Dualbooting Win XP Pro SP3 32bit and Win 7 Pro RTM 64bit = FAIL
Gotta love Microsoft. This weekend I was gonna format Win 7 RC1 and XP in order to do a clean install for my socket 1156 upgrade with Win 7 Professional 64 RTM and Win XP Pro SP3 integrated from MSDNAA. Today I've spent the whole day with headache getting these 2 OS's cooperate on my comp. I think I'm tru like 5 or 6 reinstalls of Win 7 and 2 or 3 for Win XP. I've used nLite & vLite to slipstream them but I removed only quite a few components that I've removed in the past that shouldn't affect the issues I was having. Neither did I have any probs getting Win 7 Ultimate 64bit RC1 in dualboot with XP SP3 either before this.
I tried basicly EVERYTHING to get the boot loader to work as it should, I installed XP first and then Win 7 and I tried the opposite install order as well and I've tried modifying the boot loader manually with BCDEdit in cmd prompt and also with EasyBCD and VistaBootPro and "fixboot" from XP recovery console etc and also checked internet for the exact procedures without any luck. The problem was that the either the boot menu didn't show up so only XP or Win 7 would automaticly load or if I got the menu then it would say "file: \ntldr status: 0xc000000f info: The selected entry could not be loaded because
the application is missing or corrupt." or when neither of the OS would work simply "NTLDR is missing" press ctrl+alt+del.
So I decided this is the day I leave Win XP for good, at least I got a clear sign that I should just drop this legacy OS and move on. :p: (Or possibly the relatively new hardware simply didn't want to run on XP. ^^) The only thing that bugs me in Win 7 is the 1000 point lower cpu score in 3DMark06 but games and other stuff runs as good and often slightly better in Win 7.
Feels great with a decent sized OS partition (29.2GB) for a change as well as I've previously used 14.6 + 14.6GB partitions for XP and Win 7 so they were like always full after a little while. :p: