Win XP/7 Dual Boot

A

AndrewR

Member
Hey having some problems restoring my system. Have two different Operating Systems on two different disks.

Previously I had a dual boot setup with 7/xp on one disk. This worked fine for months then one day I ran out of space for 7 and bought a bigger hard drive. I kept 7 on the smaller disk as my primary OS and after purging xp restored it to the the bigger hard drive using an imaging program. It's worth mentioning that XP was C and Windows 7 was and still is E I suppose.

I had Easy BCD 2.0 detect XP the first time? I load it up... ntoskrnl.exe missing/corrupt. Well I tried restoring the mbr+o track from the imaging program to the new disk and double checking the settings of xp in the advanced tabs. Reboot.

Windows XP loads.. cursor shows up... I have sounds.... it dumps me to a login with just a blue screen with the xp logo and no visible password field or way of bring up task manager. =( Maybe something happened with how the Bios or windows recognizes the drive letter?

Do I need to run both OS's on the same disk or is fine to keep them seperated?

** Quick Update **

I tried using the Win 7 DVD after rebooting to repair my startup it detected a problem on Win Xp
s partition and *said* it "fixed" it. Wonderful. Go to login to Win XP. Same blue login screen with no login form, no task manager and thus no descernable way to get past it. From what I can tell both the imaging program and easy bcd are working... there must be some sort of file missing. I've never heard of this happening before. Really dreading a "in place upgrade of XP/recovery console session" Some file that wasn't copied over properly? One setting in easy bcd I forgot? I'm stumped.
 
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Thanks for the link!

I had originally created/deleted new partitions several times in Win XP before I backed it up with Acronis and purged. I'm considering Option 3 once I find the necessary files for the 98 disk. Though I was wondering if editing the registry entries in XP was possible from inside Win 7. I'm really concerned I'll wipe out the mbr accidentally on the primary disk instead of the one where I installed XP.

Since I ran into a bit of a hiccup my filesystem on xp went raw I'm re restoring and wondering if I should have had the settings setup to auto make XP C again or have chosen another drive letter and set it back afterwards.
 
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Having hardware issues accessing the intended drive for XP (bad power cable splitter/ i/o error when I use the good one even gparted won't detect the disk going to mess around with the other larger disk.

I meant to ask before are there any differences between cloning XP vs using an imaging program such as Acronis to backup and restore it?
 
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A backup image is still a clone of the original, and if it's restored to a different place it will still be open to the same confusion between its registry and its "real" situation.
 
I see. I guess I never thought about it like that.

In any event today I did it! Fixed XP back to how it used to be. After the restore I ran a chkdsk and then attempted a repair install in XP only to not have the option once again. I rebooted assigned the XP partition the letter C (I had restored it to a premade partition that changed letters on me) restored the other OEM restore partition to it's original letter then I opened easy bcd. Rewrote the 7/vista mbr, readded xp noticed they both had boot paths on E instead of their drive letters like last time (though I did some reading NTLDR and the Easy BCD so it makes more sense why they are like that) Then I booted it up and I could login and everything writing this message from inside XP right now actually. The only odd thing is instead of saying Windows XP it said earlier version of windows something that the boot loaded originally said half a year ago. I thought I had edited the entry in easy bcd to say something different. Odd.

At any rate I'm happy everything is working and hopefully I can figure out why this name change happened.

Edit: Now I have a new problem after Win XP installed the new disk reboots into Win 7 all fail with the boot device being inaccessible. I load up the Win 7 Dvd and it shows the partition having zero bytes and recommending I delete the entry for 7 and reinstall the Preinstallation enviornment. Went into XP disk management and noticed XP partition is marked boot and active whereas 7 isn't even marked active. Marked it and hoping that fixed. I get the feeling 7 needs to be marked as boot again but not sure how.

Edit 2: That fixed it. I guess within their own respect OS's 7 and XP both see themselves as the boot disk but both need to be made active partitions within their own system. Handy to know if I ever migrate them over again.

I guess this means dual booting with OS's on two different hard disks is out.
 
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No problems with OSs on different HDDs, my four are spread over two OS drives.
There's an "active" partition per device (or can be).
This is what the MS flags mean
 
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