Dual Booting Vista: Use BCDEDIT to change boot up options.
If you are dual booting XP Prof and Vista, you most likely have that annoying “Earlier Version of
Windows” in the boot list and have Vista booting as the default.
In Vista, you do not have the Boot.ini like in XP where these type of settings were changed. We will need
to use command line and the bcdedit command (use bcdedit /help to see all the options).
1. Find the cmd.exe command in Vista, (Start/All Programs/Accessories), right click and select “Run as an
administrator”. This will open the command window (black and white old DOS looking thing).
2. In order to change the boot.ini display from “Earlier Version of Windows” to something nicer like “XP
Professional” you type:
bcdedit /set {ntldr} description “XP Pro”
3. To change the default boot up instead of Vista to XP, use:
bcdedit /set {bootmgr} default “{ntldr}” then type bcdedit
4. Reboot.