win 7 & xp on dif hdds

Mike F

Member
So I had easyBCD working great. XP is on an older IDE drive, Win 7 is on a new SATA drive. I made some hardware changes and now XP won't boot at all. I replaced a IDE DVD rom drive with a SATA. Replaced the double IDE cable with a single. Also added a card reader/USB internal device. So, all the drive letters were changed. Now I just get the 'ntoskrnl.exe' error whether I boot from easyBCD or make the ide drive the boot drive in bios. Tried deleting and adding the XP entry, no help. Is there an easy way to fix this?
 
Terry, shouldn't re-adding the entry in EasyBCD take care of it regardless of hardware re-ordering?
 
I was thinking it might be a problem with XP itself due to an OS letter change caused by the physical move, rather than a BCD problem.
 
I see the reason for your post #2.
The "I've deleted and added the XP entry" led me to the conclusion that it couldn't be the old troubleshooter problem because that's only a historic failure to do the manual tasks correctly which isn't relevant since Easy2.
If however the OP is still using 1.7, then updating is obviously the first thing to try.
My money's still on a case of XP schizophrenia though.
 
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Thanks for the replies. The easyBCD version is 2.1. I read & re-read the article on multi-booting and understand most of it. It seems most of the solutions require a floppy drive, which is non-existent on my mother board. If you think of anything else that might help, please let me know. If not, I'll probably try a repair with the xp cd.

Thanks again.
 
Ok, I can't believe it, but you guys were right. Put the old IDE cable back in and I can now boot XP from BIOS. Unfortunately, xp still won't boot from easyBCD. A new message appears telling me I should boot from the xp cd and do a repair. Should I do a fresh install of easyBCD? Anything else I should check? Thanx.
 
What's the exact message? And did you try deleting and adding the entry again, post-cable-switch?
 
The good news is everything is working fine again this morning. Yes I did delete and add the xp entry yesterday. Probably should have tried booting xp more than once.

The bad news is I can't tell you exactly what the error message said.

Thanks so much for all the help!
 
Follow Up

I just wanted to report one minor quirk I still have. It is absolutely no issue for me. I'm only posting it in case Mr. Guru or anyone is interested. This only happens if I disconnect AC power to the machine while it is shut down. It never happens if the computer remains plugged in during shut down.

If I choose to boot Windows 7 at start up, everything is hunky-dory. If I try booting XP I get the following error message (wrote it down this time).

"Windows could not be started because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.

Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware.

Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information." (Whew!)

I can just hit any key at that point and it resets and I just boot windows 7 and all is well again.
 
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Check your CMOS battery. It sounds like the BIOS is losing its memory when the power's off.
 
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