Trying to Manually fix dual boot

N

nylla

Member
After reading this forum for hours, I must say you people doing the answering sure have a lot of patience.:smile:

My problem is: new Win7 system, two hard drives, thought I'd be safe and unplug Win7 hard drive before installing retail XP Home cd. When easyBCD gave me the "Failed to detect a valid installation of windows nt-2003" msg, then I came here and found out I should not have unplugged my win7 hard drive. Too late now. Read and read. Decided all I needed to do was copy the boot.ini, ntldr and ntdetect.com files to the "system" partition. I did that.

Then I editted boot.ini to look like this

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

The only thing I changed was from "rdisk(0)" to "rdisk(1)", in two places

easyBCD still gives me the "failed to detect a valid installation" msg.

XP Home will boot and run if I unplug the win7 hard drive. I'm using the version 2.0.2.117 of easyBCD.

What else do I need to do? Seems like I should have to change "multi(0)disk(0)" but I don't know anymore and my eyes are crossed. tia
 
Thanks, Terry. The beta found my xp and now I'm dual booting.

Can I now remove the drive letter I assigned to the System partition? It just seems a little dangerous having drive letter access to that partition.

thanks
 
If you wish.
You can always reassign a letter if you need to access anything in future.
 
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