Corrupt BCD... Help!

[guywitheglasses]

Hello all
Apparently I have done something very, very wrong. My laptop was running Windows 7 64-bit. In fact here are the specs:

Dell Latitude E5400
Windows 7 64-Bit
3GB DDR2 RAM
Intel GMA4500m
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz

Here is what I have done over the course of the day, it's a long story:
I wanted to dual boot 32-bit XP and 64-bit 7. So I got my XP disc, modified it a bit to accommodate the SATA drivers, yatayatayata... anyways I installed XP and it worked fine. Windows 7 wasn't showing up anywhere though, under system boot preferences, dual boot menu, nothing. I read to go into the registry and change Drive F to Drive C (As the 100MB System Reserved partition was made C by default and my XP partition was made as drive F) so I swapped them around and XP wouldn't boot anymore. It would say Windows XP and stay there forever. So I reinstalled XP, but now that the 100MB partition was full, I had to format it (Probably my problem) and then reinstall XP. It worked. NOW I read that you should (From XP) install EasyBCD and do these steps.(http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Installing+XP+After+Vista+or+7)
However, upon opening EasyBCD it said the BCD could not be found, etc.
I somehow reset all that under the BCD repair tab on that program, and was able to do all the steps in that tutorial.
After rebooting just now, I get "Windows could not boot because the following file is missing: <windows root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe.". I assumed this meant a missing boot.ini. So in the Windows Recovery on the XP disc, I typed "bootcfg /rebuild". I then get an error that it failed to scan disks because of a probably corrupt file system and that I need to use chkdsk. I did, and THAT tells me that the drive is fine and to type /p to check anyway. I type /p, but it tells me the command is not recognized. This is fun

Help appreciated,
Thanks,
Stephen R

 

[dave1310]

Microsoft has an answer to this at: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_xp-system/windows-rootsystem32ntoskrnlexe-is-corrupt-or/3e03d6f9-c8e4-49e7-8cbc-152d82c7c839

You might also want to glance at: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/32523/how-to-manually-repair-windows-7-boot-loader-problems/ and http://www.escotal.com/os_boot.html for an overview of the boot structure.

I'd speculate that, as it never completed the scan, your "bootconfig/rebuild" command never executed and that is probably a good thing. Could well be the \ntoskrnl.exe is corrupt hence the scan comment to the rebuild command.
Hope that helps with your question.

I have a question for you, though. Do you have some deep-seated need to dual-boot Win 7 and XP or do you just want to run XP programs from time to time (even if tiime to time is 24/7)? If the answer is the latter, why not consider using Virtual XP? It works great on my machine, will run concurrent to Win 7 and you don't have the problems associated with a dual boot setup. You can get the how-to from Microsoft at: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/

When I had a dual boot setup, it seems that whichever OS I needed was the other one! With this approach, you click the Virtual PC line in the start menu of from a desktop icon and away you go!

 

[dave1310]

By the way, if you choose the virtual PC approach, the virtual machine will need its own anti-virus. The virtual machine will not "see" the anti-virus you are using in the "real" machine!