partition 2, where OX X was installed. After selecting it at startup, it went to a black screen and hard hard drive was flashing steadily. It ran about 3 hours, I figured it might be setting up. Then I rebooted, but got a black screen. I then ran Hirens boot CD, and repared the boot loader. This got the XP bootloader to work. I booted into XP and got easyBCD, but that would not run. Any ideas on how to get vista to boot? I ran checkdisk, and vista files seem to still be intact.

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
Sounds like a Hackintosh build...
Oct 13, 2008 1:45AM PDT

In short, Mac OS X may only be installed/run on Mac hardware, as per the Mac OS X EULA. If that is indeed a a Mac and you're adding Vista, the recommended method is to use Apple's Boot Camp...editing the Vista BCD store is not a valid method. However, as this sounds like a Hackintosh build (running OS X on a PC) I'm locking this thread as no help can be given. If I have erred, though, feel free to submit an offensive post alert with an explanation to have this thread unlocked.

John

- Collapse -
Unlocked...
Oct 13, 2008 4:15AM PDT

Reply from jeremiahbarrar: "No its a mac book running specialized versions of vista and xp."

Can you elaborate on "specialized versions?" Regardless of the edition, Boot Camp is the recommended solution. However, it becomes a little more complicated if they are, say, images of a preconfigured installation. Tell us more about what makes these versions special and we'll see what options exist.

John