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Dual boot with XP, partition issues
Hi, I'm trying to do a dual boot with Win 7 and XP. The issue is, I have Win 7 installed first. My partition table looks like this:
Win 7
Win 7 Page file
Win XP
Win XP Page File
Games
Programs
Storage
I used Acronis Disk Director DOS to make the partitions, the Win 7 and XP ones are primary (Win 7 one active), the others are logical. I reformatted the Win XP partition in Acronis and set it as active then proceeded to install XP. For some reason XP decides to install the boot files on the Windows 7 drive instead of the Active one which it is being installed to every time (i.e. it installs the files to E: but points it's installation to C: so it never boots), and as it also screws up the Win 7 boot loader, I end up not being able to boot into either OS.
Now today I tried to format the partition from Windows 7 thinking maybe Acronis doesn't properly set it as a Primary partition or what not, and guess what it did - it completely nuked everything after the Win 7 swap file. That's right, it literally destroyed 5 partitions with several hundred GB of data on them, leaving "Unnallocated space". You can imagine the look on my face.
Anyway - thanks to Active Partition Recovery program I was able to get my data back intact, but this is the last time I handle even the simplest tasks to Disk Management in Windows (I've actually had Win 7 wipe out pre-formatted partitions during installation as well, what's the matter, can't it handle more than 4 partitions? )
So in what way can I set up a dual boot with 7 and XP without having to delete both OS's and install XP first?
Thanks