Windows 7 Dual boot Windows 7 and XP AFTER W7 Install?

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dkperez

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Feb 6, 2009
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On my system XP Pro 32 was on the D partition. The C partition was just sitting around, having been used a while back for XP64.

SO, I booted the Windows 7 CD and installed Windows 7 into the C partition. Which worked fine. EXCEPT that I don't have the dual boot screen any more and can't boot XP. How do I set this up so I can still boot into XP?
 
My setup was initially XP pro installed at the physical start of the drive on the C:\ partition.
I had several other partitions with Linux distros installed as well as both an NTFS and Fat32.
The last partition on the disk was formatted to install Win 7.
When I ran the installer I instructed the installer to place Win 7 on that last partition.
After install Win 7 was the C:\ while I as in Win 7 and the boot menu showed XP as "an earlier version of windows".
Booting to XP and XP is now my C:\.
Since I had, before installing Win 7 four Linux distros in a multiboot configuration that used Grub for a bootloader
I needed to restore GRUB after installing Win 7.
Grub stands for GRand Unified Bootloader.
Using a bootable app called SuperGrub I restored my GRUB bootloader and GRUB boot menu. This allows me to boot any of the four Linux distros as before.
The original GRUB bootloader menu had an entry for XP.
Selecting that entry brings up the Win 7 bootloader so I can choose between XP or Win 7.
 
Well, it got turned around a long time ago............

I initially installed XP64 on C (first partition). Unfortunately, I couldn't find drivers for some of the peripherals I needed to use. SO, I wound up installing XP32 on D (second partition)....... Eventually, I stopped using XP64 entirely so it just sat there.

When I installed Windows 7, I just booted the CD and told it to format the C (first) partition and install. Thus, I lost the dual boot and now it only boots Windows 7.

Unfortunately, I have a nujmber of things on D (XP32) that I don't want to clobber, and I DEFINITELY don't want to spend the next 3 days reinstalling XP stuff when it's going away as soon as all the Windows 7 stuff is actually working. SO, for the short term I need to be able to boot into XP and I'm looking for the magic way of telling the system to let me dual boot WITHOUT reinstalling the whole world.

How?
 
This is not my area, but it seems you could use BCDedit to add the XP partition to the boot menu. I have seen examples where Vista was added, so you might check around. There may be other easier ways, but I would not know those specifics.

I have not looked, there may be a tutorial on this site.
 
OK, got it working... The EasyBCD enabled me to get to a dual boot...
 


I have a blog here about setting up a multi-boot menu with 3 bcdedit commands.

You may have succes with a menu driven program you can download called easybcd.
 
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