Reinstalled XP, now I cant boot into Win 7

[Vilandra]

I have 2 drives on my machine.

HDD-0 is C and has XP on it.

HDD-1 is D and has Win 7 on it.

Both have been working just fine, and when the machine boots up, I get the OS choice menu, "Windows 7" or "Previous version of Windows".

Yesterday, I started having trouble with XP, so instead of trying to fix the problem, I decided to format and reinstall XP.

After installing XP I lost the OS menu choice to boot from, and I cannot boot into the 2nd drive (win 7) no matter what I do. Ive changed the boot order in the BIOS to point to the Win 7 drive, but that didnt work.

After trying a lot of suggestions, (Win 7 DVD command prompt "bootrec /fixboot", etc) Nothing worked. I tried to install EasyBCD, but it would not launch under XP.

I ended up reinstalling Win 7 again, but that didnt fix the problem either.

So now im stumped. Any ideas as to how to fix this?

The machine automatically boots into XP, but I want to get the choices back again.

Any suggestions or help would be appreciated greatly! I tried searching the boards here, but couldnt find this problem.

Thanks!

 

[Dahak]

you should be able to boot off the windows 7 dvd and it will either automatically start the startup repair or just after selecting the language, at the bottom there is an option for repair this computer, and select startup repair and it should fix it.

If that does not work, you would have to boot off the install dvd again, select repair this computer, and select the command prompt. and then you have to do bootrec /rebuildbcd which will recreate the windows 7 boot loader and then bootrec /scanos

 

[Vilandra]

Already tried that as well. It didnt work.

 

[Dahak]

I probably edited my first post when you replied, so if you missed my other suggestions is as follows

If that does not work, you would have to boot off the install dvd again, select repair this computer, and select the command prompt. and then you have to do bootrec /rebuildbcd which will recreate the windows 7 boot loader and then bootrec /scanos

 

[Dahak]

another thing you could try is if your motherboard support a boot device selection ie on asus boards is f8 and it allows you to select your boot drive. can you boot from the drive that has the windows 7 installed on? if so you should be able to use easybcd to rebuild the boot menu in that case

 

[Vilandra]

Ok, ive tried part of that.... Here is what ive tried.


bootrec /fixmbr "completed successfully"
bootrec /fixboot "Element not found"


I dont think ive tried your suggestion of rebuildbcd and scanos. I'll give those a try.


Also, I just now got EasyBCD to install under XP (had to install net framework) and it said it couldnt find the right boot drive, so I selected drive C and rebooted. Now Windows 7 boots up, and I cannot get back into XP.

The odd thing is that no matter which drive I boot into too, it always comes up as Drive C. Right now im in Win 7, and its listed as C, but when im in XP, the Win7 drive is listed as D.

I'll try the rebuildbcd and scanos at the prompt to see what happens.

 

[Dahak]

If you are booted into windows 7 now, you should be able to add the windows xp to with easybcd.

as for the xp and win7 when booted into showing c: that is normal, as the boot drive always shows up as c:

 

[Vilandra]

Ok, so after installing EasyBCD on Win 7, I rebooted and it gave me the 2 OS choices (win7 and XP) however both would not work. It said there were errors.... So I booted into the Win 7 DVD and used the Startup Repair option. It listed a couple of problems and fixed them. Now I have the options back. I havent tried XP yet. I wanted to be sure Win 7 was working properly.

 

[Dahak]

Bonus. pretty much if you have win7 up and if the selection for xp does not work, its pretty easy to use easybcd to remove the xp entry and re-add it

 

[Vilandra]

Thanks for the help Dahak.

 

[postmortemIA]

the other solution - which is fairly simple - is to start another installation of windows 7. this will make windows 7 re-create boot loader and figure out what operating systems are already present

then on first reboot, you'll be able to go back into your original win 7 installation

this will require you to make another partition.

 

[Vilandra]

XP still would not boot, so I installed the beta release of EasyBCD 2.0. It has the option to create a new boot.ini, ntldr and ntdetect for the XP drive. Now everything is working.