Dual boot troubles

kwaz67

New Member
I set up a dual boot partition last evening as recommended from another site. I first made a partition of 20gb installed windows 7 from a disk and it worked great. The problem came when i went to reboot and get back to my windows xp partition. The option didn't appear and I spent 4 hours trying to find a fix. One site sent me here stating that a product here may be able to help. I decided to inquire fisrt before i mess up things any more. I can still see the windows xp partition. The drive is a raid drive with two 150gb drives. I have saved the data somewhere else so I could start over but was looking for an easier way out if possible. Of note in computer management in window 7 there are now4 partitons of my drive, the original xp D: , windows 7 C: and one with no titile and staus description of OEM partition, lastly there is one labeled E: which status descripition is parimary partition.

I don't know it that helps or not. Any suggestion would be helpful
Thank you

kwaz67
 
Hi Kwaz, welcome to NST.
Please read the sticky thread, where you'll find 99% of beginners dual-boot problems explained.
W7 creates a hidden boot partition if you leave it to its own devices. This is where all of your Windows boot files will need to be.
In W7 , locate the partition marked "system" in Disk Management. This will probably be your hidden anonymous boot partition. Give it a letter so that it becomes accessible in Explorer.
Download and run EasyBCD 2.0, and use the Add/Remove tag to add a new entry for XP. Don't try to change the disk letter. It knows where everything has to be. Accept the offer to auto-configure boot.ini, and as it does so, it will prompt you to copy the other 2 essential XP boot files across to the root of the "system" partition.
As soon as all three files are there, you should be able to happily boot into XP as an option in the W7 boot menu.
 
Back
Top