windows xp and windows 7 dual boot issue: they won't

1. 52

   colintyvuposted 12 years ago

   I read the complete step by step how to on setting up dual booting windows 7 and xp. I prepared all my partitions beforehand, and labeled them accordingly so there would be no confusion i. I installed windows 7 on my new SATA drive. Everything went OK, except that I never got a boot menu presented - to 7, it was as if XP was not there i.
   I downloaded and installed, and ran, easybcd, and tried to add the xp menu entry manually. It asks for the drive, and the drive with xp on it is now, under windows 7, drive D (it is E when I boot xp). All necessary files (ntldr, ntdetect.com, boot.ini) are all on this drive. But when I try that menu entry, all the computer does is reboot. It will still only boot windows 7, unless I go into the BIOS settings and change the boot order of the hard drives (in this list, if I make the one with the Win7 partition nr 1, I can boot windows 7 and only that; if I make the one with the XP partition nr 1, I get my regular old boot menu from boot.ini (which also gets me into my wubi install of ubuntu). i
   I would like to be able to boot into XP from the windows 7 boot menu, or, alternately, would like to boot windows 7 from the xp boot menu. (that would be even better). Does anyone have any pointers for me?
   
   Thanks in advance.

   replyreport
   1. 67

      atechwizposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      It sounds to me like something went wrong with it.  I set up a couple of computers to dual boot with Windows 7 and Windows 8 and never had this problem.  You can set up which OS loads by default in the control panel.  But the way you are describing this it does not sound as if Windows 7 is aware that Windows XP is on the system and vice versa.

      replyreport
2. 58

   don tiltonposted 12 years ago

   I have both 7 and XP on mine. I believe that the trick is to have the XP installed first, on the first partition, then put the Win 7 on the next partition. When I did this the default boot was Win 7 but the startup shows "Previous version of Windows" You can change the default startup system from the Win 7 control panel. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me. Right now I'm working on getting Linux into a Win 8 comp...

   replyreport