Oops.. Urgent help required please! <NOW SOLVED THANK-YOU>
Before I started fiddling today I had already had a dual boot Win7, WinXP setup using EasyBCD. Although I had never booted WinXP (last week I reinstalled everything from scratch) So today I thought I would give my WinXP partition a go, do my updates, etc. etc. However WinXP booted, got to the Welcome screen but hung before selecting a user account..
Before writing anything else let me explain how my drive was partitioned;
SDA1 Win7 60GB Primary+Active,
SDA2 WinXP 20GB Primary,
SDA3 Data 100GB Logical,
leaving approx 60GB unpartitioned (250GB Drive)
I concluded there was a problem with WinXP itself, so I decided to reinstall WinXP. However before doing so I stumbled upon this thread and wondered if I could achieve the same outcome without reinstall Win7? - http://superuser.com/questions/3065...ng-partitions-so-they-appear-as-c-for-each-os
I proceeded to bump SDA1 over 200MB, create a new SDA1 partition (system volume) so my partitions are now looking like this:
SDA1 System Volume Primary+Active (WinXP's NTLDR, Boot.ini & NtDetect.com copied across),
SDA2 Win7 60GB Primary,
SDA3 WinXP 20GB Primary,
SDA4 Data 100GB Logical.
Then I reinstalled WinXP, done all my updates etc. WinXP is now perfect and I'm happy with it, HOWEVER(!) it wasn't just a case of Booting from the Win7 install DVD to recreate/repair Windows 7's Boot Record..
No installations are visible, so I went to command prompt and started battering away with commands...
I tried ;
bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
<rebooted, no change>
<booted W7 install DVD, command prompt>
bootsect /nt60 all
<rebooted, nothing, wouldnt boot at all>
<Obviously this command was a mistake.. Acronis Disk Director then told me that "file system error, file records corrupted">
So then I deleted and recreate SDA1, copy over WinXP's three boot files again and I'm now looking for assistance before I do any more damage please.
I can access Windows XP fine, I even tried to install EasyBCD into WinXP but obviously the wrong bootloader (XP's) is there so EasyBCD cannot work with that.
Assistance urgently required! - Thank-you in advance!
EDIT : Solved. I figure it out myself once I managed to get EasyBCD running from Windows 7..
Basically you have a boot drive (in my example above SDA1) on the boot drive you need to have the following directories;
\Boot\BCD (containing Win7 boot files)
\NST (containing WinXP boot files)
However my boot drive is not set to ACTIVE.. My SDA2 Win7 drive is ACTIVE..
EasyBCD settings are as follows;
C:\
Win7 drive <SDA2>
\Windows\System32\Winload.exe
C:\
WinXP drive <SDA3>
\NST\ntldr
F:\Boot\BCD <Boot Drive SDA1>
Then I just hid certain drives using the DiskPart command. The hidden drives are.. the Boot drive <SDA1> and partitions <SDA2 and SDA3> from each other, thus when your in XP you cant see 7 and vice versa.
Before I started fiddling today I had already had a dual boot Win7, WinXP setup using EasyBCD. Although I had never booted WinXP (last week I reinstalled everything from scratch) So today I thought I would give my WinXP partition a go, do my updates, etc. etc. However WinXP booted, got to the Welcome screen but hung before selecting a user account..
Before writing anything else let me explain how my drive was partitioned;
SDA1 Win7 60GB Primary+Active,
SDA2 WinXP 20GB Primary,
SDA3 Data 100GB Logical,
leaving approx 60GB unpartitioned (250GB Drive)
I concluded there was a problem with WinXP itself, so I decided to reinstall WinXP. However before doing so I stumbled upon this thread and wondered if I could achieve the same outcome without reinstall Win7? - http://superuser.com/questions/3065...ng-partitions-so-they-appear-as-c-for-each-os
I proceeded to bump SDA1 over 200MB, create a new SDA1 partition (system volume) so my partitions are now looking like this:
SDA1 System Volume Primary+Active (WinXP's NTLDR, Boot.ini & NtDetect.com copied across),
SDA2 Win7 60GB Primary,
SDA3 WinXP 20GB Primary,
SDA4 Data 100GB Logical.
Then I reinstalled WinXP, done all my updates etc. WinXP is now perfect and I'm happy with it, HOWEVER(!) it wasn't just a case of Booting from the Win7 install DVD to recreate/repair Windows 7's Boot Record..
No installations are visible, so I went to command prompt and started battering away with commands...
I tried ;
bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
<rebooted, no change>
<booted W7 install DVD, command prompt>
bootsect /nt60 all
<rebooted, nothing, wouldnt boot at all>
<Obviously this command was a mistake.. Acronis Disk Director then told me that "file system error, file records corrupted">
So then I deleted and recreate SDA1, copy over WinXP's three boot files again and I'm now looking for assistance before I do any more damage please.
I can access Windows XP fine, I even tried to install EasyBCD into WinXP but obviously the wrong bootloader (XP's) is there so EasyBCD cannot work with that.
Assistance urgently required! - Thank-you in advance!
EDIT : Solved. I figure it out myself once I managed to get EasyBCD running from Windows 7..
Basically you have a boot drive (in my example above SDA1) on the boot drive you need to have the following directories;
\Boot\BCD (containing Win7 boot files)
\NST (containing WinXP boot files)
However my boot drive is not set to ACTIVE.. My SDA2 Win7 drive is ACTIVE..
EasyBCD settings are as follows;
C:\
Win7 drive <SDA2>
\Windows\System32\Winload.exe
C:\
WinXP drive <SDA3>
\NST\ntldr
F:\Boot\BCD <Boot Drive SDA1>
Then I just hid certain drives using the DiskPart command. The hidden drives are.. the Boot drive <SDA1> and partitions <SDA2 and SDA3> from each other, thus when your in XP you cant see 7 and vice versa.
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