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

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 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 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 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.

You should be able to easily accomplish this using EasyBCD. I take it you had XP installed first and have installed 7 second. When it boots into 7, open up EasyBCD and do the following:
-Click Add New Entry
-Select the Windows NT/2k/XP/2k3
-Make sure Automatically Detect Correct Drive is checked then click Add Entry
-Next goto the BCD Deployment
-Tick the Install Windows Vista/7 bootloader to the MBR
-Click Write MBR.
-Close EasyBCD and reboot.

It should give you the option to select your OS now at this point.

-JMP

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