http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/ How-To Geek Forums Topic: EasyBCD vs VistaBootPRO & My Dual-Boot Experience en Thu, 08 Jan 2009 22:54:55 +0000 http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/topic/easybcd-vs-vistabootpro-038-my-dual-boot-experience#post-17942 Sun, 13 Apr 2008 02:19:54 +0000 snidey 17942@http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/ <p>Thanks marcus. Your review really help me a lot. </p> http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/topic/easybcd-vs-vistabootpro-038-my-dual-boot-experience#post-2543 Tue, 09 Oct 2007 12:54:57 +0000 supermansghost 2543@http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/ <p>Sweet!</p> <p>Spread the word, How-To Geek Forums helped get you a job =) </p> http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/topic/easybcd-vs-vistabootpro-038-my-dual-boot-experience#post-2534 Tue, 09 Oct 2007 07:04:34 +0000 MarcusAurelius 2534@http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/ <p>Thanks, Scott.</p> <p>I got the job :D </p> http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/topic/easybcd-vs-vistabootpro-038-my-dual-boot-experience#post-2289 Tue, 02 Oct 2007 11:38:22 +0000 Scott 2289@http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/ <p>Thanks for your review MA. As you see, we answer many questions about dual booting here and we appreciate your input.</p> <p>My experiences with Guru on the EasyBCD forums helped make my dual XP/Vista boot a reality. This was 6 months BG (Before Geek ;))</p> <p>When in your admin travels in school or out, remember to pass on the golden rule of dual boots: "Install the oldest OS first", if possible. </p> http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/topic/easybcd-vs-vistabootpro-038-my-dual-boot-experience#post-2286 Tue, 02 Oct 2007 07:27:38 +0000 MarcusAurelius 2286@http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/ <p>Thanks to the how-to geek and all the friends on this forum and their very helpful posts I managed to easily get my dual-boot working great in multiple scenarios.</p> <p>I'm planning on applying for a job at my school as an assistant IT person, so I tried these scenarios:</p> <p>XP then installing Vista as a dual-boot<br /> Vista then installing XP as a dual-boot<br /> Vista then removing it and putting XP instead.<br /> Vista, XP, and Linux in many different orders.</p> <p>The original info in this forum was to use VistaBootPRO to do most everything, but I'm afraid I found it to be a woefully ineffective and largely useless tool - in the end it gave me more headache than help.</p> <p>But thanks to some of the follow-up replies here I also found out about <a rel=nofollow href="http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1">EasyBCD</a> which did the trick. For all the above scenarios, I was able to one-click setup thanks to this program.</p> <p>I just wanted to say thanks for all the excellent posts and in particular for those that suggested EasyBCD, hopefully you've just landed me that job :D</p> <p>I'm not a genius or anything when it comes to computers, but I'd like to say thank you by making a contribution in the form of a review of these two popular bootloaders and why I picked EasyBCD. I hope I can continue to contribute to this wonderful site in the future.</p> <p>***** REVIEW FOLLOWS *****</p> <p>I really liked VistaBootPRO when I started to use it, but I found out that was basically a "safe" way of using BCDedit.exe - which isn't a bad thing of course, but I found it to be severely limiting for anything other than setting up a standard dual-boot on a system with no problems and no issues.... it's not that likely of a scenario :P</p> <p>When I switched to EasyBCD I found it to be more than just a "frontend" if you will to bcdedit but a complete program that does <em>a lot</em> more than i thought!!</p> <p>Unfortunately, the people (person?) that made EasyBCD didn't really explain just how much it does too well on their site.. For instance, I found the "Diagnostics" section which lets you re-create a corrupt bootloader, replaces missing boot files, and resets boot data to be invaluable - but their site doesn't even mention this feature!!!</p> <p>Also I was impressed by EasyBCD's stability even on systems that didn't have a working dual-boot or had MBR issues. On several machines with an improperly set-up bootloader I had VistaBootPRO crash on me losing me some bootloader data, but EasyBCD detected the corrupt entry and warned me about it.....</p> <p>Last but certainly not least I just loved EasyBCD's Linux support. While VistaBootPRO supports Windows XP and Vista, EasyBCD (as far as I can tell) supports Win 95+, OS X, Linux, BSD, and OS2.... I really enjoyed how easy it was to get the Vista bootloader to recognize my Linux install - I'm sure Microsoft'd be pissed if they saw how easy they made it!</p> <p>There's a feature I didn't get to use (I'm afraid I just don't know enough about Vista to use this part) which is support for WinPE 2.0, which *I think* will let you use WinPE 2.0 images like Vista setup and stuff like BartPE with the Vista boootloader without having to boot from a CD so you can set up a recovery partition or something.</p> <p>Anyway, here's my "verdict:"</p> <p>*** 1ST CHOICE ***<br /> <a rel=nofollow href="http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1">EasyBCD</a>: 9.5/10<br /> <img src="http://neosmart.net/images/software/easybcd/easybcd.png" /></p> <p>Awesome program, really powerful, with tons of cool features. <a rel=nofollow href="http://neosmart.net/forums/">Support forums</a> are especially helpful with timely replies and nice community. </p> <p>Big advantage: <a rel=nofollow href="http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/">extensive documentation</a> and lots of features.<br /> Drawback: Their site needs to make its features clearer because you'd never guess what it can do.</p> <p>*** 2ND CHOICE ***<br /> <a rel=nofollow href="http://vistabootpro.org">VistaBootPRO</a>: 6/10<br /> <img src="http://www.pro-networks.org/main/images/blurb/VistaBootPRO_Beta3_3_.jpg"></p> <p>This program came before EasyBCD and I guess you could say it's what started all of this, so that counts for something. But the latest versions I tried crashed where they should have simply warned me and it limits you to just XP and Vista for the most part. The have a good <a rel=nofollow href="http://pro-networks.org/forum/">fo </p>