Dual booting Windows 7 and XP

Hello. I have looked through the forums, but have not seen this exact problem listed. I hope someone can help me.

I bought a new computer kit last month, and after I got it all together, I installed Windows 7 Pro 64. It has the AMD A8-3850 Quad core CPU, 8gb of RAM, on an MSI A75MA-G55 motherboard, and a 1tb SATA HDD. One of the first things I had to do after installing the OS was to flash the BIOS on the MB. I have everything the way I want it on the computer now, and made a backup image of the C drive.

For the most part, everything is good with Win7. The only thing I don't like is with the sound card. I like to sing Karaoke on a website, but I couldn't get the "What you hear" function on the onboard sound card. So I bought a SB X-Fi XtremeGamer. I have the WYH function now, but my voice coming through the headphones has a lag that throws me off. So I have decided that I want to do a dual boot with Windows XP.

I have read many tutorials that tell how to do a dual boot setup, so I set out to do that. When going into the WinXP setup, I was having a problem with the hard drive. So I decided to reformat the hard drive and install the winXP first, then just install the Win7 backup afterwards.

WinXP saw the hard drive and had me do the partition and format then winxp installed fine, no problems. Ok, one problem. It installed on the C: drive. It didn't give me another option. And I know when I go to put the backup of WIN7 back on, it will want to be on the C: drive also. I have it setup the way I want it, and really don't want to have to setup both OS's again. So I again formatted the HD, installed Win7 again, then installed the backup image. I am back to where I was at the beginning. I partitioned the HDD into 4 separate drives; C:, D:, E:, and F:.


When I go in to install WINXP, the installer sees the hard drive, but it shows the partitions as:

D: Partition 1 [NTFS] 1 MB (278718 MB free)
-: Partition 2 [NTFS] 100 MB (66 MB free)
C: Partition 3 [NTFS] 123327 MB (97131 MB free)
E: Partition 4 [NTFS] 830441 MB (276178 MB free)

The only partition it will let me install it on is C: Partition 3. And that would wipe out WIN7.

So, my question is: How do I get the XP installer to see the partitions, or would it be better to just install another HDD, maybe a 120gb SATA drive, and just install WinXP on that? Would I still be able to do the dual boot that way?

Bare Foot Kid said:

Hello ShdwKnght, welcome to Seven Forums!


You really screwed yourself by forcing a 5th partition and accepting a Dynamic disk; Windows 7 will probably stop booting before long and I doubt you'll be able to get XP installed at all as-is; do you have good back-ups of everything on the entire HDD?

Yes, I have it all the files and drivers backed up on the external drive.

So I am guessing I need to wipe the drive and start again.How do I change the drive from Dynamic to basic?

When the boot disc loads, and tries reading the HDD, it comes up with a message, "This boot cd cannot read Win server".

I'm sorry. The exact words are, "This bootable CD does not support Windows Server."

That was from the Partition Magic cd that you had me download and burn.

No, that was from the boot.

I went into disk management and deleted one of the partitions so that it is unallocated. Then I rebooted the computer and let it boot from the cd of partition magic.