Solved New 7 install on added HDD,Dual Boot XP Pro

[Prospector]

I tried to use a tutorial from your Windows 7 help and support, titled "Windows 7- Dual Boot Installation with Windows 7 and XP", without success. This is a Dell Optiplex GX280 with a possibly failing Seagate drive with Xp Pro on it, so I bought a Western Digital 1TB and a Dell Windows 7 Pro OEM DVD. I did the "7" install first as was recommended by Microsoft but first partitioned (3) the new WD HDD and installed 7 PRO, then read the tutorial, so I unpartitioned the rest of the drive and proceded to "shrink" the remaining to provide a 100 GB partition and followed the tutorial from there. It was supposed to give me the list of partitions on re-boot to choose from and then press F8 to install to that partition, having the install disk in the drive. It instead provides a dual boot option between the two operating systems which are on two separate drives. It offers Windows 7 Pro or the "older OS" but no option to choose the shrunk drive. Do I need to disconnect the old drive to get this tutorial to work?

 

[whs]

You are complicating the matter. Disconnect the failing drive and install Win7 normally on the new drive. Then reconnect the failing drive. Now you switch between XP and Win7 with the BIOS boot sequence.

 

[gregrocker]

If you were planning to dual boot XP with Win7 on the same HD you should have not only unplugged the old HD first, but also installed the OS's in order of age, with XP installed to a partition you created and formatted using the XP installer, then Win7 installed to another partition created and formatted using the Custom install Drive Options given on the booted Win7 DVD. Clean Install Windows 7 Win7 should configure a Dual Boot menu.

If you wanted them on separate HD's (which you don't say, only that the old HD is failing) then you should have unplugged the old HD during install, after install plug back in the old HD, boot preferred OS HD by setting it as first to boot in BIOS setup, or boot the other HD using the Dell one-time Boot Menu F12 key at boot.

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

Hello Prospector, welcome to Seven Forums!


Power down the PC and disconnect the old HDD first, connecting the new HDD to the #1 SATA port of the motherboard and making sure it's set as the second boot device, after the CD/DVD drive in the PC BIOS setup.

If you do want to do it the correct way and install XP first, then install XP to the first partition on the HDD so it will get the C: drive letter so there will be no confusion when installing programs/apps to the XP partition.

After XP is installed and booting good on its own; use this tutorial at the link below to create a partition and install Windows 7 to the created / first partition of the new HDD and be sure to post back with any further questions you may have and to keep us informed.


Clean Install Windows 7 : Ahead of XP

 

[Prospector]

Too many opinions caused confusion

You are complicating the matter. Disconnect the failing drive and install Win7 normally on the new drive. Then reconnect the failing drive. Now you switch between XP and Win7 with the BIOS boot sequence.

Thank you whs, I tried to do my homework and have gotten multiple opinions but disconnecting the (possibly failing drive) was one that I neglected to do. I will add more to the surfer dude's wonderful welcome in the next post.

 

[Prospector]

Hello Prospector, welcome to Seven Forums!


Power down the PC and disconnect the old HDD first, connecting the new HDD to the #1 SATA port of the motherboard and making sure it's set as the second boot device, after the CD/DVD drive in the PC BIOS setup.

If you do want to do it the correct way and install XP first, then install XP to the first partition on the HDD so it will get the C: drive letter so there will be no confusion when installing programs/apps to the XP partition.

After XP is installed and booting good on its own; use this tutorial at the link below to create a partition and install Windows 7 to the created / first partition of the new HDD and be sure to post back with any further questions you may have and to keep us informed.


Clean Install Windows 7 : Ahead of XP

Thank you Bare Foot Kid, In the midst of my confusion, there is one thing that I need to share and find out about. In my Bios, there is SATA 0 and now SATA 1 onboard.The problem that I may still have is this: When changing the boot order, my bios does not list both! It allows you to change the boot order of the one SATA listing. In the "Drives" portion it does allow you to turn each on or off only. Also, I can not find the Microsoft KB article that I was directed to but it basically said that if you install XP first before Windows 7 then something gets deleted by XP and that is why I installed "7" first. My notes are a mess and I have not been able to find the link which I wrote down. Also, I have two days worth of work updating windows 7 and if I do a fresh install again then I have lost a lot of work. I am on a slow dial-up ISP, being disabled makes these things very difficult. Besides, I have not had a good sleep for days with this "mess" that I have been overwhelmed with. Also, Your site will be on my list to read since we serve the same master!

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

Hello again.


When I write #1 SATA I meant the first SATA port of the mobo, some have a port 0 and some don't.


Before you disconnect the "old" HDD please post a snip of Windows 7 disk management for us to look at, to be sure there will be no boot issues when the HDD is no longer connected.

In the Windows start menu right click computer and click manage, in the left pane of the "Computer Management" window that opens click disk management and post a maximized snip of that.

How to Upload and Post a Screenshot and File in Seven Forums




Keep looking up!

 

[theog]

Is this want you are looking for:
System Restore Points - Stop XP Dual Boot Delete - Vista Forums

 

[Prospector]

Yes, I believe that the dual boot delete was the issue that the Microsoft KB article was warning about. I have not yet looked at the link that you provided but now after about 1.5 hours of sleep, I'm ready to get with it, once more.
Thanks,
David
Bare Foot Kid asked for a screen shot and I believe that I have uploaded 2 different formats I hope that I did as asked. This is my first effort
.

 

[theog]

Yes, I believe that the dual boot delete was the issue that the Microsoft KB article was warning about. I have not yet looked at the link that you provided but now after about 1.5 hours of sleep, I'm ready to get with it, once more.
Thanks,
David
Bare Foot Kid asked for a screen shot and I believe that I have uploaded 2 different formats I hope that I did as asked. This is my first effort
.
View attachment 160300

View attachment 160301

1) Remove Disk0 (80gb) & replace with Disk1 (1tb)
2) Setup your dual boot.
3) When the dual boot is working OK, plug in the failing HD & Copy/Paste data.

 

[gregrocker]

Use Method One here: Dual Boot Installation with Windows 7 and XP, after unplugging the 80gb.

Boot XP installer, delete second partition, create a new one there, full format, install.

Boot Win7 installer, install to first partition, it should create the Dual Boot and will be in first position for when you are ready to remove XPired.

 

[Prospector]

I do not want to offend anyone, but I believe that theog's method, especially with the Win 7 already installed, is the way I need to go since I already have 2.5 days of updating the 7 OS, dozens of programs installed or transfered and ready to install, and a huge package of updates to Microsoft Security Essentials finally downloaded and installed via my snail slow dial-up ISP but then to wipe and do a fresh install, is just beyond me. I understand physically moving the drive to the #1 drive slot in exchange for the old, but not yet proven to be failing drive, then put in the second drive space after the new drive is partioned,formatted properly , having the second OS (XP) then up and running. If this is at all exceptable, I want to use my external HDD to do an "ASR" with the new XP PRO install just as I had to do with the one on the old HDD and save weeks of work bringing the new XP PRO to updated status with my floppy "ASR" recovery disk and the same back-up. Malware (OSL2000 boot manager) caused me to do a double re-install of the XP PRO just as I was starting this process, so it's been exhausting already. The boot manager did not provide any way to exit the program and allow the reboot to procede, so I had to wipe the drive and start over, to get it off of my machine and then it would not boot so I had to do it again! They wanted you to buy a licience to get their trash off of your machine! Now, will the "ASR" recovery disk work for me on the new HDD install of XP PRO on the new hard drive?

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

You won't offend anyone, just do what you're comfortable with and that's all that matters.

 

[gregrocker]

You can determine with certainty whether the 80gb is failing by running the maker's diagnostics/repair extended CD scan: HD Diagnostic
Hard Drive Diagnostics Tools and Utilities (Storage) - TACKtech Corp

If you want to proceed to put both OS's on the larger HD: unplug the old XP HD, follow the tutorial Method Two for when WIn7 is already installed, especially Steps 7-12 which will recover the Win7 boot which is lost when XP is installed and add it to the Dual Boot using EasyBCD 2.02.

Sometimes this won't work and requires starting up Win7 again to add XP with EasyBCD 2.02, by marking Win7 Active and running Startup Repair repeatedly until 7 starts.

It isn't clear what ASR you're referring to, however you cannot install an OS to an external HD and making one bootable to install XP is extremely difficult.

 

[Prospector]

You can determine with certainty whether the 80gb is failing by running the maker's diagnostics/repair extended CD scan: HD Diagnostic
Hard Drive Diagnostics Tools and Utilities (Storage) - TACKtech Corp

If you want to proceed to put both OS's on the larger HD: unplug the old XP HD, follow the tutorial Method Two for when WIn7 is already installed, especially Steps 7-12 which will recover the Win7 boot which is lost when XP is installed and add it to the Dual Boot using EasyBCD 2.02.

Sometimes this won't work and requires starting up Win7 again to add XP with EasyBCD 2.02, by marking Win7 Active and running Startup Repair repeatedly until 7 starts.

It isn't clear what ASR you're referring to, however you cannot install an OS to an external HD and making one bootable to install XP is extremely difficult.

The Windows back-up recovery floppy, when used to restore my back-up from the external HDD after the malware incident, was referred to as the Automated System Recovery, I think, or maybe the "R" is for restore, Disk "ASR" during the process, using the ASR option, which is simply what the recovery disk is called as well as the process itself to restore the back-up. I did not know if the restore or recovery disk, some how is encoded with that particular drive, thus preventing me from using it to do a restore on the new XP PRO install and new drive, saving me a great deal of work getting it to where the old drive's OS already is.
I expected and hoped that I would be given the opportunity to discuss why I am not sure about the drive's condition. This is why: I used SEATools fom Seagate to run the S.M.A.R.T Drive test which failed but discovered that it is normally turned off so I turned it on and again it failed! The short and long tests passed. The advanced test warned not to use it without specific knowledge of workings so I did not try that test. I did use Nirsoft !00 tools to do an extended test and did not understand the data that it produced. I believe that I made a copy of that test data if you would understand what it means, or I can easily enough run it again to make sure that I have a fresh set of data for you all to look at. Do you want me to supply that data? I need to know why the SMART test failed. I have added the test results twice but the first time it was not present where I could find it. Text file 500+kb, what am I doing wrong?

 

[gregrocker]

The extended Seatools CD test is sufficient. Run also a Disk Check
on all partitions. If it passes you can dual boot with the old HD if you want to - just keep your files backed up and watch the HD closely, enable SMART.

If you choose to keep the old HD for now: is the Windows-managed Dual Boot menu working correctly, and do you want to keep it or recover the System Boot Files into Win7 so it's HD boots independently via the BIOS?

Or are you wanting to try the floppy recovery disk to install XP to the partition on the new HD?

 

[Prospector]

Smart Drive Test Results

The Nirsoft results shows OK's for most and this time it did the new drive as well. I have run chkdsk repeatedly through the tools menu so that the "F" parameter gets set. I learned that technique after using the command line and realizing that it was running in read only mode. I now always check both boxes and the last few times it has reported after the re-boot that all is well.
This is my problem. It first started giving RAM based error messages saying as it was shutting down that it was unable to write to 0x00000000 and then upon re-boot, most of the tray icons were missing. I found that Maxtor manager's "SYNC" function was a problem with others as well through a Google search. I removed it from both my machines and that particular error is gone. I downloaded and ran 2 RAM testing programs that were similar, one ran 9 tests and the other ran 11. I have 2 new quality IGB modules-800Mhz. and 4 - 512's/ 333/mhz.The states a bus speed of 400, which I interchanged because ever since I bought this professionally refurbished machine, 10 MB of RAM have been missing. 3062, instead of 3072MB. I have 4 slotts and replaced 2 of the 512's with the new 1GB modules which gave me two to interchange but still the same results. Also, I still do not have my icons loading. I used task manager to stop all of the processes of the missing icons and re-boot and get most back and sometimes all I have to do is reboot a second time and get all of them back. It's crazy! Look up at the previous post for the test results. IT won't let me add it to this post for some reason. I found the key of my error. I also just noticed your last question about using the back-up recovery floppy to install XP to the new partition, it that what you asked? It holds 1.44 MB. I would use it after the install to add the back-up in my external drive to bring the already installed XP PRO OS up to where it is in my other drive only. All of the Security updates, programs , upgraded drivers and everything else that I have done to that basic OS so I do not have to do it all over again.

 

[Prospector]

It was rather humiliating when I found that I should have opened that text file before posting it. I am very sorry and will try to find another way to capture the whole document.

The Christal Disk Info 4.0.2 results were: Health Status Good!
Temperature 43 degrees C
All that I can conclude is that the drive is still good but another problem exists!

 

[gregrocker]

Try running this program to get a better analysis of SMART data: CrystalDiskInfo - Software - Crystal Dew World

 

[Prospector]

I am not sure if I took the time to say thanks previously but I am doing so now. I have been upgrading the 7 install as well as looking for the problem with the old drive which still fails the smart test.

I began the switch of the two drives and left the old disconnected as advised. Now, after putting New HDD in slot #1 and then connected to the SATA 0 position on the motherboard as well as the first position of the wide cable, it states: "No Boot Device Available", upon boot-up. Is it because it is not recognised as drive "C"?

I also tried to boot before I turned off the SATA 1 in the bios and it said that there was no drive available, I think, I forgot to write it down, (should have had my second cup of coffee first), so I turned it off and tried to boot again then I got the mentioned error message.