Win7 is trespassing

after merely thinking about it for a year i finally installed 32bit win7
i have 3 drives
on the first i have 32bit winxp and 64bit winxp on two 31gb partitions
everything was working great
then i installed 32bit win7 on one of the two 65gb partitions i had ready on hdd 2
the unpleasant surprise came when i tried to boot up my winxp
apparently win7 infiltrated boot information on the hdd with my xp systems on it instead of just keeping everything on its own partition and hdd
this opens many questions for me:
should i have unplugged the winxp drive before installing win7 to prevent this?
are there other ways of keeping the systems completey isolated on their drives?
will the win7 installation work if i remove/format the partitions with winxp on them?
will my winxp systems work if i delete win7?

i find it extremely annoying that when i want to use my 64bit winxp i first need to click on older windows in one boot screen and then on another boot screen i select 64bit winxp
i can preselect the most desired option in both screens and reduce counters, but why 2 boot screens in the first place?

heres my boot.ini

[boot loader]
timeout=8
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional x64 Edition" /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN /FASTDETECT /USEPMTIMER
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN /FASTDETECT /USEPMTIMER

and my boot.bak (does this even do anything? i deleted it to get rid of the w7 boot screen and nothing happened)

[boot loader]
timeout=8
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional x64 Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /usepmtimer
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /usepmtimer

my intention is to compare all 4 systems (xp-32, xp-64, w7-32 and w7-64) and then install the best 2 on my 3rd drive for optimum compatibility with all software
can i get everything in order by installing 64bit win7 in a particular way?

Windows NT 6.x migrates the primary bootloader on the primary drive.

If you didn't want this, you should've configured the windows 7 drive as the primary drive in the bios prior to installation.

yeah actually win2k and XP would do the same thing if you weren't careful (the results were not quite as drastic but still frequently not what you expect). Also, it could cause windows to install itself on like drive E sometimes :/

It is and always has been good practice to not have any other drives hooked up when installing any version of windows But due to the dual boot screen thing even more so on W7 it seems, the entore boot loader process is completely different in Vista/W7 which is why it does that.

However, I would keep searching to see if you can't just add your other windows boot to the new W7 boot loader. I'm pretty sure you can, though I can't give step by step details. Need to look up BCDEdit I believe, see if that can help.

where multiple installations of a former os is installed, the windows 7 boot loader will launch the NT5 boot loader.

i will have to look into bcdedit i guess...
but is there no simple known way to fix this?
it should be just a matter of a few values in the appropriate files, right?
boot.ini alone doesnt cut it
boot.bak seems to be only for show
which files do i need to edit and where are they?

BCDedit now edits what used to be the boot.ini which no longer exists in Windows 7.

This is to protect the OS frm malware being able to easily rewrite the boot.ini like they could on XP.

It does make things a bit harder to do simple things but is much more secure.

I assume you want to choose which OS HD to boot via BIOS boot order, or the one-time Boot Menu key given on first boot screen.

You are correct that in order to configure it this way during install, you needed to unplug the XP HD, set Win7 HD to boot first, install 7, then replug XP HD, set preferred HD to boot first, then trigger other HD if needed with one-time Boot Menu key.

This keeps both HD's independent to come and go as you please, whereas a Windows-managed Dual boot interlocks them.

To achieve this retroactively, Mark Win7 partition Active in Disk Management and set first to boot in BIOS boot order (after DVD), power down to unplug the XP HD, then boot into Win7 DVD Repair console or Repair CD, click through to Recovery Tools list to run Startup Repair up to 3 separate times with reboots until Win7 starts. Now you can plug XP back in and boot via BIOS boot order and shortcut key.

yea, so...
i used easybcd to remove the annoying win7 boot screen
my old dual boot appears operational
the thing did it all with the click of a button
some garbage files seem to remain, but they practically take up no space so for safestys sake...
i assume win7 is broken now, but thats no tragedy as the installation is less than a day old with nothing to be lost there...
i wouldnt be surprised if the crazy thing still fired up when asked to though
regardless, will installing my systems with the others unplugged let me swap drives as i see fit?
i mean like take the data cable from hdd1 and swap it with hdd2?
i dont quite understand whats written in those boot files, but seems like the physical drives have numbers, so drives changing places might still confuse the boot file even if i readjusted the position via bios, no?

Just follow the steps I gave above to boot via the BIOS, so your drives can move around as you want.

Since the XP dual boot is on the same HD, it won't interfere with Win7 booting via the BIOS.

But you'll need to recover the MBR into Win7, so follow the steps I gave in my last paragraph above.