Dualboot problem: Cant regain XP

Win7 force your "E" partition to be recognized as"C" (Vista did same thing)
Try to go to system properties, then in advanced system settings, then to advance, then to startup and recovery and see if you have XP in system startup.

Probable solution:
Try to install XP first on "E" partition & then Win7 on "C" partition...

Hi, it wasnt there, but now fixed thanks to first page of the sticky thread

Sorry for clogging up your forum!

And yes,...
Read this tutorial:
Dual Boot Installation with Windows 7 and XP

Ok, I now would like to swap XP and Win7 partitions, so Win7 uses the first and bigger partition on HDD, and XP uses the small one at the end.

I will have to make another "holding" partition to temporarily ghost XP install to, then put it on E: (old Win7 partition)

Are there any issues with this with the Bootloader etc?

farnsbarns said:

Hi there, great forum you have, I am a comparitive n00b and have a problem as follows:

I have single HDD with
C: XP
D: data
E: empty

I installed Win7 RC to E: and it works great, but now does not give me choice of OS to boot, and E: thinks its now C:

However when I use Win7 or XP install disk to "repair" it shows Win7 still in E: and XP in C:

So I tried BCDEDIT as googled below
Windows 7 and Vista (and XP) Simple Multi-Boot Guide Installing Windows XP :: TweakTown

However BCDEDIT "cannot find file specified", google (in relation to Vista actually) says its because Win7 partition is not active in order for BCDEDIT to work. Windows only allows 1 active partition per disk.

This is what storage manager shows from Win7


So how do I get WinXP back as a bootup choice?

Thankyou for any help

Your posted picture is a 'thumbnail' and is unreadable.

You might get more assistance if the photo were actually readable,

i.e. much bigger than 1019 x 724 pixels...

Fixed, thanks. It worked in the other forum, must use a diff code here or something.

Id like to swap the partitions "XP" and "Win7" via a temp partition to store the ghosted XP.
So Win7 goes to primary partition at start of disk instead of XP which has been on there for years.

Am I going to break anything or will I just have to maybe BCDEDIT again?

What you want to do now requires you to reinstall both operating systems. You cant just move the files to another partition and expect it to work. There are ways to have XP, at least, rediscover its new drive if you insist on going that route but I don't think it's worth the effort.

Just a suggestion but an OS partition doesn't need 200 gigs. I use only 3 gigs for my XP install though I recommend 10. Find better uses for your space.

Also, you can have up to 4 primary partitions per disk. No need to use logical ones. If the extended partition messes up, you lose all your logical drives.

Lastly, to avoid Windows 7 messing up the drive letters by naming the first drive D, install 7 from within Windows.