Windows 7 Tried to dual boot but xp invisible

[piperxpdude]

Successfully installed Win7 (evaluation copy) to the second partition of my harddrive, hoping to be able to dual boot XP pro and Win7. Installed from the disk, not within XP, clean install. Other than my wireless card and sound not detected , I do not have an option to dual boot and cannot access XP at all. I have tried repair, but Win7 doesn't see the old OS and for some reason, I cannot boot from the cd part of my combo drive. By that, I mean, win xp pro disc (cd) and win2000 (cd) discs result in disc read error, but the win7 (dvd) and win xp media center (dvd) will boot.

I have even replaced the HDD with a known good to try to install XP there, but still cannot boot from cd-rom. Before I delete the win7 partition and try to manually extract ntldr and build a boot.ini, is there simple fix to this? What is the best non-lethal next step?

 

[busydog]

Successfully installed Win7 (evaluation copy) to the second partition of my harddrive, hoping to be able to dual boot XP pro and Win7. Installed from the disk, not within XP, clean install. Other than my wireless card and sound not detected , I do not have an option to dual boot and cannot access XP at all. I have tried repair, but Win7 doesn't see the old OS and for some reason, I cannot boot from the cd part of my combo drive. By that, I mean, win xp pro disc (cd) and win2000 (cd) discs result in disc read error, but the win7 (dvd) and win xp media center (dvd) will boot.

I have even replaced the HDD with a known good to try to install XP there, but still cannot boot from cd-rom. Before I delete the win7 partition and try to manually extract ntldr and build a boot.ini, is there simple fix to this? What is the best non-lethal next step?

What you did should have worked.... I've done it many times. Try installing VistaBootPro (Google it) and see if it sees your XP. If it does, you should be able to enable XP in the Boot Menu.