Windows 7/XP Dual Boot: Disk Read Error

[MichaelTarpey]

Silly me. :/

I'm running Windows 7 x64 Home, and I decide that I need my old Windows XP Pro installation to dual boot alongside. I have two hard drives. One is 500GB and has two partitions, the windows 7 partition and the recovery partition from the factory. The second drive is 2TB and had a few videos on it, so I created a small 20GB partition on it to make room for XP.

Boot disc works fine, I select the partition, files copy, seems to be successful. Computer restarts. BIOS screen shows, disappears...

"A disk read error occurred
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart"

No biggie, let me boot Windows 7 and see if I can figure out the problem, so I select the windows 7 drive from the boot menu.

Same message. Either drive I try to boot from, I get disk read error.

Did some investigation and boot.ini doesn't have windows 7 anymore, which I remember reading would happen. But I have no idea how to go about readding it, or whether or not it will do anything because of the disk read error.

Searched two internets, didn't find anything relevant.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated as I sit here staring at the error message.

Thanks to Android for letting me post this.

 

[KSoD]

Windows 7 doesnt use the boot.ini file for booting. It uses the BCD File. Which is a file that XP can't use. So your going to have to insert the Win7 DVD to do a boot recovery. If you dont have the Win7 DVD you will have to go to NeoSmart to get the Recovery CD to do this. You will then have to get the SATA drivers for your mother board and use the F6 to install 3rd party drivers method during the XP install to get XP to see the drive you want to install it to. XP by default doesnt have support for SATA as that technology came out after XP was created. Even with the addition of SP3 there still isnt SATA drivers on the disk by default.

After you finally get XP installed you will have to head back to NeoSmart and get EasyBCD so that you can manually add an XP entry to the BCD so you can have a dual boot setup.