Windows 7 XP and 7 dual boot

gtrman79 · Jan 14, 2009

I am trying to do a dual boot with XP and 7. I did get it to work. But had to remove and reinstall 7 twice due to an error with hard-drive.

Everything was going along fine. I was installing apps and doing basic testing. It happened when I got to testing Steam. I was trying to play HL2 but the game would not start.

I then got an error at the bottom that said something about a hard-drive error. I restarted and it ran chkdsk. It did a LOTof deleting of entries. Then booted backup with no internet. So I just booted to XP. Well the internet wouldn't work on XP either.

So...my question is....would a driver/hardware issue in 7 affect hardware in XP?

Also, I have music and media in a seperate partition. Can XP and 7 both access and edit these files with no issue?

Thanks!!

Radenight · Mar 3, 2009

cygnus333 said:
My desktop has 1 sata 500 gb hard drive partitioned at 250 gb each. I want to set up a dual boot with XP on the d: drive. Win7 64-bit is on the c: drive. I would think that just installing the XP on d: would be all I need to do. Does this sound like the best way to accomplish this?

Unfortunately no... Since you've already installed Windows 7 you'll have to install both OS's again.. This is because Windows 7 and Vista use a different boot manager than Windows XP.. so if you were to install Windows XP now it wouldn't allow you to choose which OS you want to boot into.. You have to install from old to new.. so Windows XP first than Windows 7.. If you do it that way the boot manager will configure itself and you'll be presented...

cygnus333 · Mar 8, 2009

Thanks for the info. I tried the 3 commands. Fixmbr and RebuildBcd ran ok but FixBoot had a problem. Here's the msg. I got. 'The volume does not contain a recognized file system.' After rebooting it went right back to XP. Any suggestions?

Thanks, Chris

rriskjr · Apr 14, 2009

Dual Boot problem

Hey, I have 2 500 Gig physical hard drives. I had Windows XP installed on Drive C, and installed Windows 7 on Drive D. It was able to dual boot with no problems. I reformatted my C drive and installed Windows XP X64. Now my dual boot no longer works, and I just get an error when I try to boot to the D drive. All of the data is still on my D drive. How can I fix this?

Josh the Nerd · Apr 14, 2009

Repair the boot files with the Windows 7 DVD.

fjgold · Apr 15, 2009

I'm presently multibooting XP and Win 7 (7000) along with 4 different linux distributions. Setting this up was very easy.
Before installing Win 7 on the last physical partition of my HDD my setup used the GRUB (linux) bootloader to provide a boot menu to choose between XP and my various linux distros, with the default being my XP install.
After installing Win 7 of course replaced GRUB with it's own bootloader, ignoring my linux installs. Using a live CD called SuperGrub allowed me to restore my original GRUB bootloader menu with the XP entry still at the top (default) and all my linux distros available below it.
Selecting the XP entry brings up the XP/Win 7 bootloader from which you can boot either OS.

This is very cool IMHO. An amazing degree of integration between linux and Windows and something I discovered by accident by using Super Grub to restore GRUB.

Windows 7 XP and 7 dual boot

gtrman79

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Radenight

cygnus333

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rriskjr

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Josh the Nerd

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fjgold

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