Vista and the BCD Editor

Okies, just installed Windows Vista RC1, after days of resisting the urge. I've finally managed to move all my data from my second partition and installed Vista as part of my dual-boot laptop. Now...dual-booting with Windows 2003 Server on one side, and Vista on another is neat, but Vista doesn't think so... On my boot up screen, Vista gives me two options: "Earlier Version of Windows", or "Vista". That's like asking me: "Use an antiquated OS or me?" Substitute the word "Earlier" with "Older" and you get the idea. Anyway, I thought that would not be a problem. Open up Boot.ini in notepad and change the description to my heart's content will do.

But wait.. there's no boot.ini for Vista!

In comes the new Boot Configuration Data Editor, or the BCDEdit command line tool.

For a start, I investigated what my boot options look like with the /v argument:

So how do we go about changing the description field of the Win2k3 partition? BCDEdit /? gives us a list of available commands (too long to list here). BCDEdit /set is what I'm looking for, and the format goes like this: BCDEdit /set {id} {datatype} {value} , where {id} will be the identifier value listed in our /v above. The {datatype} that we want to set is "description". To list the available datatypes, we can type "BCDEdit /? TYPES"

Thus:

So, there goes my BOOT.INI :)