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#1
Dual Boot WinXP-Win7 Fail
A bit of history first... Before including Win7 as an OS, I had two WinXP OS installations on separate partitions on my standalone [single] HD. One OS was my day-to-day 'system'. The other was an audio/visual setup. Data files were on another 'single' HD and a Raid10. I did not use a boot manager to switch between the two XP operating systems opting instead for quick/dirty edit of Partition Table followed by reboot [hide/unhide, mark active etc]. Worked fine for me...
Thought it would be easy enough to replace my 'day-to-day' XP OS with Win 7 and hold on to my WinXP AV system which has some legacy XP video editing software I need/use. I was expecting to be able to 'switch' between OS's as before, keeping the two unaware of each other and preventing program 'path' issues. After some hiccups got the Win7 OS in the proper place on the HD [I re-formatted the XP partition from the Win7 install disk] and successfully got it to boot. All was done while my XP AV partition was 'hidden'.
Based on my build notes [this was all done quite a while ago], when booting up the computer the Windows boot manager was displayed. Legacy OS was shown as an option. If I continued the boot into Win7 I could see that my XP OS partition was now unhidden and given a drive letter of 'D'. This caused a reshuffle of all the other drive labels which I had to undo. Gave up and hid the XP partition and modified the Windows Boot Manager to only include the Win7 entries and now it boots straight into Windows.
If I hide the Win7 partition, making the WinXP partition visible and active followed by reboot I get a BSOD after the WinXP splash screen. Using Acronis DiskDirector I can view the contents of the WinXP partition just fine and I do note there is a 'leftover' Boot folder on the root directory with BCD and BCD.log in the folder.
I'd like to get this working so that I can switch between the two Operating systems and not have both partitions visible at the same time. The few troubleshooting things I've tried have resulted in STOP errors when trying to boot from the XP partition [Following the splash screen -- C0000021A; 0x00000407] or booting from XP install CD/DVD ['Starting Windows...' -- 0x0000007B; 0xF78D663C]. I might have things really messed up now [MBR?]. If I had to I guess I could live with Win7 and WinXP on different physical hard drives, but I think what I'm trying to do should be in the realm of the possible.
Appreciate any help/information