win 7 not booting in XP system

Hi

I have installed windows 7 beta on my windows XP machine,SATA hard disk. Issue: Unable to boot into win 7. XP boots fine.

C:\ had XP. Installed windows 7 to F:\ drive.

After installing I could boot into windows 7 and could work on it.
Later i found that windows 7 would boot (with the windows 7 boot manager) only when the windows 7 installation disc was on dvd drive.Otherwise only XP is shown in the boot selection menu - the standard old menu.

Now, even with the dvd, it does not boot into win 7. Instead it goes to the win7 install screen. But the installed files are still there in F drive. So, tried repair in win 7 for start up, but no problems were found.

Tried easyBCD from within XP, but that didnt help booting to win 7.

One peculiar thing I noticed is, although I installed win 7 to F: drive, when seen from within win 7, the installation drive was shown as C: drive. In reality the C:\ drive contains the xp installation. From within win Xp, win 7 installation files are in F: drive only. Is this the problem?

Now how do i boot into windows 7? Will adding some lines to boot.ini help in getting the windows 7 to the OS choice list?

Thanks.

Configured EasyBCD from within XP, but there is no effect in boot.ini of XP.

Code:

EasyBCD: 
There are a total of 2 entries listed in the Vista Bootloader. 
Bootloader Timeout: 5 seconds. 
Default OS: Windows 77 

Entry #1 

Name:  Windows 77 
BCD ID:  {default} 
Drive:  F:\ 
Bootloader Path:  \Windows\system32\winload.exe 
Windows Directory:  \Windows 

Entry #2 

Name:  Microsoft Windows XP 
BCD ID:  {ecadfcf8-0c24-11de-bd80-00221561b6f3} 
Drive:  C:\ 
Bootloader Path:  \NTLDR

/******************************/

Code:

Boot.Ini 
[boot loader] 
timeout=3 
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS 
[operating systems] 
C:\CMDCONS\BOOTSECT.DAT="Microsoft Windows Recovery Console" /cmdcons 
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

windows 7 like Vista uses a new boot manager, when you installed W7 onto a seperate drive all the info for it to boot is on the seperate drive...

if you were to install it onto the same drive as WXP but a different partition on that drive then all the info for booting W7 would go onto
the same partition as WXP is on, running EASYBCD on W7 would allow you to set it up so either OS could be selected at boot time...running EASYBCD on WXP with W7 installed on a different drive does nothing to the
W7 bootmgr...therefore your issue....

you can boot your W7 by selecting to boot from that disk in your bios...
then select the WXP disk in the bios when you want to boot WXP....

and/OR you could create another primary partition on the WXP disk, install
W7 onto it, then use EASYBCD on W7 and set it up and you will get
the dual boot screen from the W7 bootmgr....

I am basically just explaining what many others have already stated in many topics in here....do a search on dual-boot and you'll see how it
works....on a seperate drive W7 creates a 200mb partition on it's disk for it's bootmgr info, on a partition of a drive with an existing OS on partition 1(ie WXP) it will place the bootmgr info on the partition 1 of the drive...

Hope this helps...

Thanks for your replies.
I have done lot of reserach on this....you were the first to tell me EasyBCD works from win7 only...phew! And just yesterday i reinstalled for the 2nd time only to see the same problem occur!

I did do the repair with installation disc but it reported that no problems were found.

As for the other solution, how do you create a primary partition on the XP partition? Can that be done during win7 setup? XP installation is of concern to me...

They gave excellent advice. To sum it up easily:

Use your bios to make your drive F:\ that is from XP (where you installed 7) the default booting hard drive.

It should now boot into 7. If you can't see your XP drive in 7, follow what Limneos says. Then use either EasyBCD or VistaBootPro 3.3 to add your XP to the Win7 boot manager.

Done. Everytime you start or reboot your PC, you should be presented with an option to choose Win7 or XP.

Hope it helps. If any further problems, or need help with the app(s), post back.

VistaBOOTPro was a ripoff of the EasyBCD tool by someone who had worked on it along with the chief programmer. When Vista was first out I came across that little bit of info having first seen VistaBOOTPro and then EasyBCD. EasyBCD turned out to be far better only to learn about that one.

The idea of seeing EasyBCD installed on XP is not to edit anything but can be used to restore the Vista or 7 mbr if either can't be booted into. It's a graphical replacement for the BCD editor already seen in both Vista and 7 already.

For seeing 7 complete the installation some information is needed on the XP drive as far as that being another sata or ide? If an ide drive and plugged in while 7 was going on the 7 mbr and boot files would have been placed at the XP root with 7 seeing that as the boot sector and unavailable until going into the Disk Management tool to see the XP primary mounted and assigned a logical drive letter like D while 7 would see itself as C.

If both drives are sata the likelihood is that the 7 can't finish until booting from the second drive where the setup files as well as mbr entries are seen. You would set that as the default boot drive later copying the XP boot files over and editing 7's BCD file there once the installation completed itself.

even i got a similar problem
I had Windows 7 installed on my PC
After that i installed XP on my PC
Now Windows 7 is not booting
how do i recover the bootloader of Windows 7?