Font(s) fouled up

[seekermeister]

Where you went wrong was in not leaving both drives exactly as they were after installing XP, and choosing which OS to boot by choosing which harddrive to boot from with the F8 BBS Popup Menu, instead of changing anything in the MBR of either drive. If it were me, I would leave well enough alone on the W7 drive...assuming that you can boot properly to W7, and then try booting to the XP drive by the way that I described, or by changing the boot priority in the BIOS. If you can still boot to XP with one of these methods, then leave things as they are, if not, start over with the procedures that you used to get XP installed before, and leave it alone.

 

[piiax]

I remembered your saying about F8 and bbs so I tried f8 first and it listed 'choose os' but there was only one choice, xp. Bbs is the safe mode menu? How do you implement seeing both drives in that menu?

 

[seekermeister]

It sounds as though you got the XP boot loader, instead of the BBS Popup Menu, since it only listed XP and not Windows 7 also. I assume that you have the XP drive listed as the 1st boot device in the BIOS boot priority to get to this one, instead of the one in Windows 7. It should work just as well as the BBS Popup Menu, but to be able to select either OS, you need to put your preferred OS's harddrive first in boot priority, and only use the F8 to switch to the other. No, it doesn't need Safe Mode to work. It varies with the motherboard/BIOS, but on mine, I start tapping F8 even before the first BIOS screen appears, and it has a message at the bottom of the screen (on one of my machines, this appears in the lines listing drive detection) that alerts me that it has been set. If you don't see this on the first BIOS screen, then Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart the system and try again.

EDIT: The Windows boot loader is white on black, the BBS Popup Menu is black on blue (in my system)

 

[piiax]

Gigabyte lets you save up to 7 versions of the bios for different settings, probably mostly for people who hot-rod their computer. I pulled the plug on disk 1 (with Win7) and XP loaded without difficulty. Nothing was wrong with it. So I just did the bios choice of which hd loads 1st, one for 7 and one for XP. It's a little clumsy. You only get the possibility of loading the screen after pressing 'del', as far as I can tell on my mb. But it gets the job done! In the back of my mind I feel as if EasyBCD could fix the mbr to do this if I just knew the right way to set it. So problem 95% solved. Thank you very, very much Seekermeister!

 

[seekermeister]

It is quite possible that EasyBCD can make it the way that you want, but I'm not sharp enough to know how to make it work. If you really want a boot loader, there are third party boot loaders that would do the job, or you can wait for someone else to reply, who knows how to edit the BCD properly. Personally, I don't find my method too clumsy, because I don't change OSs all that often anyway, and using the BBS Popup is just as fast as the Windows boot loader. Plus it eliminates the possibility of something going wrong with the boot loader and losing access to both OSs at the same time.

 

[piiax]

I do a lot of graphic work with Adobe Photoshop CS2 and InDesign CS2 and they and various pluggins will not work in Win7 so I'll be back and forth a lot, not wanting to spend the money to upgrade yet. As long as this works I'll get used to it, and you seem to being saying it's safer to use the bios method to switch.

 

[seekermeister]

Thinking about what you said about using "Del" instead of F8, makes me think that you entered the BIOS, not the BBS Popup Menu to select drives. That would be a bit clumsy to do on a regular basis. If F8 doesn't work for you, try the other F keys, because one of them should work. I tried to Google which key to use on Gigabyte, but it appeared that there might be a variety. Since you didn't fill out your system specs, I wouldn't know what motherboard that you have, or to checkout the F keys. It may be a bit of a hassle to locate it, but in the long run it would save time.

 

[piiax]

It's the f12 key that loads the choice screen AFTER del, but that loads the choice of which piece of hardware you want to use to first try to boot, e.g. floppy disk, BEFORE del. I tried dancing on the f keys once but no luck, but I'll keep trying. I too searched "gigabyte AND bbs" but no luck yet. I'll look more this evening; have to start thinking about work. I have the MA790XT-UD4P mb.