DUAL BOOT CRISIS

GWilkie · 09 Apr 2011

Ok I am in dire need of saving guys. I have to confess I am really embarrassed to be posting here because I have been in the business for 15+ years and never had something I couldn't fix myself or with a white paper or two.....
I installed Win 7 on the secondary partition of my HP laptop (Core I5 great specs...etc...etc..) today. Originally it had XP SP3 installed on it from work, which I can no longer access, and I have CRITICAL data on my XP drive that I can not loose.
I installed 7 by booting from the disc, and choose Disk 1, and the second partition. It installed fine, but killed the XP MBR I assume. When I run EasyBCD and try to add an XP Entry it tells me that there is no valid drive containing XP. It also seems that the XP partition isn't mounted??? Why in the heck would this happen and Please for the love of God someone tell me that we can fix this. Thanks guys.

-GeekInNeed

jote · 09 Apr 2011

HI GW, when you boot from your win7 can you see the xp partition?

GWilkie · 09 Apr 2011

Nope. I can't see or access it. I had to assign it a drive letter as well in Win7. I thought that would fix it, but I was wrong.

whs · 09 Apr 2011

I doubt that has anything to do with the MBR. looks like you lost XP from the bootmgr. Nevertheles, if the XP partition is still there, it should be easy to access it from Win7 and recover the data.

But before we proceed, I suggest you post a picture of your Win7 Disk Management. Then we'll see.

GWilkie · 09 Apr 2011

GWilkie · 09 Apr 2011

Here we go

jote · 09 Apr 2011

Can you run this program, there is an option to search lost partitions.

Free Partition Recovery Software - Recover Deleted FAT/NTFS/Ext2/Ext3 Partition.

jote · 09 Apr 2011

jote said:

Can you run this program, there is an option to search lost partitions.

Free Partition Recovery Software - Recover Deleted FAT/NTFS/Ext2/Ext3 Partition.

If u find lost partition and you press fix it is posible that mbr changed and windows not boot so you will need to fix the boot again, boot from xp setup cd and chose repair trought xp console, whit commands

fixboot and fix mbr

whs · 09 Apr 2011

Looks like you have Win7 on C and E is wiped out. Was E the XP partition? You must have specified formatting or another installation option when you installed Win7. Else I have no explanation why that partition was cleaned up.

With your level of experience I assume you have an image of the XP partition. If yes, the partition is easy to repopulate. Then you only have to fix the bootmgr.

GWilkie · 09 Apr 2011

This is the part I don't get.... You see here is the original Vs what I have now.

Original:

1 Disk - 2 partitions.
Disk 1 - partition 0 = C: This contained Win XP
Disk 1 - Partition 1 = E: This was empty.

After installing Win 7 I have the following:

Disk 1 partition 0 = NO Letter initially - After reading some I decided to assign it E in the hopes that the boot loader might pick it up. NO luck.
Disk 1 partition 1 = C: now with Win 7.

**Originally my partition with XP did have PGP whole disk encryption on it and was 32 bit, which is why I think it is showing as unrecognized and unmounted... This Win 7 is 64 bit. This is just a guess though.