Malice_Unarmed
New Member
Hi, I am dual booting with XP and Win7, have both on 1 drive in 2 separate partitions. After installing Win7 one of my hard drives turned into a system disk (not the drive my OS's are installed on) and I cannot access it within Win7 only in XP. I have 6 internal hard drives and 6 external, the drive in question is "disk 0" in disk management, it says its a system disk and when going through properties it says it contains the MBR (master boot record). I'm not sure why the MBR would be on that drive maybe just because its the first in the list which still doesn't make much sense. Only thing I can think of why I am not able to access it through My Computer (its not displayed in My Comp) or Disk Management is user control it being a system disk might be blocking access to it, my log on is admin but like using CMD u need to right click and use as admin so it could be the same thing but been looking thoroughly and not seeing a way to get to the drive. The drive does not have an assigned letter so trying to access through CMD would be hard and I don't have the options to assign within Win7
Any thoughts?
There are a couple similar posts but the posters haven't given the amount of detail I have and their issues were never resolved.
Thank you.
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EDIT.
No replies but I was able to correct my issues after some tedious trial and error. If anyone has the same issue, what I did was unplug that drive but I then was unable to boot to Win7 considering it contained the MBR but XP still booted. I tried a repair on Win7 but it said there was nothing wrong. So I had to reinstall Win7 with the drive mentioned above unplugged. Doing so I can now boot to both Win7 and XP and after reconnecting the drive after install I can access it with both OS's. I was having a lot of issues trying to dual boot since you cant easily modify the boot info in Win7, I used a program called EasyBCD to get back to XP which worked but doing so I couldn't get back to Win7, EasyBCD doesn't work on XP either even manually changing the boot info in XP, Win7 would freeze during loading. The past week I've installed both Win7 and XP about 6 times each, before the last reinstall I did, I used a backup program called "Acronis True Image Home 2009" which will make an image of the partition you want to back up, that way you don't need to reinstall all your applications and settings. If you are repeatedly reinstalling OS's I suggest trying that and save some time.
Any thoughts?
There are a couple similar posts but the posters haven't given the amount of detail I have and their issues were never resolved.
Thank you.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EDIT.
No replies but I was able to correct my issues after some tedious trial and error. If anyone has the same issue, what I did was unplug that drive but I then was unable to boot to Win7 considering it contained the MBR but XP still booted. I tried a repair on Win7 but it said there was nothing wrong. So I had to reinstall Win7 with the drive mentioned above unplugged. Doing so I can now boot to both Win7 and XP and after reconnecting the drive after install I can access it with both OS's. I was having a lot of issues trying to dual boot since you cant easily modify the boot info in Win7, I used a program called EasyBCD to get back to XP which worked but doing so I couldn't get back to Win7, EasyBCD doesn't work on XP either even manually changing the boot info in XP, Win7 would freeze during loading. The past week I've installed both Win7 and XP about 6 times each, before the last reinstall I did, I used a backup program called "Acronis True Image Home 2009" which will make an image of the partition you want to back up, that way you don't need to reinstall all your applications and settings. If you are repeatedly reinstalling OS's I suggest trying that and save some time.
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