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Black Magic with WinXP Boot.ini and Windows 7 boot file
Why Black Magic? Let me get to it.
I had a dual boot Win XP and Windows 7. One beautiful day last week, my Windows XP hard drive seized and is now as good as dead.
The Windows 7 Hard drive works, but Windows 7 won't boot.
I have already tried just about everything I could, so if you think of something, I probably tried it.
The bottom line is that the only documented way to fix this issue would be to go back in time and either install BCDedit on my Win7 drive or perform a clean install of win 7. Which is what I did on another hard drive, by the way.
Now, since my options are limited but I have a perfectly good win7 installation that won't boot, I found this tutorial:
Migrate to Windows 7 from an XP dual-boot configuration | Microsoft Windows | TechRepublic.com
which explains how to "properly" eliminate the WinXP partition from a Win7, WinXP dual boot.
One of the steps, unfortunately, is to copy the Boot.ini and other files from the WinXP partition to the Win7 partition, which I cannot do. Otherwise, there is little difference between my situation and the one in the tutorial.
This is where the black magic comes in: what if I go to another WinXP computer (say, my netbook or an old winXP I have) and copy the Boot files from there, paste tehm into my win7 drive and edit them to reflect a dual boot, then proceed with the same steps as the tutorial?
What do you windows geniuses think? Can it work?
Do any of you have a dual boot winxp/win7 boot.ini code you could post for me to copy?
Thank you very much for your help.