I hate windows 7 dual boot

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Elite Baiter Joined: 02 Jul 2006 Posts: 1702

Forced to upgrade to windows 7, I decided on a simple dual boot option.

To make it simple, i decided I would add a second HDD so no chance of accidently over-writing my ultra important xp.

The install only took 20 mins (which isnt too bad) but then it didnt even see it had windows XP as a bootable option, on the dual boot i could only see windows 7. And the pc booted straight into 7.

So that meant using a diff pc to manually get the bcdedit command lines for dual boot. (the os is new, it should have a simple "do you want to dual boot" many do!

So then back to xp
still no dual boot, but now i can start it in xp - so over to the boot.ini - windows 7 doesnt have one! so its in xp im talking about
i edit the line in the boot sequence

Code:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows 7 Ultimate" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Well it allows the dual boot menu now, however...
windows 7 wont start.

I could of saved myself a lot of time, and used windows 7 as default from when I BCD' edited, but prefer xp as default. (if i had chose bcd - windows 7 it would be working.)

Then i installed my antivirus, now i keep my keys locked away, windows 7 is weird when searching...

EDIT: as of 11am the next day its still not working.

im getting errors of ntldr missing (no its not)
i can boot to both if i disconnect the drives - pointless

Posted: Sat Sep 04, 2010 2:44 pm

Obviously the W7 bootloader took over after you installed it. I've had the same situation after installing Vista beside XP.

My approach was starting Vista, download easyBCD here: http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1. It detected the XP partition, and it's easy to juggle around with the default OS. Should work for W7 as well.

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