Windows 7 Dual Boot issue...but not the normal one.

[karak]

Past situation:


Originally I had XP and win7 working in a dual boot with XP the computers original OS and Windows 7 added later and everything worked fine. This is on an SSD harddrive.
Yesterday- I needed to use Gparted to make Windows 7 partition larger as it was getting a bit small. Gparted worked perfect. I had the typical issue with the boot being messed up and rebuilt using mbr, fixboot, and config. My Windows XP is the primary,active partition and is what I use mainly, windows 7 also set as primary but not active.

How system works at Present:
XP works as normal.

Windows 7: I can boot into Windows 7 just beyond my login but it comes up with an error concerning Nvidia's driver. Which seems weird as it states It says that "a file on C: is causing a runtime error(driver from Nvidia)", not E: where Windows 7 bootfiles and such should come from.
This, and maybe much of Win7 is attempting to load in from drive C, not E where Windows 7 resides.
When I use safemode, explorer won't work, but taskmanager will and msconfig says that the windows 7 install is C:windows not E:windows as it should be.

Summary of Problem:
E:Windows 7 appears to be looking at C:Windows XP for its boot files, as indicated by the Nvidia error. Safe mode works but explorer in safemode does not, just task manager. If I use Windows 7 repair to adjust the boot system I then can't boot into XP, and Windows 7 problem stays the same, so currently I have used XP's fixboot, fixmbr, and config to at least get XP running.

I have a full backup the moment before I did this but even reinstalling that backup caused the issue, so I am thinking there is something in the bootloader,MBR, that I am missing or is bad despite checks.

Any help? What I have used to get this far- Gparted Windows 7, XP disk repair to get the dual-boot to show back up. MBR Wizard...can't find out what I need to do. Drives don't show any errors but I am scratching my head as how to get windows 7 to look where it is supposed to for all its files.

 

[Saltgrass]

All the boot files (XP and Win 7) are in the active partition.

The OS you boot into will show as C: whether it is XP or Windows 7.

Since the system is probably using the Windows 7 boot files, you should not use any XP boot option commands.

You don't need to use G-Parted to change partition size in Windows. It will increase or decrease the size, but it cannot move the partition. Windows will not move a partition because it can be dangerous, so maybe G-Parted would be needed for that.

Have you run Disk Management yet?

Considering your situation with the Nvidia driver, you may need to get into safe mode, if you can, and change the driver. But what you might be able to do will depend on your situation. You could remove a Windows 7 driver physically while in XP, but knowing which one might be hard. You also might be able to start Windows in a basic video mode (F8) so as to not use the Nvidia driver.

I would suggest you do a Windows 7 Startup Repair, which may need to run as many as 4 times. Once you have Win 7 booting normally, use EasyBCD to set up the Dual Boot (version 2.0 or later).

If this doesn't allow you to get your system back, you might re-image and try going to safe mode for Win 7.

 

[karak]

Fixed it! It was indeed the drives being wrong. It was taking files from the C: drive and not the E:drive as it should have been, verified by checking where it was loading windows files from.
Went into the registry and changed the mounted drives settings and switched them.

My system has always SHOWN E:Windows 7 no matter what. Since the very day I installed it, it was never C:, though I hear that can happen. So when it changed to C on its own it screwed everything up. Now I am happy and working back the way I started.

 

[karak]

Thanks Saltgrass, I had already run the repair about 21, actually I think over 30 times by the time I wrote the original post. I know it was over 21 as my wife began counting in anger, when I refused to give up. About 11 hours worth of that kind of thing, total on just Sunday alone. But I found out it wasn't that anyway. Thanks for helping!