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WIN 7 corrupting XP HD in dual boot system
My transition to WIN7 has been a long process, primarily because my Layla 24 sound card has had driver problems that are about to be resolved. I installed WIN7, it was on a separate 80 gig HD and I left a 2nd 80 gig HD there for my XP, so I'd have a dual boot system. I tend to have lots of Acronis image files for each time I change something on my boot HD. After installing WIN7, I had to abandon using it because of driver problems.
In the mean time I've created lots of image files for my XP HD. When you install WIN7, if it sees an XP installation it automatically creates a boot menu so you can choose either WIN7 or XP. If you revert the XP HD to a pre WIN7 image then you can't boot to WIN7, because it puts the boot info files and changes to the MBR on the XP HD, which a pre WIN7 XP HD doesn't have on it.
WIN7 can fix this by putting in the WIN7 install CD and choosing repair computer and then choose fix startup problem. It takes 3x of doing this process until you can actually boot to WIN7 again. I then use Easy BCD in WIN7 to alter the startup boot menu.
Now here's the problem. Somehow it corrupts the XP HD by fixing the startup problem. Now Sonar, my audio recording software almost immediately crashes with a MS Visual C+++ run time error, shortly after opening Sonar. I then went a ahead and uninstalled my sound card driver and Sonar and then reinstalled my sound card driver and then Sonar. I still have the same crashing problem.
Has anyone had similar problems and found a solution? I wish I could change WIN7 so it would put all the MBR boot info on it's own HD instead of the XP HD. I wonder if using one HD and installing WIN7 on a partition would help? I made tons of changes to WIN7, so I'd hate to have to completely start over with a clean install. Whenever I revert to an old Acronis XP image I also restore the MBR, I wonder if not doing that would enable WIN7 to still have a boot menu?
Any suggestions?