How to dual boot xp with win 7

n612ua · 21 Feb 2010

Hello I have win 7 on my laptop and want to dual boot with xp. I used easybcd to setup the option to select the win xp or 7 at boot up. I have my xp cd and when I boot to the cd it runs though part of it and bam I get the blue screen of death. I don't get to the part where I can select the partition to install xp on. By the way I have one hard drive but it has been partitioned so I want win 7 on one part and xp on the other.

Anybody have any ideas of why it won't install? I have tried this about 5 times and the same thing.

Thanks mike

Night Hawk · 21 Feb 2010

The first guide for setting up a working dual boot of XP with 7 most here will point you to is seen at Dual Boot Installation with Windows 7 and XP

The guide there covers XP before and after 7 installed. Will the XP primary be the second or first primary. Method Two covers installing XP after 7 there. "Blue Screens of Death" or BSODs however can be caused by different things such as bad memory. You may want to run memtest or another memory stress tester to see if any bad ram is present.

Inspecting the disk for any finger smudges or scratches as well as the use of an optical drive lens cleaner can be a plus. In some cases the optical drive's lazer or the hard drive itself may be at fault having bad sectors or problems with the read/write heads. The present installation of Windows will run fine while writing anything new to the drive such as a fresh install of Windows? runs into immediate problems.

The above are the most common problems resulting in BSODs when trying to perform a fresh install of Windows to be looked into.

Saltgrass · 21 Feb 2010

BSODs when trying to install XP might also be because AHCI to control the drives. XP does not seem to like it. Check your bios and see if the drives are running under IDE, or AHCI.

n612ua · 21 Feb 2010

Basically method 2 is the way I have been trying. After booting the laptop to the xp disk I pushed the F6 key. It came up saying something about not being able to find my mass storage device. I have a seagate 500GB sata hd. Can I download the drivers and put them on a cd and when I get to that point again load that cd?

Thanks mike

Night Hawk · 21 Feb 2010

I was going to suggest if your laptop runs a sata drive not an ide model as seen with the older models the XP installer's F6 option is where you load sata controller drivers off of a floppy or burned to cd at that time since XP lacked generic support. Vista and 7 no longer required the driver disk.

The BSOD however instead of simply seeing the "no drives detected" type message is a bit odd there however. You'll need to look up the chipset manufacturer for that model in order to locate the XP drivers needed. But you may still want to run a few other checks on the items mentioned to confirm or rule those out as a problem.

gregrocker · 21 Feb 2010

You may need this: How To Slipstream SATA Drivers Into XP CD

Leave the target partition unformatted so that XP CD can do NTFS full format, as XP partition table is slightly different.

n612ua · 22 Feb 2010

I did what Saltgrass said changing the bios to ide from ahci to ide that worked kinda. After that it went to where I can pick which partition to install on. Then it started the progress bar not the install page just the blue window where it copies the stuff like sortkey.nls spgrmr.dll stuff. I would say 95% of the files it copies between 81% and 100% would not copy so I had to press esc to continue without using those files. After telling it to skip those files it restated and went to the install window did its thing there. After it reboots it goes thought the windows xp start up and I get another bsod. I ran the disk again and deleted the install. But now it won't let me choose to boot ino win 7 hopefully in the morning when I get home from work I can run repair from the win 7 disk and it will allow me to boot back to 7. If it dose then i'll read the other links and download the driver and try again.

I'll keep you all posted.

Mike

n612ua · 22 Feb 2010

Hello for some reason my windows 7 disk is not reading. When I try to boot up my computer I get this message

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
<windows root>\system32\hal.dll
\please re-install a copy of the above file.

Can I get this file online and put it on a cd and run it from there?

gregrocker · 22 Feb 2010

If you have the 100mb Win7 System Reserved partition, try tapping F8 at bootup to access Repair My Computer console. Run Startup Repair up to 3 separate times with reboots to repair MBR.

Otherwise, you'll need to use the Recovery console on your XP CD to repair the boot.ini first:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330184

If this fails, continue with XP setup until it discovers an XP installation, select R for repair (if given) to repair the XP installation. Afterward, install EasyBCD 2.0 beta after doing quick forum registration to use beta. You'll also need Net Framework 2.0 to run Easy in XP. Add Win7 on Add/Remove tab by name, type and drive letter.

Saltgrass · 22 Feb 2010

To boot back into Windows, you may need to change the IDE back to AHCI...

I think the best way to install XP with Win 7 already installed AND the 100 mb System Reserved Partition is to set the XP partition active as the tutorial from iseeuu suggests. But that will not help the IDE/AHCI situation. If you can't slipstream the necessary XP drivers, you may want to go to the Virtual XP solution.

I tried to load the drivers from an external floppy and could never get them to work.

Edit: I have now been able to install XP using F6 to use the AHCI drivers during the install and changing from IDE to AHCI after the install......I did use an external USB floppy to load the drivers.