Dual Boot Windows 7 / XP

Have you tryed going into your BIOS and trying to switch boot hard drives.

Boot Manager doesn't appear - the machine goes directly into booting XP.

I didn't think I had to change the boot order in the BIOS. I tried that but it will not boot from the Windows 7 disk at all.

I'll try EasyBCD and see what happens. Thanks.

in XP, download and install .Net Framework 2.0 (32-bit) verison or .Net Framework 2.0 (64) version and EasyBCD for your 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x86) XP.
NOTE: In XP, Net Framework is required to be installed to run the free program EasyBCD.

EasyBCD seems very nice - I set up the boot menu and it will not even recognize the Windows 7 drive as a boot drive in the menu.

I'm wondering now if somehow the installation got corrupted. I'm going to reinstall Windows 7 on that drive and see if that fixes it.

for small time just restore your win7 it can make fresh like New installation but New installation fresh is better

This is quite interesting. I watched the installation more closely this time and I could see the boot menu appear after it went through the initial install. It started up Windows 7 and of course the first thing it wants to do is apply updates.

After it applied the 3 "critical" updates, it wants me to restart. I do and *bam* no Windows 7, now it wants to boot only into XP. I think I saw that one of the updates it was applied was an hardware update (ACPI?) So, it looks like this update is killing the install. I'm new to Win7 so I'm not sure what this critical update is... any ideas?

Thanks,
Ken

update if your installation not problem & stable

It turns out that the issue is related to the SATA drive setup. When I disconnected the other drives and only left the new drive connected, Windows 7 installed and boots just fine. According to some other posts I have seen, Windows 7 gets confused if the drive you are installing to is not the first SATA drive on the MB.

The boot order of the drives did not make a difference. From what I can see, W7 tried to make the boot load system partition on the old XP drive and then "lost" the Win 7 operating system. Doing the install without the other drive corrected that and it created the boot partition on the same drive as Windows 7 was installed.

I am going to physically move the new SATA drive to the first port and put the SATA drive that I have XP installed on the second port. I think it will work after that although I have some question if it will find the XP drive when I reconnect it. I _think_ can straighten that out by using EasyBCD.

If you have other suggestions, I'm open to those as well.

no problem, 2 system should on 2 drive or 1 drive different partition , if 1 drive it can make crash system ! Xp can install in ATA or SATA & Win7 SATA only

For future reference that is not true.
I have Win7 Ultimate installed on disk 0 IDE Maxtor Diamond Max ATA100 hard drive and running perfect.  
No hard feelings  
I just wanted to make sure the information was correct

This is a rule of Windows Os installation, you could first install a older windows OS then install the latest OS to realize dual boot, but you can't install the latest OS first then install the old OS.

My problem was solved by moving the Windows 7 drive to the SATA 0 port and putting the XP drive further down the chain. I can now dual boot with no problem. EasyBCD was very helpful to configure the dual boot. I recommend it if you are trying to manage your dual boot environment.

Best answer selected by area51reopened.

This topic has been closed by Area51reopened