Windows 7 Win 7 Causing Problems @ Attempted Dual Boot

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KonigTX

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Joined
Nov 21, 2009
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6
Hello,
I am running Win 7 64-bit RC on my machine. Previously, I had run Win XP Pro x64 Edition with great success. I heard Win 7 had many great things to offer so I took the switch, and unwisely dumped my XP install. Now here I am 7 months later, and I'm tired of the graphical glitches in my games and with Aero and want to create a dual boot to play games inside XP. However, the disc I've used to install Win XP x64 previously will not allow me to boot into it now -- if I put it in while Win 7 is running, I get this: Imageshack - winxp

Also, for some reason my OS only recognizes 3GB of my 4GB available RAM... is there something wrong?

System specs:
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit RC
Intel Core2Quad Q9400
Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P
Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX
4GB Corsair RAM

Any help in the right direction that could be provided would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
 
Solution
If I understand your situation, you have 2 hard drives and I will assume for now they are SATA. One has a good install of Windows 7 and you want to install XP on the second drive and do a dual boot.

You do not want to install XP after Windows 7 since it will probably mess up the MBR. If I were you, I would unplug the Win 7 drive and just install XP normally. Then boot back into Windows 7, and the OS that boots will be the drive listed first in the bios.

You could then download EasyBCD and add the XP install to the boot menu. Just make sure you know what drive letter the XP install is when both drives are connected.
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If I understand your situation, you have 2 hard drives and I will assume for now they are SATA. One has a good install of Windows 7 and you want to install XP on the second drive and do a dual boot.

You do not want to install XP after Windows 7 since it will probably mess up the MBR. If I were you, I would unplug the Win 7 drive and just install XP normally. Then boot back into Windows 7, and the OS that boots will be the drive listed first in the bios.

You could then download EasyBCD and add the XP install to the boot menu. Just make sure you know what drive letter the XP install is when both drives are connected.
 
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Solution
@Saltgrass: It's actually one 500GB SATA drive partitioned almost in half, so 200GB+ for both Win 7 and XP.

Last night, I found an old copy of Win XP 32-bit, so I threw that in the disc tray and was able to successfully install it onto my D:\ partition. However, that led me to a "Disc read error has occured, Please press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to restart" during bootup.
After diagnosing for an hour, I switched my HDD mode into LBA and was able to successfully boot into XP. I then installed EasyBCD, re-wrote my MBR and created a boot menu, and can boot into both OSes.

However, my Win 7 has now been deactivated. And I believe I have a fried 8800 GTX -or- fried RAM. Great Sunday!
 
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