Think I made a mistake, can anyone help?

[Groosh]

Hey guys I think I made a pretty dumb move and was wondering if maybe there is a way out of it. I was running windows 7 as my primary OS and shrank the volume and created another 50gb partition to run Windows XP Dark edition. I installed it to the correct partition, but made it NTFS. Now on my C: drive, I have 2 NTFS partitions and I can only boot to XP. I can access all of my files I had used in windows 7, but it is not recognized when attempting to choose an OS to boot from in BIOS. Clearly, having two NTFS partitions on 1 drive is a no-no. Is there anyway to repair this without a clean install of windows 7? Also, I'm using a 150gb HD, the partition with Windows 7 is 100gb.

 

[Jonathan_King]

There is no problem having 2 NTFS partitions on a drive. What happened is that the XP boot loader replaced 7's.

First, mark the Windows 7 partition as active: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/71432-partition-mark-active.html

Then run a startup repair for Windows 7.

Then you will be able to boot into Windows 7. The next step is adding XP to the boot loader. Download EasyBCD 2.0, and add XP. You will need to register in order to download, but it is free.

 

[gladson1976]

You just beat me to it JK

 

[Groosh]

Thanks King. I can't mark the partition with 7 on it as active from xp because it's recognizing my xp partition as the active one. I have no way of logging into 7 to change anything from that end, i'm stuck booting into xp. Anyway around that?

 

[Jonathan_King]

You can mark a partition as active from the Windows 7 installation or repair disc. See my tutorial http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/71432-partition-mark-active.html.

If you don't have a repair or installation disc, you can create one by burning the ISO to a CD. http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/2083-system-repair-disc-create.html

 

[Groosh]

Thanks for the help man...really appreciate it.

 

[Jonathan_King]

No problem, hope it works out.

Let us know if you have any more questions or problems.