Hope someone can shed some light on this problem.

I was running W2K3 Enterprise Server and XP in a dual boot scenario installed on 2 separate hard drives (W2K3 on C: and XP on D:). Everything was working fine, with W2K3 as my default OS.

Then I was having a few problems with XP and decided to reinstall it, deleting the partition and reformatting drive D. W2K3 was not touched at all.

Now, whenever I boot up and choose W2K3 in the OS option menu, the system restarts and brings me back to the menu. I can choose the newly installed XP and it loads up fine, but I can't load up into W2K3 anymore.

Any ideas? Can I reinstall W2K3 on top of itself without losing data? I reinstalled Windows 2000 onto itself before and it worked, but if anyone has tried this with W2K3, any help would be appreciated.

My boot.ini file looks like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=15
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windo ws Server 2003, Enterprise" /fastdetect

It's because the boot loader of winxp is old then win2003. So yea you are going to have to reinstall win2003. Just like how winxp is newer then win2k.

Thats why you always install older to newer. ;) But like u said u had no choice to reinstall. So now you have to reinstall win2003 as well.

Unless u can find out how to get the boot load from win2k3 again. Good luck. :P

You gave me a good idea. So I followed some MS Knowledge Base info and created a W2K3 Boot Disk from the 1st disk in the XP Boot Disk set. Booted with that new disk, and got into my W2K3 Server.

But, I thought just by loading up into W2K3 that it might reset the boot loader, but no go. I rebooted normally to see if it would go into W2K3 from the Option menu, but it still reboots back to the menu.

You may be right and I will probably have to do an in-place upgrade of the W2K3 Server to get the newer boot loader installed, as mentioned in KBA 816579.

At least with the W2K3 Boot Disk I am able to get into the server, save my files and settings, and replace them if need be after doing the in-place upgrade.

Will let you know how it goes. Thks.

To be able to Boot into w2k3 you have to have the w2k3
versions of these files in your c:root.

bootsect, msdos.sys, ntdetect, ntldr,

Otherwise w2k3 can not be recognised as they are not know by older op systems such as xp win2k win98 etc.


A little tip when you are running w2k3 again you can make a copy of these files if you need to install xp again.

Hope this helps.JTK

I guess most of us make this mistake once....

The way I solved it was to boot XP, that still was bootable. After that I inserted my W2K3 CD and (re-)installed the Recovery/Repair console Console via WINNT32.EXE /CmdCons. This reinstalled my W2K3 boot files and I was able to boot into W2K3 again.
Of course a partial installation of W2K3 would also do the trick, but this is way faster, and you don't need to cleanup afterwards. I use the partial reinstall when I haven't got a Windows I can boot to to use the winnt32 executable.

Hope this helps someone ;)

Nice. Never thought of that. Wish I did last time. But now its all good since I just got a retail copy of winxp pro. :) Saved my donkey yesterday when installing media center 2004.

But yea might try that next time so thanks.

Boot into XP, rename ntdetect and ntldr to .old
Copy those two files from your w2k3 boot disk set into the same location, (root of the C drive).

You should be able to boot into the other OS, then you'll be able to delete the .old files.
Dave

yea I've tried that before and no good..but u never know...

Thanks a million. I installed the Recovery Console from the W2K3 CD (CD Drive:\\i386\WINNT32.EXE /CmdCons) and rebooted into Windows Server 2003.

Whew!! I thought I would have to reinstall (in-place upgrade) the Server, but this alternative was a cinch!

BetaONE Rulez! Thanks all for your input!!

obi1