I purchased a 1T WD Sata HD to install my two OSs, XP and Win7 which operate well on small separate hard drives. I partitioned the 1T drive into 4 partitions, the first 3 = 50G each for the Os. Made a ATI image of Win7 and installed it in the 1st partition and it booted fine and ran fine. Then made a ATI image of XP and installed it into the second partition and rebooted. The drive only boots into XP and nothing is indicated as to choosing which system to boot from. What do I need to do to choose either one of them? TIA
Use EasyBCD 2.0 for rebuilding your bootloader. In most cases, when dual booting win7 with xp, the loader gets corrupted, because win7 uses bcd, and xp still uses boot.ini. EasyBCD 2.0 rebuilds your loader without a hassle. Easy as can be (it's all in a name )
Install it, and run it. You can either choose to rebuild the loader, or you can manually add the entry for your win7 partition. Either one will work. It did for me when dualbooting with xp. You will also need to do this when removing xp from the dualboot. Keep that in mind. Good luck, and let us know if problems should persist. But normally they won't. It's easily solved like this.
Correct, but don't forget to use 2.0 beta, not 1.7 final! You can get it in the support forum of neosmart.
Yep, if u use 1.7, you will mess up your dualboot, as it is NOT fully compatible with win7 bootloader. google for neosmart. Look for it on their forum, it should be posted as a sticky.
Thank you for the quick responses. I DLd 2B and evidently have more than a simple solution, that’s my life because I like KISS. Message trying to run BCD: The boot configuration data store could not be opened. the system cannot find the file specified. would you like to manually load a BCD registry for Easy BCD to manage? I’m lost and in fear when near the registry, any KISS suggestions? Thanks and BE WELL
Generally speaking, If you are going to Install more than one Windows Operating system, you Always install oldest OS First, then Newest.
Not exactly true, when dualbooting xp with win7. It has been widely reported that in many cases it still causes trouble. That's because xp uses the old boot.ini, and win7 (vista also) uses bcd. When installing xp, boot.ini gets set up. Then installing win7, the dualboot seems ok, but after rebooting win7, it'll automaticly hide the win7 partition and boots into xp. After that, the win7 partition won't be accessible. EasyBCD or a similar builder will be required then to rebuild the win7 loader. Don't know myself exactly why this happens on many systems, cause normally the win7 loader should take over the dualboot process. If someone here can explain this strange behaviour, please elaborate
This has got beyond me in understanding. The original question was about a Win7 updated Vista partition dual boot problem with XP. I never liked the idea of an installation over another system so I found out how to install on a clean partition and proceeded. All went well and the drive did dual boot with XP a number of times yesterday. I did nothing else and shut down late in the day, then this AM chose that partition to boot from and it wouldn’t boot even to XP. I hid the XP partition and still Win7 wouldn’t boot even after using repair etc. finally did a fresh install of Win7 and left the XP partition hidden. I didn’t use it much but I don’t recall any problems doing it with XP and Vista and then Win7 pre release. I suppose I should re examine my motive for doing this, one of which is to reduce the plugging and unplugging of hard drives, I don’t like to leave them running when not needed for days.
Have you actually tried installing win7 AFTER xp ? Normally easybcd will work. You must be doing something wrong. Try googling for some guides of easybcd...
Right now I'm using a 1T drive and XP is on the 2nd which I'll make an image of it's 50G partition, i'll delete all on the 1st 50G partition and install 7 on it. I don't think it matters which partition either is on? ON LOOKING AT YOUR QUESTION, do you mean on 1st partition or instalation sequence. My XP installations are always made using True Image 10 which for years operated without a hiccup.
I mean sequence. As has been said : install XP first, then install Win7. So if you can, delete the win7 partition. Leave xp as it is. Now reinstall win7. It's should then take over the dualboot.