Dual Boot Installation with Windows 7 and XP

Transfer the Win7 installation including MBR, Track0 and Active flag, auto-drive letter to preserve C boot. If necessary confirm Active partition and Run Startup Repair til it boots.

Then apply XP to its partition without any if those except auto drive letter selection to preserve C. Afterwards from Win7 install EasyBCD to add XP to Boot Menu.

Based on the hundreds if not thousands of posts I've helped solve in this thread the possibility of something unseen in your config interfering with this is good. But I'm giving you generalized steps since I only had enough time to read your screenshots now tonight.

Norton is one of the least favored apps here during our entire run.

I thought I had it working, but now XP is not booting up.

It goes through the loading screen with no errors, but when it goes to the login screen for entering the password, it just stops with the blue XP screen and no window to enter the password.

Please post back the requested screenshot of Win7 Disk Management - Post a Screen Capture Image

In addition confirm which steps you followed which I gave in the post above, and if not exactly what you did to get the Dual Boot working.

I do finally have it working.

After so many iterations, it is difficult to define the exact sequence, but I might try to duplicate it on a new drive.

W7 seems to have problems when an image is restored to a partitioned drive. The first step after restoring the image is to use the DVD to repair the install and startup. If this isn't done, when it did start, it frequently created a new desktop and lost all my settings. I don't think it thought the W7 install was legitimate.

Once the restored image boots successfully, create a new image to use for any future dual boot restores, if necessary.

Next restore the XP image. This will result in the system directly booting into XP.

Finally, use the W7 DVD to:
1. Do an automatic repair if one is found.
2. Open a command window from the repair console and do bootrec.exe /fixmbr and bootrec.exe /fixboot.
3. Use the recovery console and run the Startup Repair.
4. You should now be able to boot directly in W7, where EasyBCD can add the XP boot option. Note: The XP partition may require a drive letter to be added from Disk Management before EasyBCD can find it.

I will see if I can easily duplicate this on another clean drive just to verify the process.

I have attached the image you requested.

Looks okay but why are there page files on Disks 3 and 4?

I thought that restoring an image to a partition would result in the partition appearing the same to Windows as if it had been restored to a single drive.

My understanding was that spreading the page file among multiple drives improved performance.

Sorry, I don't understand why the page file would affect the boot manager or vice versa. Doesn't Windows stop using it at shutdown and start again after booting?

Paging file doesn't affect the bootmgr. You asked why an image didn't appear to Windows as if it was on a single drive and I replled that it must share the boot manager if it is on the same physical drive.

I also said I would not share the paging file.