Dual Boot Installation with Windows 7 and XP

Yep, that's me.

You could use a HDD benchmarking program like below to see what the HDD is running at.

HD Tune website

OR

CrystalDiskMark - Software - Crystal Dew World

Brink said:

Yep, that's me.

You could use a HDD benchmarking program like below to see what the HDD is running at.

Hi Shawn.

Thanks. I looked into all that but in the end returned the SSD for a refund.

I was used to having two disks in each of notebooks, one for the system and the other data. The second in place of its optical drive. So for two notebooks, I always needed 4 disks.

But I need to make savings so while I have two excellent Hitachi drives one 500GB and the other 1TB, and have a 12TB NAS with 3 disks configured as a 6TB RAID5 (the 4th as a hot swap), I decided I could do without the additional disks and also therefore a new SSD. Although less preferable to 2 separate disks, 500GB and 1TB are large enough to partition 2 drives on each, one for the OS and the other, data which for some reasons I don't want to saved to or only to reside on the NAS.

As I presently have XP and Windows 7 installed on the 500GB disk as a dual boot configuration I thought I would used Drive Snapshot which if you don;t know is I think, an excellent program with a really small footprint, to back up each partition, and then restore each OS to a a new partition on the 1TB disk.

In the same machine, booting this 1TB gets to the OS selection but selecting either OS produces an error. XP complains that there is something wrong with NTLDR or it is missing and Windows 7 that there is some device error.

In the case of XP I know NTLDR does exist and I have no idea why Windows 7 can't start. It's a little beyond me - as I suspect the answer is an obvious one, I though you might know?

Do you know what it is about backing up a whole partition (OS), and then restoring it to a new disk, which would prevent either OS from starting?

EDIT: This is from memory so I'll check first but the screen after selecting Windows 7 shows

status: 0xc0000225
info: the boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible

and the screen after selecting Windows 7 shows

/NDLR is missing
status: 0xc0000225

Normally, it would be best to back up and restore the whole disk instead of just a partition to avoid missing to restore any system partitions.

You might see if this below may be able to help repair your boot manager. :)

MBR - Restore Windows 7 Master Boot Record

You might see how Macrium Refelect Free may work for you.

Imaging with free Macrium

You're welcome. I'm glad it'll work for you for now.

Novel8 said:

I have a TV tuner that worked flawlessly when I had XP. I tried to use it in Win 7, but all i get is a message that the hardware cannot be found. I even changed slots and still no luck. My question is this: If i reinstall XP as a dual OS, would that tuner work?

Hello Novel,

The TV tuner should work while you were booted into XP, but it still wouldn't work in Windows 7.

If the TV tuner has drivers available for Windows 7 that you could install, then it may be able to work properly in Windows 7.

What is the brand and model of the TV tuner? We may be able to help find W7 drivers for it if any are available.