Windows 7 - WinXP / Windows 7 Dual Boot Problem

I have an SATA drive with WinXP loaded. I decided to use a spare EIDE drive to load Windows 7. I have installed Windows 7 with no problems. I never see the Windows boot manager to choose which OS I want to load, but I can load either one by changing the boot order in BIOS. I can see the EIDE drive from XP, but not the SATA drive from Windows 7. How can I get the boot manager to work and let me choose which OS to load?

Actually booting from the BIOS is a better method of dual-booting since the drives are then fully independent and can come and go as you please. You can set your preferred default drive to boot first in BIOS, then use BIOS Boot Menu F-key to choose other drive while booting.

Having the Dual Boot menu which should have been configured when Windows 7 is correctly installed last makes the drives interdependent and harder to extricate one later, although we specialize in that here.

Make sure XP drive is assigned a letter in Windows 7 Disk Management to see it in explorer.

If you still want to configure a Dual Boot menu then please post back a screenshot of your full Disk Management map, using the Snipping Tool in Start Menu, attaching file using paper clip in reply box.

Have you assigned a drive letter to the sata drive in Windows 7?
You can do this from disk management.

I have the same problem while dual booting 2 hard drives,but i think the bootloader can only show different OS's on the same hard drive within a different partition.

Have you tried F12 when loading up to go into boot options (the key may change depending on your system)
If you can set both HD's as active in BIOS (so both HD's show up in the bios Boot Order)
i.e
1. EIDE
2. SATA
3. CD-ROM

I couldnt becasue i have my second IDE hard drive connected via a pci slot with a raid controller/converter and i could only set 1 at a time.

Hello jaxong Welcome to the Windows 7 Forums!

Upon starting 7 up you should be seeing the option for "previous version of Windows" briefly before 7 continues on to load up. You select that option to boot into XP if the older version was sucessfully added into the 7 boot loader.

For seeing access to the XP while in 7 you have to go into the Disk Management tool and assign a new drive letter for XP there. This will see Windows 7 mount the XP drive as a new logical drive. When first installing the 7 beta on an XP drive on the second primary and booting into that the XP primary was hidden from 7 there as well where a quick trip into the DM solved that!

Eventually you will likely end up deciding to simply remove the ide drive and install 7 on the sata however once you have run 7 long eniough. Once XP is seen in 7 you can even set XP as the default OS if needed by going into the Control Panel>System>Advanced system settings and simply bringing down the OS seletor to click apply. Likely you will want to continue seeing 7 remain as the default however.

Hi,

Download EasyBCD 2.0 install it on 7.

Click Add/Remove Entries.

Select Windows 2k/NT/XP/2K3 in the drop down.



Click Add entry.



Let Easy autoconfigure.

First you will need to sign up in order to download the beta version there. The present finished version is the 1.7.2 release available at Download EasyBCD 1.7.2 - NeoSmart Technologies

One thing to note that the EasyBCD tool was written for Vista and will most likely replace the 7 boot screen for the seen for Vista. Hopefully the 2.0 beta has addressed that issue.

While in the startup & recovery section to where you would choose which version will default you can also adjust the amount of display for the boot options screen to stay seen when first starting up there.

It won't replace the boot screen . It is just adding the XP entry and XP bootfiles to the system partition, and configuring boot.ini.

Easy 2.0 has full 7 support.

Works great. If either OS is missing from Easy listings, then Adding it should work.

If not please post back a screenshot of both Easy listings and full Disk Management drive map.

I figured the 2.0 version would eventually support 7 and not see the boot screen replaced once available. But that's still in beta and you have to become a member of the forum over there before being able to download it until the final release.

RogerR is now wanting to remove the XP entry not add it in at this point dissolving the dual boot entirely. If he was adding XP in then installing the updated version for setting a fresh dual boot would have a need for EasyBCD for an easy set up.

Here ya go Nighthawk, Merry Christmas before it disappears off the coast here:

EasyBCD 2.0 Beta - Build 76.exe