Dualboot problem

[melandor0]

Dualboot problem (Solved)

I've had Windows XP installed on my desktop for quite some time and I wanted to dualboot with Win7 for Dx10/11 support for some games. I have three HDD's, with XP installed on "1" and the new Win7 installed on "2", "3" is purely for mass data storage. I decided to install Win7 on 2 without formatting the drive and almost everything went as well as one could hope.

However, Win7 changed the name of the drives (all three are SATA btw) so that now 2 is C: and 1 is D: and XP won't start at all. I tried using EasyBCD from this tutorial: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/8057-dual-boot-installation-windows-7-xp.html

but when I try to start XP it gives me the "NTLDR missing" error. I'm wondering if the problem lies within Win7 changing the drive letters for me (I had no fingers in that happening, I'm sure.) and XP refusing to boot from anything but C:

So I'm asking if there's another solution or how I should go about changing the drive letters without messing everything up even more.

 

[Jonathan_King]

Welcome!

The drive letter change is normal; each OS will change the letter of its volume to C.

Try marking the Windows 7 partition as active and running a startup repair.

Hopefully that will add XP to the boot loader.

 

[melandor0]

Will do, thanks a lot. I'll be back in a while

 

[melandor0]

"Startup repair could not detect a problem"
However, I have two active HDDs in the discmanager, the XP one and the Win7 one. Could this be a problem?

 

[Jonathan_King]

No, that's not a problem. Each hard drive will have its active partition; that is the one that is looked at during the boot.

Now what happens if you remove the Windows 7 drive, and just try to boot from the XP one?

 

[melandor0]

I physically unplugged everthing except the XP drive and XP booted just fine.
EDIT: It's C: again, pretty obviously. But I wanted to say that I noticed that only the Win7 drive had one of those things on it's pins. Plastic cap that used to set slave/master on old ATA drives (don't know english name sry)

 

[Jonathan_King]

It looks like the Windows 7 BCD isn't working right.

Download EasyBCD 2.0 (free, but you have to register first), and install it.

In the Add or Remove Entries tab, create a new entry for XP.

 

[melandor0]

It's working now!
Thanks a lot, 2.0 solved it. (I also had to overhaul the HDD boot order because my PC is speshool.)

 

[Jonathan_King]

Great, thanks for keeping us posted.

Glad it's working out now.

Let us know if you have any more questions.