After installing a XP on a hard drive seperate from my windows 7 installation....

[spikoman69]

I cannot boot up windows 7 anymore, after doing this everything ended up real wierd, namely on windows 7 C: and D: are two partitions on my 500gb which has windows 7 on one and programs on the other. My 200gb harddrive was empty and I installed windows XP on it, and on Windows xp, that harddrive shows up as D:, there is a C: drive, E: and F: on windows xp correspond to my C: and D: on windows 7, and there is a C: drive that is blank on windows XP and it shows a size of 100mb, but I dont physically have another 100gb hard drive or a 4th partition. Also, I cannot boot windows 7 anymore, and for some reason I have to set my boot order with priority to windows 7's install in order to boot XP on the other drive. Did my boot sectors get written to the windows 7 harddrive maybe? Im very confused and disgruntled at this situation.

 

[KSoD]

Yes your MBR got written to the Win7 Drive. If you didnt bother to remove this drive when you installed XP then the XP Boot Loader, or boot.ini, became the primary loader. That loader can not load anything but XP. You have to use a Win7 Disk to restore the BCD and then add an entry to your XP Drive.

As for the drive letters and that. Sorry but i dont understand that wall of text. It reads like a maze. But simply put the drive letters will not read the same in both OS's. Both Win7 and XP will want to be known as the C:\ drive which means that in the other OS they will have to be something else. As for the rest, i dont quite understand it at all.

The 100MB drive, that is the part of the drive that contains the boot information. It is separated from the OS now with Win7 to prevent corruption of the loader, and the ability to rebuild it without destroying the OS. Something that was not possible with XP or Vista. Search around and you will see that there are plenty of topics on the 100MB partition created during the Win7 install.

 

[spikoman69]

Mmk, sorry if my post was a maze there was alot to be explained. So if i insert my windows 7 cd i can repair its boot records, then use the XP recovery console and write its boot records to the proper hard drive?

 

[KSoD]

Yes you can use the Win7 CD to repair that boot loader than use EasyBCD to just add an entry for XP, no need to rewrite the XP boot loader as you wont have a dual boot then. Not unless you want to hit F12 every time you want to switch OS's.