Windows XP and Windows 7 dual boot issue: they won't

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colintyvu

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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.
 
Your issue is because Windows 7 is using its own boot loader on your new drive, hidden in that tiny 200MB hidden partition. The only time when the boot loader is shared is when you're installing 7 and you choose to delete that hidden partition before booting, or if you install both 7 and XP on the same drive. I'd say keep things as they are and don't worry too much about it - all you need to do is press F11 if you want Windows 7 anyway, its only one extra step in the boot process.

You could also edit Windows 7's boot loader, that could work. I've never had to do that though, since I never stuck with XP once 7 hit the market.
 
Hallo,

Boot into Windows 7, run EasyBCD ---> Click on Add New Entry. Select the Windows Tab. From there you must select the "Type" which will be Windows Xp in your case. Deselect the "Automatically detect correct drive." Specify the correct Drive Letter. If under Windows 7 your Windows Xp partition is shown as e.g, the F: Drive, then you will have to select the F: Drive in EasyBCD. Finally click on [Add Entry]. And lastly on File ---> Refresh BCD Store. Restart and see if it works. Good luck! See the Wiki link underneath for additional assistance. :)

http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EB...e;jsessionid=13B7FDCDCB06A0533AA5B0EE0ACC3E47
 
You're missing the point. Go read OP's post again.

He wants to use the Windows XP bootloader that also references a Ubuntu install to reference Windows 7, so he can use one boot loader for all OSes.
 
This should not be hard. I've had linux, winXP & win7 installed before on the same hdd and from what I recall grub handled it fine. I've never had that 200MB partition win7 creates though as I manually partitioned my drive.
 
Then you need to install in this order -xp->win7->linux
 
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