Do you have multiple harddrives? If so, I always recommend that each OS be installed on a drive of it's own, while all other drives are disconnected, until the installation is finished. This method eliminates any problems such as you are having now. The primary difference is that it eliminates the need for a boot loader and having to deal with fixing the MBR. You would use the F8 BBS Popup Menu to select a drive to boot instead of an OS.
I do have 2 hds. The 2nd is from my former xp machine and filled with a lot of stuff I'd hate losing but I guess I'll try that after exploring a bit with the fix mbr possibility. Thanks for the suggestion!
Harddrives are cheap, expecially if you get one just big enough to hold XP. To keep from losing anything, it might be worth a few dollars for another. If you got a bigger one, the extra space could probably be put to good use for extra storage.
I shrunk the 2nd partition on the 2nd hd and will try to install xp in the free space left. We'll see how it goes. I should get a new hd anyway as this one is fairly old.
Trying it on the 2nd hd didn't work either. I must be doing something wrong that I don't see, or maybe the mbr situation has everything messed up. I've ordered a new hd and will do a clean XP install on that. Thanks everyone for your replies and help! Really appreciated.
Assuming that second drive is good, and you attempted to install XP on it, while it is the only drive connected, I fail to understand what the problem is. If it does have to do with a previous installations MBR being on it, there are programs, like this one:
Free Erase MBR (Master Boot Record), Delete all partitions, Clear MBR Virus - Super Fdisk
There are others, I just picked the first one on the Google search. If you erased the MBR, I can't imagine why there would be an installation problem, other than some kind of user error, and a new harddrive won't fix that.
I tried it both with the 1st hd connected and not connected. I am nervous about erasing the mbr. Would I do it with both drives connected? I know I have the backup disk image for Win7 on disk 1, but what happens when you erase the mbr? Does it just get remade? On disk 1 as well as disk 2? Also, the image of Win7 is stored on disk 2. Just checked your link Seekermeister, and see that all partition information is erased too. I have too much data on these drives from my old XP to do that. I think I'll wait for the new hd, do a clean xp install on it alone and then try to dual it with the Win7 hd. Will this be possible?
Last edited by piiax; 15 Feb 2010 at 07:44.
No, I would not connect the W7 drive while erasing the MRB of the other drive, to eliminate any possibility of something going wrong. If there is any data in other partititons of the drive, copy/backup the file elsewhere. That way, you should be able to work with the drive without fear. I did not read the details, but I'm fairly sure that program that I linked would be run on boot, now from an operating OS.
OK. I can move all the files to disk 1, redo an image to disk 1 and then try fixing disk 2. I'll let you know.
Back again. I ran Super FDisk at first with both drives connected just to see what it would say, with no intention of making any changes. There were lots of partition errors on both disks like the partitions were beginning where they weren't supposed to. So I got out, disconnected drive 1, fixed drive 2 by removing partitions and mbr, and finally XP installed without problem. Then when I reattached drive 1, the bios set up so that the xp drive was #1 and loaded without my being able to access the drive with Win7. My gigabyte mb's bios allows you to save different versions, so I reinstalled the original bios settings and now Win7 drive came up 1st. Yea! Then, and here's where things got messed up again, I used EasyBCD to write a new mbr to load XP. First I saved it as the 'O' drive because that was the letter given to the drive when I loaded 7's partition manager. When I rebooted I was given the choice of 7 or xp as expected, but when choosing xp there was an error, it couldn't load and asked if I wanted to try to repair using the install disk. So maybe it wanted to be 'C' drive and I tried that with EasyBCD. That gave me a no hal.dll error, can't load. So what do I do now?
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