Dual Boot Has Messed Up

[5aq1b]

This is a bit of a long one so be patient

Previously I had a dual boot setup with 2 XP's running. One for General Internet use and the other for music production. I have now installed Windows 7 over the General Use instance of XP so now I have Windows 7 and the XP for my music production.

My hard drive is partitioned into 4 drives and looks like this when viewing in My Computer in Windows 7:

C: Windows 7 OS
D: Windows 7 Installs
E: Windows XP Installs
F: Windows XP OS

After Installing Windows 7, the dual boot menu wasn't appearing for me to have a choice to which OS to boot to so I performed the following and added the XP to the Windows 7 boot manager:

1. Open an elevated command prompt.
2. Type the following to create a boot loader for Windows XP.
bcdedit /create {ntldr} /d "Windows XP"
3. Type the following to set the device to where Windows XP is installed. I used D: in this example. Replace it with the drive letter of your XP installation.
bcdedit /set {ntldr} device partition=D:
4. Type the following to set the path.
bcdedit /set {ntldr} path \ntldr
5. Type the following to add this boot loader to the boot up screen.
bcdedit /displayorder {ntldr} /addlast
6. Reboot the computer.

I'm able to boot from XP cd and go into Recovery console. Once in there i'm presented with:

1: c:\Windows
2: k:\windows

I choose option one and it asks for an admin password. I only ever use one password and it won't let me accept anything, not even a blank one so I leave that. After using the MAP command to distinguish which is the XP OS, i realise that it's the K drive so i can get into option 2. I run fixboot but that has no effect and the only option that is left is fixmbr but the warning message kind of puts me off running it.

Please help! I hope i've explained my problem as much as i can!

 

[pat mcgroin]

Grab the program easyBCD and you should be able to get your boot order sorted out.
http://neosmart.net/

 

[5aq1b]

i've installed and opened it but I thought that was just used to automate the commands i typed to add XP to Windows 7 boot manager?