I made a stupid decision, and now Windows 7 won't boot.

G

geardawg

Member
I believe the first tab in EasyBCD had two option boxes: one saying "Use Vista Bootloader", and the other saying "Disable Vista Bootloader; XP something", from what I can remember. I selected the last option (the one with XP" in it) and saved. I restarted my computer to see if I was able to boot into a copy of the Mac OSX 10.5.6 installer since I had no DVD writer, but my computer said "Error loading operating system" before it got the the selection screen.

Right now I am in a new copy of Windows XP x64 on an old hard drive. Is there a way I can fix this from XP so I am able to boot back into Windows 7 again?

(If I can boot into 7 using the Windows XP boot.ini file, right now I have my XP hard drive plugged into as the only drive, on the only IDE port. My windows 7 drive is the only drive on SATA port 0, and I have 6 SATA ports. If that helps, could someone please copypaste the boot.ini configuration for this?)

Any help at all would be appreciated. Thanks.
 
Hi Gear, welcome to NST.
Plug your Win 7 disk back in, enter your BIOS, and put your Win 7 disk first in the boot sequence (if it is not already). Then move your CD/DVD drive up to first, so that your Win 7 HDD is directly following. Now insert your Win 7 DVD, save the changes, and exit the BIOS. You should now get a message "Press any key to boot from CD...". So press a key. Once in the setup program, hit "Repair my computer", and then select Startup Repair. Run Startup Repair 3 times if necessary (because it seems to be only capable of fixing one thing per pass), and that should repair the Win 7 boot, and put it back in charge of the boot, instead of the XP bootloader. Oh, and one more thing...make sure not to hit that option again unless you understand what its going to do first before you do it. :brows:
 
Coolname007 said:
Hi Gear, welcome to NST.
Plug your Win 7 disk back in, enter your BIOS, and put your Win 7 disk first in the boot sequence (if it is not already). Then move your CD/DVD drive up to first, so that your Win 7 HDD is directly following. Now insert your Win 7 DVD, save the changes, and exit the BIOS. You should now get a message "Press any key to boot from CD...". So press a key. Once in the setup program, hit "Repair my computer", and then select Startup Repair. Run Startup Repair 3 times if necessary (because it seems to be only capable of fixing one thing per pass), and that should repair the Win 7 boot, and put it back in charge of the boot, instead of the XP bootloader. Oh, and one more thing...make sure not to hit that option again unless you understand what its going to do first before you do it. :brows:
Click to expand...
Oh joy, I just checked my flash drive where I extracted the .iso I downloaded from Microsoft, and nothing Windows 7 is there. Is there just a way to copy someone else's bootloader and just patch mine, or will I be able use XPs boot.ini, or will I have to re-download the .iso again (on a slow free WiFi hotspot (which is slow (and laggy)))? :tongueout:
 
geardawg said:
Oh joy, I just checked my flash drive where I extracted the .iso I downloaded from Microsoft, and nothing Windows 7 is there. Is there just a way to copy someone else's bootloader and just patch mine, or will I be able use XPs boot.ini, or will I have to re-download the .iso again (on a slow free WiFi hotspot (which is slow (and laggy)))? :tongueout:
Click to expand...
What happened to your Win 7 DVD?
The XP boot.ini cannot be made to boot later OSes, because it is not forward compatible, and Vista/Win 7 use a totally different bootloader.
 
Coolname007 said:
What happened to your Win 7 DVD?
The XP boot.ini cannot be made to boot later OSes, because it is not forward compatible, and Vista/Win 7 use a totally different bootloader.
Click to expand...
I never burned the .iso to a DVD, I just put it on my rarely used flash drive.
And yeah, I'm guessing I'll have to go re-download Windows 7 seeing that Windows XP isn't compatible with those other bootloaders.

Thanks for the help anyways, bro.
 
Not to worry. Rather than having to worry about downloading Win 7 all over again, which I imagine would take forever, download our recovery disk instead which is basically a trimmed down version of the Vista install DVD, which contains only the recovery features of the DVD. Then use it to run Startup Repair.
The download should take much quicker than the Win 7 .iso, seeing it is only 120 MiB. :wink:
Once you have downloaded it with a torrent client, just burn it to a CD with ImgBurn.
 
Back
Top