Dual Boot Installation with Windows 7 and XP

doncarlos said:

Trevor. I appreciate the suggestions you made to Crusnik, but I too have run into that exact problem of not getting XP to do a restart after it reaches the final installation stage.

I have used the W7 disc to repair so I can do a W7 boot at least.

Afterwards while in W7 I have found that the XP files are all on the new partition I made in W7. In fact, using bcdedit while in W7, I was able to get a bootladder that showed both W7 and XP when I did a restart. But when choosing XP it would never boot in to XP. It would just give me an error and freeze and i would have to do a repair with the W7 disc to start all over again.

Did this entire process a half dozen times, from the very first step to the last. Each time redoing each step anew.

I do believe that it would have worked if I would have installed XP first and then W7, but I didn't.

I believe this all has to do with the issue that XP never really really completes a full installation since it was unable to restart at the final stage. Wish I could just get that XP to restart after the install...Dang.

Any further thoughts or similiar problems or comments is appreciated.

I know this is an old question, but I had the same issue, looked everywhere and didn't see anyone saying that, despite the good tutorials about EasyBCD we can find:

In order to boot from the Windows 7 hard disk/partition, you must have NTDETECT.COM, NTLDR and BOOT.INI in Windows 7 partition, and that's the point: you MUST EDIT the boot.ini file that is in Windows 7 partition so that it points to the partition where Windows XP is installed!

When booting from Windows 7 hard disk and choosing Windows XP, bootmanager will look for those XP related files in 7 partition, and then will look for Windows XP where the boot.ini in Windows 7 partition tells it is installed. If you just copy boot.ini from XP partition to 7 partition without any changes, it will be like XP was installed in 7 partition and it will never load because it is just not there!

Edit boot.ini copied to 7 partition and change the rdisk number. There are plenty of tutorials explaing how to edit boot.ini file around if you don't know how to do it.

Do not change or edit original boot.ini or any system files in Windows XP partition, or, if in the future you want to load Windows XP from its own hard disk/partition (let's say you format or remove Win7 hard disk) you would not be able to do it anymore. Just let those as they are and edit boot.ini copied to Win7 partition.

Hope it helps someone.

I didnt have any problems ,I had win 7 installed and then shrunk my c drive and gave it a simple volume drive letter ,then I clean booted xp and told it to quick format the new partition (quick) and it installed to that partition . it then rebooted to xp ,I then used ebc to configure the boot loader , and it was just great .mind you had to use ebc twice , but now all running great

I am running a dual boot of XP and 7 both 32 bit works good but I have 4 gigs of ram and 1 gig built into the memory card so it only uses 3 gigs I was wondering if a could dual boot xp 32 bit and 7 64 bit. If so would it be worth it for the extra gig of ram.
Thanks
Paul

Hey brink, thanks for the guide. I've encountered a little problem (I have no dualbooting experience):
I tried to install windows XP as I've done before, everything went well until the reboot after the disk format and file copy, when it loads the OS, it says: "Error loading operating system. Press ctrl+alt+del to restart" (which doesn't change anything). I had to use my windows 7 CD to restore booting settings to be able to use windows 7 again and post my message.
Also, I have Windows 7 Home Premium, so virtual XP isn't an option. And setting XP compatibility on executables didn't work either.
Any ideas?

Thanks,
Dave.

Hey, actually, the message was: "A disk read error occured. Press ctrl....."

And how do i tell if i need to load SATA or RAID drivers first?
When I tried installing XP i just ignored the "Press F6if you need to ...." because I didn't know.

I'm quite sure I have a SATA drive (I dont see wide ribbon cable; I only see a narrow orange cable). As of if it is setup in RAID or not, I have no idea. Is there a way for me to find out? And where do I find the RAID drivers?? Sorry if I dont know a lot about this; never did it before.

Thanks,
Dave.