WINDOWS Xp and 7 DUAL BOOT SETUP PROBLEM

T

Thksnow

Member
I'm new to this forum and EasyBCD, but I've searched and can't find my situation elsewhere. Sorry if this has been covered elsewhere, but here goes....

I have Windows Xp and Windows 7 installed on two different hard drives. Xp was installed first and I recently installed Win 7 on a new hard drive. I have EasyBCD installed. As long as I have the Windows 7 CD in the CD drive, and have the boot priority set to CD first, it will come up to a Windows Boot Manager screen showing both Xp and 7 as choices. If I don't have the CD in the drive, it will boot directly into Xp without ever showing the Windows Boot Manager screen, just like it did before I installed Windows 7. If I have the boot priority set to the hard drive (either of them) first, it will just boot Xp without the windows manager screen coming up.

When I boot into Windows 7 from the boot manager screen, it loads and runs fine. When I try to boot Windows Xp from the boot manager screen, it boots to an Xp boot screen asking for a password (which I never used when booting Xp before installing 7 in this dual boot arrangement).

I've read the FAQs, and looked at the computer management screen, but still can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Screen shot of EasyBCD:
EasyBCD Screen Shot.jpg

Computer Mgmt screen:
Computer Mgmt Screen.jpg
 
I think I know what's wrong, but i'm new to this too: under "Edit Boot Menu" you need to change where it says "Skip boot menu" you need to uncheck that. But I'm new to this program too!
 
123386761 said:
I think I know what's wrong, but i'm new to this too: under "Edit Boot Menu" you need to change where it says "Skip boot menu" you need to uncheck that. But I'm new to this program too!
Click to expand...

Thanks, but it already is unchecked....


Addendum:


Sorry, but now I have another problem that I'm trying to solve. Thinking I was doing a smart thing, I just installed about 86 Windows and other updates while in Windows 7, using the Windows Update site. After doing this, now when I take out the Windows 7 CD from the CD drive, and reboot, it starts booting in Xp (without showing the boot manager screen, just like before), but when it's booting Xp, it comes to a point where it says something like "This version of Windows Xp must be activated before you can continue....". It's the Version of Windows Xp that I've been using for years, but I tried to go thru the activation process, and it says it can't connect to the activation site (I've tried it twice with the same result).

I'm obviously thinking that something in the updates I did while in Window 7 caused this change in behavior. Why would it now ask me to activate Xp? Also, why would it be unable to connect to the internet (it obviously still can in 7). I think that one of the updates was for the NIC card - could this be something that would cause it not to be able to connect in Xp? Could it have something to do with the fact that I'm running 64 bit Windows 7, and (was) running 32 bit Xp?
 
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The Disk Management screenshot is incomplete and doesn't show all the flags, but I can see that W7 is neither "system" nor "active", so when you installed it, it put its boot files on D (which doesn't appear to be XP as stated in your BCD).
Disconnect your other drives temporarily leaving just W7, then boot the DVD and "Repair your computer" > "startup repair" (three times)
You should find that W7 now boots unaided and has become active/system/boot.
Reconnect the other drives and use the latest Beta to add an XP entry to the BCD. Tick the "auto" box and let Easy find XP for you.
If your XP is a full retail version, any re-activation should go ahead without problems (probably caused by introduction of the new HDD)
Even if the XP is OEM (tied to that h/w), it should still reactivate provided that the h/w hasn't changed substantially. You might need to get a free phone validation code from MS, but they should oblige withour demur if all that's different is a new HDD.
 
Terry60 said:
The Disk Management screenshot is incomplete and doesn't show all the flags, but I can see that W7 is neither "system" nor "active", so when you installed it, it put its boot files on D (which doesn't appear to be XP as stated in your BCD).
Disconnect your other drives temporarily leaving just W7, then boot the DVD and "Repair your computer" > "startup repair" (three times)
You should find that W7 now boots unaided and has become active/system/boot.
Reconnect the other drives and use the latest Beta to add an XP entry to the BCD. Tick the "auto" box and let Easy find XP for you.
If your XP is a full retail version, any re-activation should go ahead without problems (probably caused by introduction of the new HDD)
Even if the XP is OEM (tied to that h/w), it should still reactivate provided that the h/w hasn't changed substantially. You might need to get a free phone validation code from MS, but they should oblige withour demur if all that's different is a new HDD.
Click to expand...

Thanks very much for the detailed response and recommendations. I thought the entire Computer Management sreen would be too large to put in my post, so I just showed part of the screen. I'll add the whole screen shot when I get home this afternoon for info. D is where Xp boots from, but the actual operating system files are on the extended partition (L?) right next to it (this should be clearer when you see the entire Computer Management screen).

Why under the W7 "startup repair" do you say "(three times)"?

Also, any thoughts on why it says it can't access the internet when I try to do the Xp activation?
 
"startup repair" is a trifle rudimentary. It can't fix more than one thing at a time. You'll need an MBR, a BCD and a bootmgr on W7 before it will boot unaided. (leastwise, that's what I assume is the problem not being privy to the MS code.) When you run it, you'll see it actually says "you may need to do this more than once" or words to that effect.
No idea why you can't access the validation site. Is the rest of the net OK, or is it that you can't access anything ?
 
Terry60 said:
"startup repair" is a trifle rudimentary. It can't fix more than one thing at a time. You'll need an MBR, a BCD and a bootmgr on W7 before it will boot unaided. (leastwise, that's what I assume is the problem not being privy to the MS code.) When you run it, you'll see it actually says "you may need to do this more than once" or words to that effect.
No idea why you can't access the validation site. Is the rest of the net OK, or is it that you can't access anything ?
Click to expand...

OK, thanks. That explains it.

Regarding the net access, yes I can access it fine from W7 (which I'm in now), but it just tells me it can't access the site when it tries to go there to validate Xp when I'm trying to boot into Xp.

Here's the entire Computer Mgmt screen, if it helps any:
Computer Mgmt Screen (2).jpg
 
Ah ! a missing disk.
Disk 2 (previously missing from the screenshot) is where the W7 boot files have been hidden.
have you tried simply putting that HDD top of the BIOS HDD boot sequence ?
 
Terry60 said:
Ah ! a missing disk.
Disk 2 (previously missing from the screenshot) is where the W7 boot files have been hidden. have you tried simply putting that HDD top of the BIOS HDD boot sequence ?
Click to expand...


Disk 0, where the Xp boot files are, is what was missing from the original screen shot. Is that what you meant? Disk 3 is where W7 is loaded, not Disk 2 (I think....).

Also, I tried your recommendation, disconnecting all but the drive that W7 is installed on (Disk 3), and booting from the W7 disk. Unfortunately, when I get to the "System Recovery Options" screen, it doesn't list any operating systems. My W7 disk is actually two 60GB SSDs in a Raid 0 configuration. I put the driver disk for Raid controller in the CD drive, and found and loaded the drivers which got me to the screen in which it attempted to fix the problem, then said it had to reboot. I went thru this four times. Each time it gave me the "DISK BOOT FAILURE" error when trying to boot (still with all the other hard drives disconnnected). It never showed the W7 operating system thru all four reboots.

I have no idea what I'm doing wrong. I'm wondering if I should just disconnect everything and reinstall W7.

Any other recommendations you have would be very much appreciated....
 
No I meant disk 2. The one labelled disk2 in your screenshot. With an unlettered "system" partition.

But if this is a RAID config, that's probably why things are failing though EasyBCD has done what you asked.
Unfortunately I don't use RAID in any flavour, so you'll need advice from someone else on that topic.
 
Terry, you seem like an expert around here with these issues. I started with two partitions (180GB[xp] 45GB[win7]) both formatted in ntfs; boot flag on xp pro first; Right after the second boot and restart, I installed win7 which saw the XP pro partition and added to bootloader.

Problem is this, ntldr is missingjfrom the large partition, when I used bcdeasy it claimed it found ANOTHER partition trying to use the ntldr from the \nst\ folder from win 7 partition. Does this sound familiar? I've tried to configure the the bootrec /fixmbr/fixboot/rebuildbcd format, not exactly as typed here either. But I think you understand.

I'm not computer illiterate, so any words of wisdom would be appreciated. My first PC was a sinclair ti-1000 and a C-64, even learned on punch card IBM and MLX, or assembly? wow, what a time ago... I just want a working Win 7 and XP pro with majority drive use. Thanks in advance. I can post anything you want to see, I've changed drives with BCDeasy 2.02, advanced, etc. Maybe I'm not writing MBR when changes are made? Just let me know what you need. I'll post back. Gotta sleep..... Peace...
 
When you installed W7, it detected XP and added it to the BCD automatically. You didn't need to do anything with EasyBCD, though you could use it (edit boot menu) for cosmetic purposes like changing "Earlier Version of Windows" to "XP" or whatever.
You certainly shouldn't be using "advanced" features to change drive letter or anything fundamental, which will break the proper boot chain.
Are you saying that XP will no longer boot ?
If so, just delete the XP entry, add another (using "auto") and don't change anything outside of the standard "edit boot menu" options.
EasyBCD will make sure that all the correct files are in the right places. No need for you to move or copy anything.
 
I'll give it a try, XP boots in dos with the letter E: and in win7 shifts to letter D: But even when it added a new OS, the letter was incorrect, I'll try this again, auto find as directed. One note: It can't find ntldr in either location. (Win7bootletter):\nst\ntldr OR (XPbootletter):\ntldr
 
The letter most likely wasn't incorrect.
The BCD does not point to XP necessarily.
It points to the location of the "system" partition which is where the boot files for all of the OSs in a Windows multi-boot reside.
Users "correcting" the "mistake" which had happened in their dual-boot and then posting here that EasyBCD "didn't work" in fixing it, is one of the reasons that the auto-configure code was added in EasyBCD 2.
The logic of the MS multi-boot architecture is not intuitively obvious, and most of our support time here in the EasyBCD 1 era was spent in explaining it to users as decribed above.
Disk letters btw, are not a fixed physical feature of the HDD partition. The volume label is (it's part of the MBR partition table), but the Windows disk letter is just an entry in the OS registry, a virtual label, unique to the running OS.
Each of the OSs in a multi-boot will have its own set of registry letters, describing all of the devices attached. Any similarity between different OSs is coincidental, unless the end user arranges otherwise by careful planning before the installation and meticulous and early manual editing in Disk Management afterwards.
 
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