Windows 7 Dual boot woes, installed Win 7 on new hard drive, now no boot select screen to choose XP or 7

Stratman490

Extraordinary Member
I just bought Win 7 Home Premium OEM today, and a 1TB Samsung hard drive on which to install Win 7. The Windows install process went smoothly, but now when I start my PC, it does not give me the boot screen to choose Win 7 or XP. I had the RC installed before, and everything was fine. Any ideas on what I need to do to get XP working again, short of a reformat? I have made the HD with XP the first boot drive in bios, but it still instantly goes to Win 7. Any help would be greatly appreciated...
 
I tried using the F12 key on startup to choose boot device, chose the drive where XP is installed, and got a message "NTLDR is missing" Apparently when I installed Win 7, it erased some files on the other hard drive. Is there any hope of repairing? or am I looking at a reformat of the XP drive?
 
Unplug the new drive and see if it boots with windows XP'

Did you, before even installing Windows 7 on the new drive, connect the drive and use Windows XP to set the Partion to Active, and make a Boot/Primary Partion and reformat this drive to NTFS???? if you didn't, this is the first thing that is wrong, then did you select the Drive and format it with the Quick format During the windows 7 install?

Have a look at this: Link Removed - Invalid URL

Do how they have done it, But set up the new drive first.

I'am guesing that the new drive is SATA, what is the old drive, SATA or one of those IDE ones that use that fat, wide Ribbon cables.
 
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I did not use Win XP to partition the drive, to be honest, I've never done that, and i think my best bet would have been to disconnect the XP drive while I installed Win 7. The funny thing is, I installed the Win 7 release candidate the same exact way as i installed this one, and had no problems whatsoever. So, am i screwed? haha. I really don't want to have to reinstall BOTH OS again. But if I have to, I have to.....
 
If W7 was the last OS you installed try running repair with your W7 disc. I had to do this when I installed W7 to a different HD than what I was running vista on. This may fix the problem
 
Uh ok, before you go any further, we need to get Windows XP Working first. so as I said Unplug the New hard drive and boot up, set every thing in the Bios back. and see if the computer works, if it doesn't Use the Windows XP Disk to do a Repair Install.
 
It is very important to keep track of which hard drive is set as primary when you install.

If you can get into Win 7, how about using the snipping tool to take a picture of your Disk Management window and attach. Try to label the partitions so we can see where things are.
 
I can get into Win 7 fine, the problem is I can't get into XP. Let me see if I can attach the screen capture of my Disk Management screen. Success !
 

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What is that 9MB partition tagged at the end of the XP Drive? What is the 100MB Partition in front of the windows 7 Drive? and why it the Card reader 8GB, it shouldn't show any size.

can You expand the drives, so there ain't any silly, small and useless partitions?
 
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Well, there is a card in the card reader.... And when I installed Win 7 it made a 100 MB partition. The 9 MB partition in XP, I have no idea what it is...
 
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Again What is the 100mb partition in front of the Windows 7 Drive? You didn't prepare the disk as I said did you? This is the reason you prepare the disk so you don't get useless partitions and before you ask what is in it, Apparrently no one knows why only Windows 7 Does it (Not even Microsoft) (and... if they did they wouldn't tell us, Which is sus) But as far as I know the File "Bootmgr" and the Folder "/boot/" is in there as these files are always missing from the main Disk. Right click it and set a drive letter to it and it will apear in "Computer" like a normal drive. and you can use any space in there, But the two things I said before are hidden, the size is about 60mb of the 100mb, If the disk is prepared like I said I wouldn't be made. Know doubt that 9mb on the XP drive is because of the same thing from when you had the 7 RC, Dunno why but the RC made a 9mb partition and that is where the time bomb files where for the expire date.
 
Well, I am typing from XP here, I installed EasyBCD, added XP to the boot menu, restarted, and wha la !! I can choose my OS. Thanks for all of the suggestions.....
 
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