HalcyonSpirit Posted September 4, 2009 Share Posted September 4, 2009 The issue at hand is that I can't boot into XP. Here's how it went down: Prior to this, I had two installations of XP on my computer, both on the same physical drive but obviously on different partitions. The first, on the C partition (system), was a 32-bit version of XP Pro. The second, on the D partition (logical), was a 64-bit version of XP Pro. I'd been using the 32-bit version less and less, so when I got my copy of Windows 7 Pro (64-bit version), I decided that I would get rid of the 32-bit version of XP and keep the 64-bit version. I went through the Windows 7 installation procedure, including doing a format of the C partition to get rid of the XP installation, and now I have W7 running fine. The problem is that instead of giving me a dual boot option with XP, the computer just boots into W7 automatically. There's no entry for XP in the boot file. They're on the same drive, so I can't change the drive boot order. I've tried using EasyBCD to add an XP entry into the Windows 7 boot file, but it won't let me tell it that XP is installed on the D drive; it will only let me put it on the C drive, and so it won't work. I've tried using the XP Recovery Console to rebuild the boot.ini file (or something to that effect), which would make the computer use the XP version of the dual boot screen, but it can't find any Windows installations for some reason. I've tried the dual-boot guides online, but they all assume that either XP is installed second (which gives it the XP boot selection) or that W7 is installed second with XP on the C (system) partition. Neither of these is true in my case, and thus nothing has worked for me. Any suggestions? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kitty Posted September 9, 2009 Share Posted September 9, 2009 So I had the same problem as you just now but with my computer booting into Windows XP rather than 7. I did use EasyBCD to fix the problem. I don't believe that XP and older Windows OS's require you to specify a drive letter hence why EasyBCD won't let you. I didn't specify one when I inserted the XP entry and it fixed it for me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HalcyonSpirit Posted September 9, 2009 Author Share Posted September 9, 2009 It would probably fix the problem for me if I had XP installed on C rather than D. As it is, using EasyBCD makes it want to boot XP from C. But 7 hasn't been giving me any problems, so I might just wipe XP and try to reclaim the partition with 7's partition manager. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nabeel Ansari Posted September 9, 2009 Share Posted September 9, 2009 It would probably fix the problem for me if I had XP installed on C rather than D. As it is, using EasyBCD makes it want to boot XP from C.But 7 hasn't been giving me any problems, so I might just wipe XP and try to reclaim the partition with 7's partition manager. Maybe you should just give in. I think Windows 7 is trying to tell you something. It loves you and it doesn't want you to use Windows XP. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nekofrog Posted September 9, 2009 Share Posted September 9, 2009 I don't know if it's the same for 7, but XP has a nifty little window that lets you choose this sort of thing. System Properties, Advanced, Startup and Recovery. There's a dropdown box that will display known OS's. But since you have them on different partitions I'm going to assume that this info is worthless. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HalcyonSpirit Posted September 9, 2009 Author Share Posted September 9, 2009 Still useful information, but only for future reference. Since I can't even boot into XP at all, there's nothing I can do about it from there. I'm pretty sure I saw something similar in 7, but it only shows itself as an installed OS. I imagine it operates similarly to how 7 recognizes other OS installations for the bootloader, so that's no surprise. The only alternative solution I can think of is installing a flavor of Linux and hoping its bootloader works properly with both XP and 7. But frankly I don't like the idea of hoping it works. I'd much rather have a separate drive entirely for Linux (which I plan to do anyway as soon as I can get home and retrieve one of my old IDE drives from an old computer). Anyone have experience with Vista's (or 7's, they're the same thing) partition manager? I think reclaiming the partition may be my only option. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kitty Posted September 10, 2009 Share Posted September 10, 2009 I should have clarified, my XP partition was on my E: drive and not my C: drive. EasyBCD had the option grayed out under C: but I added it anyway and it worked. It couldn't hurt to try it and then remove it later if it doesn't work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HalcyonSpirit Posted September 10, 2009 Author Share Posted September 10, 2009 I did. When it tried to boot, it came up with an error about a missing file or something. There shouldn't be anything missing, I didn't touch the OS files. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phill Posted September 10, 2009 Share Posted September 10, 2009 The only alternative solution I can think of is installing a flavor of Linux and hoping its bootloader works properly with both XP and 7. But frankly I don't like the idea of hoping it works. I'd much rather have a separate drive entirely for Linux (which I plan to do anyway as soon as I can get home and retrieve one of my old IDE drives from an old computer).Anyone have experience with Vista's (or 7's, they're the same thing) partition manager? I think reclaiming the partition may be my only option. Grub won't help you in this situation, all it will do is pass you off to the Windows boot loader. Someone may want to double check this but I think BCD does the same thing when it boots XP, so you could always try moving the XP boot.ini to the root of C: and make sure it points to the correct location for XP. Something like "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HalcyonSpirit Posted September 11, 2009 Author Share Posted September 11, 2009 I couldn't find that boot.ini file anywhere on any partition. Odd... Well, I wasn't going to screw around with it any longer, so I just wiped the partition. I can always reinstall if I need to. However, I tried expanding the W7 partition to incorporate the newly-released space, but the partition manager that comes with W7 apparently can't do that for one reason or another (something about where the space is located on that drive, I think). So right now I have a newly-formatted, 60GB NTFS partition. I can use it, but does anyone know of a way to merge it with my W7 partition without data destruction? There's got to be something out there that can do it... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kitty Posted September 11, 2009 Share Posted September 11, 2009 I would say Norton's PartitionMagic...but that costs money and it doesn't work on Windows 7. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phill Posted September 11, 2009 Share Posted September 11, 2009 I couldn't find that boot.ini file anywhere on any partition. Odd... Well, I wasn't going to screw around with it any longer, so I just wiped the partition. I can always reinstall if I need to. However, I tried expanding the W7 partition to incorporate the newly-released space, but the partition manager that comes with W7 apparently can't do that for one reason or another (something about where the space is located on that drive, I think). So right now I have a newly-formatted, 60GB NTFS partition. I can use it, but does anyone know of a way to merge it with my W7 partition without data destruction? There's got to be something out there that can do it... Well, the boot.ini is a hidden file, so you would have had to tell windows to display them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HalcyonSpirit Posted September 12, 2009 Author Share Posted September 12, 2009 Yeah, I did. I made sure hidden files were shown and that system files weren't hidden in the folder/file options. Still nothing. Oh well, kind of a moot point now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ronyn Posted September 12, 2009 Share Posted September 12, 2009 Really not sure, and it really doesn't matter anymore it seems, but I wonder if the installation order would matter in this case. For dual boot vista/xp it sure does. You might have had the result you were looking for re-installing XP 64bit again and allowing it to rewrite your boot sector. I haven't tried this setup yet, so no idea, but if you happen to try it out and it works, would love to know. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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