does xp install mess up win7 on same hard drive?

hardcore sean

Honorable
Jun 30, 2012
7
0
10,510
hi all, not been on here in a while so this might be a long one but id appreciate anyone taking the time to read this.
Here we go, ive split my main boot hard drive into three partitions; 100gb as my windows 7 partition (installed first)for my slow loading games
like borderlands 2,fc3 etc and my second with 150gb as a secondary partition
for my not so slow loading games and a 250gb partition for my fastest loading games, my third one remained empty so i used it to
install xp on so i could play toca rd3 because it kept crashing under win7, anyway it crashes on xp but thats for a different thread.
what i want to know is ive got no options when i press f8 for which os to boot up, i expected it to ask me which one to start but all
ive got is winxp, have i lost my windows7 installation? im not bothered cos i can still acess all the files on that partition i.e save games etc,
has the xp installation erased the boot manager from the win7 partition? ive got several hard drives in my pc, should i have put winxp
on a seperate hard drive instead of my main win7 one, and is there a way to get my win7 os to boot up without loosing the xp partition
because im not done with trying to get rc3 to work on the xp partition.
i did it before but i think i had xp on the hdd to start with and added win7 later and had the f8 option for which os to boot up,
i hope i dont have to format again as ive just got it going how i like it.
thanks for reading il put all the specs i think may be relevant.

hd1 wdc500gb 7200 sata (3 partitions; 100gb(win7)/150gb/250gb(winxp)
hd2 seagate pipeline 500gb(from skybox) empty
hd3 seagate pipeline 500gb(from skybox) my main back up
hd4 ibm 8.4gb (oldschool drive just somewhere else to back my missus' photos 'mission critical' :)
hd5 fujitsu 300gb my second back up
hd6 fujitsu 160gb backup for films/tunes/photos
hd7 seagate 40gb ??? doesnt say (from ps3) just for tunes and photos
as you can see ive got a fair few hard drives the latter three are on a pci sata thingy i got from amazon,
the rest of my specs if you think they may be relevant:
amd quad core phenom 9550 @2.97ghz/1.23v
4gb ddr2@ 533hz dual channel so i believe itl be at the 1066hz mark??? il have to check,
geforce gt440 2gb ddr3
couple of dvd burners,4in1 card reader,
360w psu and a few other case mods that i wont go into right now,but will if you think its relevant,
thanks for reading this has got me stumped :)

 

hardcore sean

Honorable
Jun 30, 2012
7
0
10,510

cheers ken il look into that, as soon as I get to grips with my missus' windows 8 laptop :fou:
but thanks for the input mate ive saved the link and il check it on my 'new' xp machine :D