Anyone ever have the problem that they don't see any OS when they use Vista's 'Startup Repair' option on the Vista DVD? It just says to try to load harddrive drivers if you can't see an OS. Well, I dual boot Vista64 and XP Pro and on XP I got a 'hal.dll is missing' startup error. So I load the XP recovery console and run 'fixboot'. (bad idea) Now the Vista loading system is screwed up and I get the 'press ctrl+alt+delete' error when trying to boot up. So I then use the Vista DVD to run 'Startup repair' like I did when I first setup dual booting but the problem now is no OS shows up, most likely because XP overwrote the Vista MBR (at least Vista 'should' show up by itself like it did last time). The strange thing is if I use the option to browse for harddisk drivers I can see all my files and partitions. I'm at a loss as to what to do now though. I can't get the Vista startup repair to find my OS to repair it.

AFAIK Windows Vista Startup repair option is not suitable for use in a true multiboot environment. Your only recourse may be to do the repair manually. Since I don't multiboot I hope someone who is more familiar with it will jump in and pass along suggestions. Anyone? i_Xp/VistaUser

Download Vista Boot Pro or EasyBCD & use that program to write or add Vista's boot loader to your dualboot's MBR.

I agree with Sabertooth about using Vista Boot Pro or EasyBCD. I have found that Vista Boot Pro works well. However, don't you have to be able to boot into XP in order to do that ? Perhaps you could try running fixmbr since fixboot didn't work.

Still no luck. Basically I have a corrupt MBR, I've been dualbooting Vista and XP, and I can't use the Vista Startup repair option because my Vista partition isn't being recognized since I overwrote that boot record using XP's 'fixboot' command in the XP recovery console. Are there any utilities to get Vista's MBR back to pointing to the correct partition? I've tried fixboot, fixmbr, and chkdsk /r I can't use EasyBCD or Vista Boot Pro because I can't load windows. (I did use EasyBCD to setup dualbooting in the first place).

fixed, case closed, there is a utility on the vista cd in the 'boot' folder. Just run 'bootsect.exe -nt60'