EasyBCD worked fine with Win7. Won't work with XP.

J

johne53

Member
A few months ago I downloaded EasyBCD 2.0.2 which I was using to select between two different Win7 partitions. All this has been working fine.

Now I'm trying to use it with a new PC which has XP installed but will also have Win7 eventually. I tried to run the same setup file (for 2.0.2) which seemed to install EasyBCD on the XP partition (apparently correctly). However, if I try to run EasyBCD I just get an error message saying "The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000135). Click OK to terminate the application". I did a standard installation into the default folder, so haven't done anything unusual.

Any ideas, anyone?
 
EasyBCD is a .NET app.
The necessary environment exists by default in Vista/7, but not in XP.
You must install .NET 2.0 SP1 from Windows Update optional extras.
(It won't have anything to do in an XP-only environment, so don't expect anything from it even with .NET at the right level)
 
Thanks for the explanation. I did eventually install Windows 7 (on a separate partition) and I then installed EasyBCD on the Win7 partition and configured it so I can dual boot between Win7 and XP.

The only problem is that EasyBCD seems to have configured XP so that it boots up "through" Windows 7. In other words, the boot loader looks for a boot.ini file on the Win7 partition, sees that there isn't one and then launches XP - with my XP partition named as drive C: and the Windows 7 partition showing up as D:

Although this arrangement works, one cosequence is that Windows XP thinks that it's an unlicensed copy (which it isn't - it's a genuine copy, activated by Microsoft a few days ago). Windows XP offers to "correct" this for me - then takes me to a web page which asks me to purchase a genuine copy of Windows 7!!

Because XP is being booted "through" Windows 7, I believe it thinks that I'm trying to run Windows 7 via an XP license key! Is there a way to ask EasyBCD to configure XP so that it boots up independently, without going through Windows 7 first?
 
That shouldn't matter. Dual-booting XP via the Windows 7 bootloader won't unactivate it.

No matter though, just give MS a call and explain, they'll give you a new activation key for free.
 
To be more accurate, it's not exactly XP which thinks it's unlicensed - but whenever I run Windows Update or MS Security Essentials or something like that, they seem to think I'm unlicensed. Don't know if that makes any sense??
 
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