Windows Vista Dual boot problem: Windows XP missing from boot options after Vista reload

hi everyone.
please help as i have read every single web page i could possably read.
i have a dual boot machine with VISTA as "C ", XP as "D ", DATA as "E ".
all on the same HDD. until last week everything has been fine, well i got home from work one night and the computer was dead, i took it in to a local shop and was diagnosed with dead power supply, so he put a new one in for me and just loaded the first info page (not windows) said there it works unpluged it and off i went, 40 bucks lighter lol.

so i got home all excited to hook it back up and nothing vista would just keep reapeating itself to boot up but wouldn't load. so i called the guy who put in the power supply and he said whatever fried my PSU may have corrupted my vista and that i might have to reload vista. that *****

so after about 10 times of rebooting its self i thought hey try the XP boot well it loaded without a hitch, so i searched and read forums for a week to try to solve the vista boot problem without haven to reload, well no luck.

the other day i finally rebooted vista, now i don't have a actual vista disc i just have a restore disc that i had to create when i bought the computer. well the reboot went fine i've been updating for two days now,

this is where the fun begins now, the XP (dual boot) is missing, i mean missing, up till now when i turn on the computer i would get a prompt to pick vista or xp, 20 seconds will automatically go to vista (default) well now that prompt is gone, it just loads directly to vista, the xp file is still there i can access it, i just don't know what to do, i read to insert xp disc and do a repair, well i went through that and didn't get a repair option i went as far as reformat, reformat quick, leave file system alone, i hit leave alone and got message " o/s exists everything will be over written, bla bla ,so i quit,
i've tried different boot loader programs, they just say only one boot loader exists, tried copy/pasting ntldr file to xp but it wont paste (says its in use),
please help, last resort will be another fresh install of XP and i don "t want to do that again if i can save it.
sorry for the long letter but i'm lost and normally with tons of reading i figure things like this out myself.
thanks keith.

 

Try this:

In Vista, download EasyBCD, scroll down here and get the instructions here

Go to the Add/Remove Entries Tab > Add Entry at the bottom, select NT/2K/XP from the drop down menu, give it a meaningful name and point it to the D drive.

Hopefully when you reboot, the choice of operating systems should be there.

 

thanks
i tried that, as soon as i change the drop down to xp the drive box grays out and i can't change it.

 

I thought that would work. With it greyed out, did you click Add entry?

You mention other boot managers, have you tried VistaBootPro? It was the ‘must have’ a few years ago but I’m out of touch with its current features.