Changing How Vista Boots

Fire up the Notepad, locate and open 'boot.ini' from your C:\ drive and

modify the parameters to boot up Windows 2000, XP and 2003 with ease. But when

you install Vista on a system with other versions of Windows (like XP), the

first consternation you face is that it groups others as 'Earlier version of

Windows.' One then has to select that to enter a second boot menu and then

select boot options from there. Second problem is that there is no longer a

'boot.ini' file. Instead, Vista uses something called EFI (Extensible Firmware

Interface) that is the new standard for booting OSes. There is a built-in tool

named 'bcdedit' which lets you make changes to the boot menu, order, time out

and add or remove entries from the list. But, this is command-line based and one

needs to know a lot (like what a 'configuration store' is and so on) before you

can go ahead and use the tool.

Vista's MSCONFIG has a tab that lets you configure already existing entries

to some extent, but won't let you add or remove entries. Third party developers

have come up with GUI tools to let anyone customize the Vista boot menu. One

such tool is EasyBCD. Install the program on the system where you want to make

changes. In case it has more OSes apart from Vista, you can install the tool on

the other OS too.

At present, the tool will work on Vista and XP/2003. Run EasyBCD by clicking

the shortcut on the desktop. If you're on Vista, you'll need to do this in

Administrator mode. The first summary screen tells you what setup exists in the

Vista boot loader configuration. Click on the 'Configure Boot' button on the

left-hand side of the screen. Here select the default OS to bootup, the time out

before the loader will boot to the default OS and change the name and location

of each OS listed in menu. You need to click the 'Save Settings' button in each

section to save that section's settings. You can add other OSes (like PCQLinux

2007) to the boot menu using the screen you get, when you click the 'Add/Remove

Entries' button. Select the tab that matches your distro of Linux the closest

and specify the path to the bootloader. You can also re-order boot menu options

using this screen.

Select the default OS and change names of the OSes for the Vista boot menu using this simple GUI

Advanced Options



For Vista and Longhorn OSes, EasyBCD allows more options to be added from the
'Advanced Options' screen if you have EasyBCD on another OS in the same system.

Strangely, this tool does not allow you to add parameters using its UI to pass

to Win XP or 2003-but you can get around that by editing the boot.ini file

through the Tools menu of EasyBCD. If something goes wrong, you can remove or

reinstall the Vista bootloader using the 'Manage Bootloader' screen. You can

also backup or restore the boot configuration data from a text file. But this

backup does not safeguard your non-Vista OS settings and those must be backed up

separately.