I am dual booting Windows XP and Debian Linux.
I use Lilo to boot Linux, which is chainloaded from NTldr. That was the old system which I set up myself and it worked fine.
Today I read that it was possible to use EasyBCD to boot XP (and also Linux) so I decided to give it a try, especially since I'd had success with EasyBCD on Vista and W7 machines (also dual booting Debian).
I went to a W7 machine, copied the Windows\Boot folder to a USB stick, then copied that folder to C:\Windows on XP. I then installed EasyBCD, pointed it to C:\Windows\Boot to create a fake W7 entry, deleted that, and then added my XP and Debian entries. This was pretty much according to instructions online, though they did seem to relate to an older version of EasyBCD. Anyway, all seemed to go fine as far as I could tell.
Until I rebooted that is. I got Invalid boot.ini file. XP still booted, but no way to boot Debian.
I've done everything I know about in Windows. I've gone to XP Recovery Console and done chkdsk /r, fixboot, fixmbr, and bootcfg /rebuild. All to no avail.
I've uninstalled EasyBCD but I still get the invalid boot.ini message. I've deleted the C:\NST folder and the C:\Windows\Boot folder (the one I copied over from W7).
Any ideas what I can try next? I'm out of ideas!
I use Lilo to boot Linux, which is chainloaded from NTldr. That was the old system which I set up myself and it worked fine.
Today I read that it was possible to use EasyBCD to boot XP (and also Linux) so I decided to give it a try, especially since I'd had success with EasyBCD on Vista and W7 machines (also dual booting Debian).
I went to a W7 machine, copied the Windows\Boot folder to a USB stick, then copied that folder to C:\Windows on XP. I then installed EasyBCD, pointed it to C:\Windows\Boot to create a fake W7 entry, deleted that, and then added my XP and Debian entries. This was pretty much according to instructions online, though they did seem to relate to an older version of EasyBCD. Anyway, all seemed to go fine as far as I could tell.
Until I rebooted that is. I got Invalid boot.ini file. XP still booted, but no way to boot Debian.
I've done everything I know about in Windows. I've gone to XP Recovery Console and done chkdsk /r, fixboot, fixmbr, and bootcfg /rebuild. All to no avail.
I've uninstalled EasyBCD but I still get the invalid boot.ini message. I've deleted the C:\NST folder and the C:\Windows\Boot folder (the one I copied over from W7).
Any ideas what I can try next? I'm out of ideas!