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.
I'm planning on applying for a job at my school as an assistant IT person, so I tried these scenarios:
XP then installing Vista as a dual-boot
Vista then installing XP as a dual-boot
Vista then removing it and putting XP instead.
Vista, XP, and Linux in many different orders.
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.
But thanks to some of the follow-up replies here I also found out about EasyBCD which did the trick. For all the above scenarios, I was able to one-click setup thanks to this program.
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
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.
***** REVIEW FOLLOWS *****
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
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 a lot more than i thought!!
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!!!
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.....
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!
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.
Anyway, here's my "verdict:"
*** 1ST CHOICE ***
EasyBCD: 9.5/10
Awesome program, really powerful, with tons of cool features. Support forums are especially helpful with timely replies and nice community.
Big advantage: extensive documentation and lots of features.
Drawback: Their site needs to make its features clearer because you'd never guess what it can do.
*** 2ND CHOICE ***
VistaBootPRO: 6/10
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 fo
