Dual Boot Installation with Windows 7 and XP

Almost clear to me the tutorial, before I instal BCE, Like to comment this:
I have in one HD Win7 and in another HD XP. To instal the win 7 I take out the XP HD. Then conect both and via the boot in bios I use win 7 or XP selecting the HD (XP) or HD (Win7). I think I have to aply the second method, correct? and in step 15, method 2, says " reinstal the vista bootloader" in my case I think this is not valid?? wilb be "reinstal the win7 bootloader"? or what?
I appreciate your help
Best regards

Brink said:

Hello Acacius, and welcome to Seven Forums.

If you have the option to select from both OS's at boot to startup in one of them, then you will not need to use BCE. :)

Hello Brink
Thanks for your quickly answer, with your advise I will continue selecting the OS via the boot.
Best regards

Grez said:

Ok, so significant progress has been made:

My boot issues with the 1Tb HDD came down to what I believe is my new fancy-schmancy mobo's inability to boot to a single partition that large. I made a 50Gb partition on the drive, installed XP, put it first in the boot order and POOF! It fired right up, alongside an interesting mixture of celebrating and swearing. ;-)

I then partitioned the rest of the drive as a storage area that can be used by both OSs.

I cleaned up my Win7 install on the SSD, and now I can boot into either OS by switching the drive order in BIOS.

However, I'd like to do real dual boot via the bootloader, and I'm running into a problem there.

For description, I have the SSD as the boot device in BIOS currently. In my Win7 config, I have the SSD as C, and then the WinXP system partition on the 1Tb HDD as D. The storage partition on that drive is defined as H for clarity.

Now, I've installed EasyBCD in Win7. I've added a second entry for WinXP. However, it does not let me choose another drive in the drop-down box when I add this entry. It forces it to be C. I could change it in the Change Settings dialog, though. I tried setting it to D (and checked that this took effect by looking at the BCDedit info at the command prompt), but when I select WinXP as my OS at boot, I get an error that a file is missing from the system folder (I assume this just happens to be the first file it's looking for after selection). I changed the setting back to C for giggles, and it gives me the same result. What am I missing? It's obviously something small and stupid, but it's 1:30 in the morning, and for the life of me, I'm becoming tired and oblivious.

Soooo, if anyone can help me overcome this final obstacle, I'll be cooking with gas.
__________

Edit: Ok, I now realize that I never should've changed the drive setting for XP in EasyBCD to D now...it has to be "C" since that is where ntldr resides. So my brain fixed that little fact for me this morning after some sleep. However, the same problem still exists.

Now, when ntldr brings up the boot options (for just a second), it is listing three XP installs (I think because there are three drives...yes, there is a third hard drive in there, which is just a leftover storage drive from a previous build with no OS on it). I think that the one that it's defaulting to is incorrect -- at least I'd like to make changes to find out. Problem is that Win7 won't let me change the boot.ini file...oh, I've changed the settings from read only to being writable, and checked the security settings so that the administrators group (which my id is certainly in) has full control over the file. However, when I go to make a change, I still get the infamous access is denied error. MSConfig in Win7 doesn't edit this file, and doing msconfig in XP is going to look at the boot.ini stuff on the second drive, which is not the one I want to edit. And, since EasyBCD created this file with a timeout setting of 1, I don't have time enough to hit a button and select another profile for XP to even see if making the change would work. Aaarrgh! Any ideas?

Well, I've solved my issue(s) here, and thought I'd update everyone on how I made things work. As I mentioned before, dual boot wasn't working because the ntldr boot.ini made by EasyBCD saw three potential partitions for XP, selected the wrong one as default, and set the timer to 1. Therefore, I had no time to change to one of the other potential choices to try it out. Also, the file was not accessible for modification no matter what security settings I had set for it or whether I unmarked it as read only.

So, to the solution: I realized that since I'd installed XP on a physically separate hard drive, it would not regard the boot.ini file on the drive I normally use for boot as a protected file. So, I changed the drive order in CMOS again, manually booting into XP. From there, I was able to open up the boot.ini file on the other drive, change the default selection to the second choice (which ended up being the right one), and the timer to 15 seconds (just in case I needed to manually play around with the thing). I saved, went back into CMOS, changed the boot order back like it was, and tried it out. Now, it works perfectly! Once I had that verified, I went back into XP and edited the boot.ini file to have a timer setting of 1 again, and now it fires up quickly and painlessly. Whew!