Having trouble triple booting WinXP & Win7. Please help.

debitcardmayhem

Have a look here http://www.pathikshah.com/blog/how-to-add-windows-xp-to-windows-7-boot-menu/

Nine_Lives

have followed the cmd prompt instructions which dont work

It puts WinXP at the end of the boot menu but when selected the screen goes blank/black & the PC then reboots.

Upon startup instead of WinXP being drive E, it's now F & terabyte is now E instead of D.

I've also followed this which doesn't work: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/8057-dual-boot-installation-windows-7-xp.html

I've gone through being angry now. Now i'm just at the giving up stage

debitcardmayhem

Hmm I am doing Roast Dinner at the mo , but on the Win7 open a cmd prompt (as admin) and paste the output of bcdedit

Nine_Lives

Thinking about this....

IIRC the reason i originally had Windows XP installed was because some programes (namely games: Street Fighter 4 for e.g.) i could not get to work within Win7 64 bit. Looking on google & i'm not the only one. I have a 1GB graphics card (some Nvidia 460 series) & had the latest directX & it just wouldn't work in Win7 64bit, even when i chose to run as WinXP compatibility mode.

So i had WinXP installed & i could play the game.


As well as my Win7 64bit DVD, i also have a Win7 32bit DVD. I'm wondering if i install this instead of the WinXP partition 1) is it likely to work with the game - but i guess you guys couldn't tell me that, but 2) would it 'do away with' this current boot issue as i'd then have 2x Win7 64 bit & 1 Win7 32bit?

RobTang

Try setting the winxp partition to different drives in EasyBCD or use the auto configure.

I pretty sure I had SF4 working under Win 7 64 however.

esuhl

This is strange... I've installed triple- and quad-boot systems dozens of times and not had any problems. I've never had multiple Win7 installations, though...

Your BIOS needs to be set to boot from a certain drive. When the PC boots, it will look at the master boot record (MBR) on that drive (which contains partition and boot manager info) and run the relevant boot manager.

So... I'm not 100% sure, but if you have the three OSes installed on different physical drives, I think you should be able to fix the problem like this:

• Set the BIOS to boot the XP drive.
• Make sure you can boot into XP using only the XP boot manager. If not use fixmbr and/or fixboot to repair the MBR on the XP drive.
• Reboot and set the BIOS to boot from one of the Win7 drives.
• Boot into Win7.
• If necessary, use bcdedit to add the XP and other Win7 boot options, and remove any un-used options. (If it still doesn't work, try re-writing the MBR from scratch and then adding the other OS options again.)

I hope that helps...

debitcardmayhem

K_P83 wrote: »

have followed the cmd prompt instructions which dont work

It puts WinXP at the end of the boot menu but when selected the screen goes blank/black & the PC then reboots.

Upon startup instead of WinXP being drive E, it's now F & terabyte is now E instead of D.

I've also followed this which doesn't work: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/8057-dual-boot-installation-windows-7-xp.html

I've gone through being angry now. Now i'm just at the giving up stage

Being a bit dim here but F is unused according to above so according to your bcdedit you have set XP as F (empty) ? Do you mean H?

Nine_Lives

That screencap was taken before the cmd prompt exercise which changed drive letters.

Anyway, this is taking up way too much time & i've just about had enough of it. I need 3 installs, so i'm looking at doing 3x installs of Win7, but as ever, i'm having problems.

Win7 install 1 onto SSD went great
Win7 install 2 onto HDD went great, both are bootable
Win7 install 3 onto final SSD, well when i went to install it it told me Windows couldn't be installed to the drive, but i went ahead anyway. It's now not bootable though - keep getting an error when it tries to boot. The other 2 are still bootable.

Prior to all this i scrapped EVERYTHING - deleted all partitions so everything was set to stock - that included the system reserved 100mb.

Just can't understand why i can't install Windows to the new SSD & why it's not bootable?

debitcardmayhem

Aaaah Driver Problem then for that perhaps not sure of course, plus I thought XP was not a good idea for SSD (due to trim commands) ...Of course I don't know since I have not yet got an SSD

Nine_Lives

debitcardmayhem wrote: »

Aaaah Driver Problem then for that perhaps not sure of course, plus I thought XP was not a good idea for SSD (due to trim commands) ...Of course I don't know since I have not yet got an SSD

You really want to get one! The boot time is incredible. I read they were just about the best upgrade you could make & i was scepitcal but bought one when i built my PC in 2010. £110 for a 60GB Corsair SSD. The difference was unreal!!
A lot has changed in 2-3 years & i've just bought a 250GB Samsung 830 SSD for £120.

Once you've experienced an SSD you'll not have your OS on a HDD again!

Anyway, this has been a total waste of a weekend off work. My god has this been painful, but the end is in sight.

Want to know what was causing the problem with Win7 triple boot (3x Win7, not the WinXP i was trying earlier)???

The connection point on the motherboard that the final Win7 SSD was connected to (SATA6) was disabled in BIOS. All i had to do was change it to "auto" & it solved it.

I now wonder whether this has been the problem all along. I've wasted about 24 hours & had little sleep as i was up until the early hours trying to fix it. I feel like taking a hammer to the damn thing!!!