After one year running only Windows Vista in my desktop computer I decided to install Windows XP too. I did have several partitions in my 500GB hard disk so installing XP on drive D: was quite easy.

Unfortunately Vista uses yet another partitioning mechanism. After you install XP, Vista seems to be gone. The files are there at drive C: but it doesn’t show up during the boot process.

The structure that controls booting in Vista is called the “BCD”. Vista does come with a command line utility (bcdedit.exe) that manages the BCD. However, you must boot Vista before using it. This is not a solution if you are “locked out”.

So I needed to install Vista’s partition mechanism *and* make it “see” both OSs, preferably from Windows XP itself. Fortunately I found a free piece of software that does just that. It’s called VistaBootPro from http://www.vistabootpro.org/. You run it from Windows XP and it allows you to resurrect Vista’s boot manager and to manage the partitions, like changing the priority and the timeout.