Reason for EasyBCD not finding XP installation

asteindl

Member
Hello,
since I had bad troubles with this feature and also see quite a lot of postings, where EasyBCD cannot find any XP (or 2000, 2003) installation on any partition, I would like to ask:
How does EasyBCD decide, whether there is a valid XP installation on some partition?

In my case I sometimes obtained this error message; sometimes there was no problem at all. I guess this had to do with the BIOS boot order; but even when the disks are numbered differently, I do not understand why EasyBCD didn't regard the XP installations, which didn't change between the trials, as valid.
It would really help in solving these problems (in my case everything is working fine now, but I don't really know why), if the program would let one know, what is missing for valid installations.

Best regards
Alois
 
It looks for the two standard folder names (windows and winnt) and one additional (winxp) added because so many people set one up without regard to the consequences, and checks for the kernel version inside the nested system32 folder.
If you set it up in some other non-standard way then EasyBCD can't second-guess you.
 
It looks for the two standard folder names (windows and winnt) and one additional (winxp) added because so many people set one up without regard to the consequences, and checks for the kernel version inside the nested system32 folder. If you set it up in some other non-standard way then EasyBCD can't second-guess you.
Hello, I fear I didn't make it sufficiently clear: In my case NOTHING changed in the XP partitions, but sometimes EasyBCD found both installations without any problems, sometimes it couldn't find any. To me it seems, that it depended, from which disk (the computer has 4 hard disks installed) the computer was booted. The Win 7 installation, from which I called EasyBCD, lies in the second partition in the first disk. When I started from that disk, everything was fine. Windows XP sits in the first partitions of the first and second hard drive. I had the boot loader of grub2 installed in the MBR of the third drive; booting Win7 from there, I encountered the problems in EasyBCD with finding the WinXP installations. In the end, I could resolve my problems by installing the grub2 boot loader in the MBR of the first disk. But I would really like to know, why EasyBCD didn't regard the installations of XP as valid.
 
Just to make sure we don't have our wires crossed. Are you referring to EasyBCD not detecting an XP installation when you are using "Add New Entry" (auto-configure), or are you saying that the XP entries in your BCD don't boot when you select them.
My previous reply was about the former case.
If you mean the latter, then it's probably related to the ARC path in the boot.ini.
Changing the boot sequence will alter the rdisk value in boot.ini, so the entries set up in one configuration won't be pointing to the proper place if you reconfigure the HDDs. The entries would need to be deleted and re-added so that EasyBCD can recalculate the correct rdisk value.
 
Hello,
in my posting I referred to EasyBCD sometimes not detecting the XP installations, when I tried to add the entry to the menu, although they were present.
(I had installed a new SSD disk for both Win 7 and XP and wanted to configure the BCD such that one could select both old and new XP and Win 7 installations. I had the BCD menu called from grub2, which was originally booting from disk 3.)
For me it was puzzling, that sometimes the installations could be found without any problems, sometimes not at all.
I could finally resolve my problems when I realized that the disk numbering depended on the boot order (that's of course said in the FAQ), not on the order, as the disks appear e.g. in the partition management or in the BIOS numbering or in the ordering seen in Linux).
The main problem was of course, that XP did not boot, even if I had succeeded to add it to the bcd menu, but in this thread I am not talking of that.
Looking at the threads in this forum, it seems that the problem, that EasyBCD does not find XP installations, occurs quite frequently and
there could be other reasons for this failure, not just an unusual name for the Windows directory.
 
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