Duel Boot Help

Kinda off topic from what you guys usually do, but I got stuck in XP and the first place I thought of for help was here at Boot Land. I upgraded to Win 7 from XP and was having a problem of it freezing every few minutes for up to a minute plus. Well I come across where you can shrink the hard drive and load another op sys without having to reformat and all that. Well I figured I'd shrink mine by half load up XP and have a duel boot system, and use XP normally and then boot to 7 and try and fix it now and then, and later, if fixed, combine it back and just run 7.

Well I didn't get any kind of boot menu at all. It just auto booted to XP and I have no way to boot 7 (that I know of) 7 is on C(Part1) and XP is on D(Part2) I went to Disk Manager and it wont allow me to make C the active partition, the menu option is grayed out, but will allow me to make D the active, as if D is not active and C is. I am at a loss. If C is active why is it booting to D. Oh and it says C is a System partition and D is a Boot Partition. And I have only the one HDD with two partitions C and D.

I tried adding a line in Boot.ini, and it did give me that choice at boot, but wouldn't boot, I probably had that wrong. I hope I didn't digitally paint myself into a corner, there has to be a way without wiping every thing out and starting over. Oh and I can see both C and D from XP and all my win 7 files on C, so it's all there, just can't boot to it. I'm thinking if I can just boot to 7 I can set up a boot menu there using their new duel boot deal instead of Boot.ini from XP...

Anybody have anything for this weird position?

G'day Bill, I'm also dual-booting Win7 & XP. Try booting with your win7 install disc and choose repair option. This will install the win7 bootloader. I use EasyBCD 1.7.2 to edit and maintain bootloader. If you end up doing a clean install, then install XP first. Cheers.

The "usual" rule of the thumb is to always install Windows OS'es in the same order they were released, as each version has "automatic" provisions for previous OS.
The XP knows nothing about Windows 7, obviously enough, but don't despair, it can be easily fixed.

Check on which drive (I am pretty sure it is C:\ ) that you have NTLDR and BOOT.INI.

Open BOOT.INI and add to it a line:

C:\grldr="grub4dos"

add to the root of that drive file grldr from grub4dos latest version:
http://nufans.net/gr...-2009-10-16.zip

When it boots, you will have two choices:

• Windows XP
• grub4dos

Choose grub4dos, you will get to a grub> prompt.

In it type:

chainloader /bo

press [TAB]
line should autocomplete to

chainloader /bootmgr

press [ENTER]
type:

boot

press [ENTER]

and you should boot to Windows 7 allright.

Basically you have now a C:\ partition bootsector that is invoking NTLDR.
You need to use bootsect.exe /nt60 to replace it with the standard Windows 7 one that invokes BOOTMGR.
This will allow you to boot Windows 7 directly (and ONLY) at next boot.

Then use BCDEDIT, or EasyBCD, or whatever to add to your Windows 7 BCD an entry for the XP.


Wonko

Thanks a million. That worked like a charm. You are a life saver!

Thanks a million. That worked like a charm. You are a life saver!

Only too happy of another happy bunny :
http://www.msfn.org/...o...28727&st=10



Wonko