EasyBCD and triple booting.

G

GJohnny

New Member
Hello, Well I have Vista X64 Installed, I installed Windows 7 (7057) on a seperate partition so I have them in multiboot, will installing XP on another partition totally mess everything up or can I do the usual thing and edit the bootloader with EasyBCD so all 3 OS's are choices on startup? :tongueout:

I wouldn't usually go back to XP now but some old games i've been craving to play will not work on 64Bit Vista (or 32Bit for that matter) due to 16bit files and other incompatabilites.
 
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Hi GJohnny. Welcome to NeoSmart Technologies.
Installing XP after Vista (and also Win 7, in your case) will result in needing to run Startup Repair from either your Vista DVD or your Win 7 one after installation (most likely 2-3 times). :wink: That is because the boot code in the MBR that is compatible with Vista will get overwritten when XP is installed (since Windows by default, for some stupid reason thought up by the kind developers over at Microsoft, installs its bootloader to the MBR each time, therefore overwriting whichever boot code was there previously), and also the partition boot record (PBR) on the "system" "active" partition, that is compatible with Vista/Win 7's "bootmgr" will get overwritten with the XP version that is only compatible with the "ntldr" bootloader that XP uses, meaning it will create *two* problems that can only be resolved by running startup repair from your reinstallation disk for either Vista or Win 7. :wink:

Once you get back into Vista, you can then simply use EasyBCD 2.0 Beta to add a new entry to boot XP, and it should work perfectly fine since XP's boot files will be installed to the "active" partition, which will also contain your Vista/Win 7 boot files.

Cheers.

Jake
 
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I have the same question, but my OSX drive is USB. Is this supported when prompted to select the HD drive? I select 82 which should be the USB drive but I get error 0F. is there a different number for USB drives? Also, is there a way to change the darwin boot loader from 2 secs to a longer timeout?

The goal is to eventually get OSX installed on Disk 1, P3 but I have been hesitant to try this until I get the lay of the land as far as how OSX will install without damaging Disk 1, P1 & P2.

Config.
Disk 0 Sata = P1 XP Pro, EasyBCD Primary boot loader
Disk 1 Sata = P1 Vista 64, P2 OS7, P3 Future OSX
Disk 2 USB / Sata = P1 OSX 10.5.2
 
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