On my self built machine with ASUS A8N-E motherboard, a 2.2 GHz AMD Athlon CPU, 2GB RAM, there are three HDDs.

1. IBM 30.74 GB drive 0 - 1 partition
2. Samsung 160.04 GB drive 1 - 2 partitions
- 1 XP, 1 Vista
3. Samsung 250.06 GB drive 2 - 4 partitions
- data partitions

XP Home Edion SP3 was giving a lot of problems, most important, after downloading files, very frequently the downloads turned out to be corrupted and unusable.

The HDDs are healthy. Running c:\sf /scannow to check the presence/absence of essential files, the program asked for the XP Professional CD-ROM, although XP Home Edition is installed. I do not have an XP Professional Edition CD-ROM, only the XP Home Edition SP1 CD-ROM. The WinXP OS apparently remains with some essential system
files missing.

So, since shortly, I decided to install Vista Home Premium on the second partition of drive 1. Now, too late, I know that I should have run the installation from within XP and not, as I did, booting from the Vista installation CD-ROM.

When the computer now boots up no boot menu pops up.

Now comes the strange part when the WinXP Home Edition SP1 CD-ROM is in the CD-ROM drive the computer boots into Vista and when the CD-ROM is NOT in the CD-ROM drive the computer boots into Windows XP.

Question 1: I would like to keep both Windows versions usable on my machine, but with a better "boot menu" than the presence or absence of the WinXP CD-ROM in the CD-ROM drive. How do I get the Windows boot menu in
place and visible at booting ? Could an added line in boot.ini or win.ini help and if so what ? I do have PartitionMagic 8.0 and BootMagic. Is installing the last in WinXp an option ?

Question 2: How to get the missing system WinXP files back in place and where is that place ? Or is a complete re-installation necessary because of the updating that took place from SP1 to SP3.

Please any suggestion is welcome.

... this may help:

SCREENSHOTS

DOWNLOAD - HERE -

http://www.vistabootpro.org/

Grrrr
"...pentathol makes you sing like a canary"
... got brain freeze

Downloaded VistaBootPro and ran it. With
"Manage BCD OS Entries" made a bootmenu,
which only appeared when I had the XP CD-Rom
in the CDR drive. Even then choosing for the
XP OS did not work saying NTLDR was missing.

My XP had problems in loading, sometimes the
first screen stayed "greyish" and when
finally into XP downloads of programs were
found to be corrupted.

As said earlier ran the Scannow sf tool which
asked for an installation XP version that was
not installed.

Decided to format the partition with Vista on
it (had not yet been activated) and to put
back an earlier Acronis image back on the
partition that had the problem XP on it.

Now using the recovered Acronis version of
XP, but when I leave the XP installation CD
in the drive I get the boot menu I put there
when Vista was still on the machine.

How do I get rid of that ?