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Dual Boot Win 7 & XP - XP has stopped loading
2 years ago I created a Win 7/XP dual boot set up using this excellent tutorial: Dual Boot Installation with Windows 7 and XP
It has run faultlessly until now when the default Win 7 still loads perfectly well, but when selecting XP it now boots until the blue Windows XP background screen appears then hangs. This is the screen that would have "Windows is starting up......" on it, but the words don't appear. So, presumably all the basic drivers are loading, but for some reason XP won't launch. I'm assuming this means the BCD software has done its job and there is a problem with the XP installation.
I have Win 7 and XP on different partitions on the same physical hard drive (which has a total of 3 partitions on it). The only thing I have done recently is to resize the 2 non-XP partitions which has meant a small amount of rearrangement of them. The XP partition has not been changed other than "moved" slightly on the same drive using a partition manager prog. The Win7 partition has been altered, and that still works, so I'm assuming this has nothing to do with the problem.
It seems I need to either repair the XP installation or reinstall, which is where I'm becoming tentative as I don't want to destroy the dual boot set up if I can help it.
Can someone explain how I run XP repair from the disc in a dual boot system? When and how do I load the disc? Will it automatically find the partition with the XP installation on it? I know I should (and do) have the DVD drive as 1st boot device in the BIOS, but do I put the disc in right at the start and go through the select OS stages. I'm sorry I'm a little hazy here on how it would work.
If I need to do a full reinstall, can someone remind me, will it ask me the location to reinstall (Should I format the partition first??)
After a reinstall is completed will the dual boot need to be set up again, or will it simply slot in to the current set up.
You can probably tell I'm slightly fishing in the dark, but hope someone can help me out.
Thanks a lot!