Dualbooting Win XP Pro SP3 32bit and Win 7 Pro RTM 64bit = FAIL

[RPGWiZaRD]

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. (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.

[Corsa]

.....Everglide Titan MonsterMat | Windows XP Pro SP3 & Windows 7 Pro 64bit | HDD: 4x300GB, 1x500G....

Time to update ur sig RPG

[glen]

I have no problem dual booting Win XP 32bit and Win 7x64 Ultimate. They are on separate hard drives. There can be a problem if they share the same physical harddrive due to the hidden partition.

[RPGWiZaRD]

I have no problem dual booting Win XP 32bit and Win 7x64 Ultimate. They are on separate hard drives. There can be a problem if they share the same physical harddrive due to the hidden partition.

That's probably it, I had them on the same HDD and it was also the first time I encounter the "100MB system reserved" partition crap but I read how to bypass it and get the stuff installed on the OS partition instead. There's different ways to do it but easiest way is during the drive formatting act, delete/create a new partition that you want to use for your OS and it will automaticly create that 100MB system reserved partition, then delete the OS partition you just created, and highlight the system reserved and click on "extend" to resize it to the size you want your OS partition to be and then format that partition afterwards and voila you have a normal partition without the system reserved crap which is ready for install.

Anyway I'm happy with Win 7 in all ways and haven't got any probs with it so I don't really need Win XP anymore, the only thing XP would be useful for still is for having bigger e-penis in some benchmarks.... so I can live with it. Win 7 64bit is otherwise faster for me in desktop environment, runs many games faster & DX10/11 support, got even better audio quality with kX Audio drivers than in XP, I've started to like the GUI changes.

[nealh]

That's probably it, I had them on the same HDD and it was also the first time I encounter the "100MB system reserved" partition crap but I read how to bypass it and get the stuff installed on the OS partition instead. There's different ways to do it but easiest way is during the drive formatting act, delete/create a new partition that you want to use for your OS and it will automaticly create that 100MB system reserved partition, then delete the OS partition you just created, and highlight the system reserved and click on "extend" to resize it to the size you want your OS partition to be and then format that partition afterwards and voila you have a normal partition without the system reserved crap which is ready for install.

Anyway I'm happy with Win 7 in all ways and haven't got any probs with it so I don't really need Win XP anymore, the only thing XP would be useful for still is for having bigger e-penis in some benchmarks.... so I can live with it. Win 7 64bit is otherwise faster for me in desktop environment, runs many games faster & DX10/11 support, got even better audio quality with kX Audio drivers than in XP, I've started to like the GUI changes.

I have WinXP pro 32bit and Win 7 64 bit RTM on the same HDD as a dual boot with no issues.

I have a 320 gb Seagate drive...I use about 60gb for each OS.

I even moved data off the partition for Win 7, to a third partition and resized the partitions an did a clean install for Win7. WinXP pro has been installed for 2yrs.

[Equinediver]

Got 2 copies of XP 64bit and a Windows 7 RTM on a RAID volume. Started with XP, then replaced Vista with W7 and then at a later date did the 2nd copy of XP. Using EasyBCD never had any real problems with booting.

Seems like something is either lurking on your HDD or maybe it is starting to fail. Did you try wiping all the partitions and then doing a full format?

[RPGWiZaRD]

Worked fine this time, I don't know if it's cuz I exchanged the previous OS HDD that is getting worn out or cuz of I prepartitioned the Windows 7 os partition in XP. Anyway the boot menu showed up immediatly during setup too so didn't need to manipulate boot files afterwards.

[YukonTrooper]

That's probably it, I had them on the same HDD and it was also the first time I encounter the "100MB system reserved" partition crap but I read how to bypass it and get the stuff installed on the OS partition instead.

When I was using Windows 7, I was dual-booting XP32 and 7 on the same hard-drive no problem. I did have to fix the boot table after uninstalling 7 with the XP install disc, so that the system would auto-load XP instead of asking which OS I wanted to use at boot, but using the two OS's at the same time didn't give me any problems at all.