XP now tries to boot as Win 7

tucsonkoi

Honorable
Jun 22, 2013
2
0
10,510
I was going to recover some data from a drive that came out of a Win7 computer. Put it in a usb enclosure hooked it up to my xp box and the drive didn't mount. I restarted the xp box and instead of booting to xp the computer tries to boot into win7. Win7 boot manager says there is a problem with the disc and can't finish booting. shutdown. I disconnect the win7 drive and startup the xp box, I'm greeted with the win7 boot manager with a message about how a device is missing and something has changed.... cant boot up.
After much poking around it appears windows 7 has placed it's BCD files on my xp box and thinks its apart of a win7 installation. Boot.ini file is still there with correct info. how can I get rid of this windows boot manager and get back to my xp box?
 
boot to the winXP install disc if you still have it, then do a repair install.

As to what caused this, you probably have your BIOS boot order set to boot from the USB, then the CD/DVD, then the HDD. When you put the Win7 HDD into the USB enclosure, it tried to boot Win7.

Once you get back to XP, then change your boot order before you attach the Win7 disc.
 

tucsonkoi

Honorable
Jun 22, 2013
2
0
10,510

Your exactly right on the boot order I had changed it to run an Antivirus scan from a usb stick and never changed it back.

Unfortunatley when I tried that when the xp cd got to the point of loading windows, got the BSOD.
I can examine the disk with UBCD or UBCD for Windows and no problems are shown.
Are the some files that I can replace or edit manually to get the startup to not see windows boot manger and see the boot ini file instead