Windows 7: MultiBoot Help Vista and Windows 7

Hello all,

I joined your forum so that I have a knowledge base to refer to while I am exploring windows 7. Any way to the nitty griddy.

I recently installed windows 7 on my primary windows vista machine. I followed the steps mentioned online except for formatting the drive as a simple volume. Instead I just restarted my machine and booted straight to the Windows 7 dvd and away I installed 7 just fine.

Unfortunately for me it took out my boot.ini and I had no dual boot environment. I searched online for a about an hour or two and was unable to find any help other than HOW to make a dual boot. For those who have this problem, your system only boots into 7 when you originally wanted a dual boot vista machine, all you need to do is load your Windows Vista dvd in your optical drive and run the start up repair. This should fix your boot.ini and allow you to dual boot again.

Thought I would throw this out there because I know that I will probably not be the only one who gets frantic about losing their other os.

-jjdemoya

hello jjdemoya and welcome....
the reason you cant load up is because the 200mb partition it makes (im guessing you didnt format before the install) is actually the boot partition....
you need to mount that partition and from there you can use bcdedit (or your app of choice) to chnage it...

Also just throwing this out there, but when I installed Windows 7, it automatically detected Vista and added it to the list for the dual boot. So if you're concerned about losing access to a previous OS (XP/Vista) chances are you'll be OK. You'll either luck out like me and have 7 detect them, or worse case scenario, you'll have to "repair" the master boot record with the previous OS's installation disc.