getting XP Pro & Win 7 to dual boot

iockus

Member
I have two HDDs, one (0) has XP on a single partition and I have just installed Win 7 on a partition on second (1) HHD.

Both are working fine but I have to reboot and repair each time I want to change OS and I have been going around the houses trying to sort this out.

I upgraded EasyBCD from 1.7 to2 after reading the forum and this makes it easier to reset the boot options but once I leave xp I have to repair.

After I installed Win 7 disk management shows the 2nd partition on HDD2 as C drive (while was E) while the old C drive is changed to 'D' drive. If I do this in XP C drive remains as C.
HDD 1 (or 0 in reality) is the system drive.

There is obviously something simple not happening although it maybe the user that is simple.

any help to get these two working together would be much appreciated
 
Hi iockus, welcome to NST.
Boot into W7
EasyBCD 2.0 / Diagnostics / Change boot drive
Point it at C: (the W7 partition)
Reboot
Intercept at the BIOS spash screen, enter BIOS setup and make W7 HDD 1st in the HDD boot sequence.
Continue into W7
EasyBCD 2.0 / add-remove / Windows / XP dropdown / Add
Accept the offer to auto-configure the XP boot files
Don't change the XP drive. EasyBCD knows what to do.

You should have a working dual-boot.
Leave the W7 disk 1st in the BIOS boot sequence

Don't worry about disk letters, they're just registry entries on the runnning system, not physical entities like the disk label. It's perfectly normal (and healthy) for each running OS to see itself as C: and the other OS as something different
 
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