Reinstall XP on tri boot sys??

bxmedic

bxmedic

Member
Long story short... I had XP and Vista x64 in a dual boot. Both were on separate raid arrays. My XP array started having issues due to a failing drive. From a backup I restored XP on a new single drive. All seemed well till I realized my backup must have been corrupt because many of my programs wouldn't work. It is now unuseable and won't even boot.

I now have Vista64 and Win 7 x64 dual booting and fully functional I would like to reinstall XP to get it working right again. I cannot wipe it out because that is the drive where the Boot Manager is written.

My question is
Can I delete or move the Boot Manager to my C: drive and if so how?


System drives and BCD settings below if it helps.

 
Last edited:
Hi BX, welcome to NST.
The simplest way to do what you want
Temporarily disconnect the XP drive
Decide what system you want in charge, Vista or W7
Put that drive top of the boot sequence in the BIOS.
Boot the installation DVD for the chosen system, select" repair your computer" / "startup repair"
repeat the previous line enough times to fix all of the boot components (it only does one at a time)

When the chosen system is booting unaided, reconnect XP,
use EasyBCD 2.0 to add entries for the other systems, let it auto-configure boot.ini for XP and remember to copy the 2 other XP boot files into the root of the new "system" partition (it will prompt you with the names)

Disconnect both longhorn disks
Reinstall XP to its partition
Reconnect the longhorns with the chosen system top in the BIOS
You should have a working triple boot.

You can also have a read of this if you want to do it manually.
 
Thanks for the reply. Changing the boot drive is exactly what I wanted to do. Unfortunately I ran into a problem.
I tried the manual method via the power console. When I got to the line
"xcopy %systemroot%\Boot\PCAT\* D:\Boot\ /K /Y /R /H /E /I"
it said "Access Denied"

Is there a way around this?
 
Did you type it like that ? or did you leave spaces in the appropriate places ?
If you can't get it to work, let the DVD do the hard work for you as I described.
 
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