Windows 7: Dual Boot Installation with Windows 7 and XP

Hello Acacius, and welcome to Seven Forums.

If you have the option to select from both OS's at boot to startup in one of them, then you will not need to use BCE.

You might have better luck checking the HP site for drivers under the machine model number - instead of chasing down the mobo. It may be specially made for HP anyway.

Ok, so significant progress has been made:

My boot issues with the 1Tb HDD came down to what I believe is my new fancy-schmancy mobo's inability to boot to a single partition that large. I made a 50Gb partition on the drive, installed XP, put it first in the boot order and POOF! It fired right up, alongside an interesting mixture of celebrating and swearing. ;-)

I then partitioned the rest of the drive as a storage area that can be used by both OSs.

I cleaned up my Windows 7 install on the SSD, and now I can boot into either OS by switching the drive order in BIOS.

However, I'd like to do real dual boot via the bootloader, and I'm running into a problem there.

For description, I have the SSD as the boot device in BIOS currently. In my Windows 7 config, I have the SSD as C, and then the WinXP system partition on the 1Tb HDD as D. The storage partition on that drive is defined as H for clarity.

Now, I've installed EasyBCD in Windows 7. I've added a second entry for WinXP. However, it does not let me choose another drive in the drop-down box when I add this entry. It forces it to be C. I could change it in the Change Settings dialog, though. I tried setting it to D (and checked that this took effect by looking at the BCDedit info at the command prompt), but when I select WinXP as my OS at boot, I get an error that a file is missing from the system folder (I assume this just happens to be the first file it's looking for after selection). I changed the setting back to C for giggles, and it gives me the same result. What am I missing? It's obviously something small and stupid, but it's 1:30 in the morning, and for the life of me, I'm becoming tired and oblivious.

Soooo, if anyone can help me overcome this final obstacle, I'll be cooking with gas.
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Edit: Ok, I now realize that I never should've changed the drive setting for XP in EasyBCD to D now...it has to be "C" since that is where ntldr resides. So my brain fixed that little fact for me this morning after some sleep. However, the same problem still exists.

Now, when ntldr brings up the boot options (for just a second), it is listing three XP installs (I think because there are three drives...yes, there is a third hard drive in there, which is just a leftover storage drive from a previous build with no OS on it). I think that the one that it's defaulting to is incorrect -- at least I'd like to make changes to find out. Problem is that Windows 7 won't let me change the boot.ini file...oh, I've changed the settings from read only to being writable, and checked the security settings so that the administrators group (which my id is certainly in) has full control over the file. However, when I go to make a change, I still get the infamous access is denied error. MSConfig in Windows 7 doesn't edit this file, and doing msconfig in XP is going to look at the boot.ini stuff on the second drive, which is not the one I want to edit. And, since EasyBCD created this file with a timeout setting of 1, I don't have time enough to hit a button and select another profile for XP to even see if making the change would work. Aaarrgh! Any ideas?