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#1
Windows 7 dual-boot upgrade killed XP partition
No really, bear with me, its not the usual gotchas.
I read about this a bit beforehand, and followed techspot's basic upgrade guide:
Dual Boot Windows 7 with XP/Vista in three easy steps - TechSpot
My boot drive is a 120Gb Samsung spinpoint, previously one whole partition containing XP. This XP wasnt a clean install, it was an upgrade to Windows 98 I think, and this may be the problem. I have a number of other hard disks, 1 PATA and 2 SATA, which I am using for video editing stuff.
I downloaded GParted, shrunk the XP partition to 76Gb and created a new 35Gb partition for Windows 7. A bit small, but I figured once everything was tested out, I could grow out the Windows 7 partition.
This was successful, and I inserted the Windows 7 disk...selected custom install, and installed to my newly created partition.
Windows 7 did its reboots and I filled in the usual bunff to create basic accounts, etc.
Then I rebooted, and was a bit surprised I did not get the dual-boot menu, it went straight into W7. Using F5 and F8 did not provide any further options, specifically the 'Previous version of Windows' one.
Going into W7 Disk manager, i could see the partition was still there. I read other posts of what W7 does (belately) and yes, it had 'hidden' the XP partition. I gave it a drive letter (D:), but W7 saw it as an empty disk!
I downloaded EasyBCD, and it showed only one entry in the bootloader. I tried to add a new entry, using type:"Windows NT/2k/XP/2k3", but the Drive was greyed out; if I selected "Vista/Longhorn" I could then change the drive to D: and then change type back to XP (odd). I then clicked 'Add Entry', but it came back with an error message "EasyBCD could not locate a copy of NTLDR on your hard drive. Please download a copy of NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM from Htpp://(blah blah) and copy them to the drive D:\ in order for your newly-created entry to work.".
Does this mean my XP partition is truly trashed? Is there a way to get back my XP partition?
I am thinking of maybe inserting the XP disk and repairing, maybe it will detect XP and fix it, but if it will blow away both my installations, I might not bother.
Last resort is to use File Scavenger on the dead partition, but when I checked it out in GParted again just now, it said that 3Gb out of the 76Gb had data, could it be that W7 has just not recognised my original XP partition as an XP partition, thought it was its configuration partition, and just overwrote stuff?
Please, any advice gratefully received...
cheers
Slaybells