HELP: booting from multiple partitions

I have been using windows 7 on my HP 6535b notebook. Recently I decided to install windows xp to another partition. Windows 7 is on the C drive and xp is on the F drive. Ever since I installed XP to the F drive I can not find how to boot to windows 7 from the C drive. In the BIOS I can change the boot order of "notebook harddrive" or "upgrade bay" or "USB flash drive"... but I don't have the option to choose which drive it boots from. Please help!

 

As that notebook has been around for longer than Win 7 I'm guessing you have a Win 7 installation disk? If so you need to boot to it and select the repair option. Can't give you precise steps as I don't have Win 7, but that should repair your BCD and get Win 7 booting again. It will also remove the ability to boot XP.

What you tried to do is not acceptable. If you want to dual boot two systems using the Microsoft method of dual booting, the OS's have to be installed in historical order, i.e. XP first, Win 7 second. Done that way a dual boot is automatically created.

It is possible to do it the other way around, but you need a third party boot manager to do so.

 

what is a good freeware boot manager that would allow me to switch to whichever OS i wanted to use at any time?

 

There's tons of guides out there, main thing one should check before attempting this is that there are proper XP drivers available for your machine. Here's one such guide on the procedure. Install Windows XP in Dual Boot with Pre-Installed Windows 7.

This procedure as others, will create the boot file that you need, with the required XP files where needed to be. Windows will do the rest.

 

Yep, there's one, though I use Grub4DOS, which allows you to install any OS to any partition - even to logical partitions - in any order, and is free.

If you decide to have a go at Augie's method you might possibly run into a problem of not being able to shrink the Win 7 partition sufficiently. It all depends on where the paging file and MFT are located, but this can easily be got around by using a partition manager such as Easeus Partition Master, also free.

 

Grub4DOS sounds interesting but perhaps misleading as it should say Grub4BCD if it does indeed change the BCD and add the proper XP files. I have several open primary partitions so I'll test your Grub4DOS. I won't test EaseUS as this is my main machine, all I'll say here is shrink the partition with EASEUS and then assign a drive letter using Windows. That has been the pain for me, assigning drive letters with partitioners. Maybe they've gotten better in this respect. It's been a while.

 

Hi augie

Grub4DOS doesn't muck about with the BCD or the boot files at all. Each partition has a complete installation including all of its booting files etc, and G4D handles the potential conflicts by hiding partitions from each other. If you are interested I can do no better than point you to a superb guide by MudCrab. The guide focuses on booting the Acronis rescue media from a flash drive, but you can ignore all that as all the info you need to install G4D to the boot sector of your hard drive is there.

http://www.themudcrab.com/acronis_grub4dos.php

I have used it extensively and can help with required entries in the text based config file if necessary. I would encourage you and others to try it - it is quite satisfying to see how simple it is to boot anything at all with it, even ISO files. Bye bye CD drive

The complete user guide is at -

http://diddy.boot-land.net/grub4dos/Grub4dos.htm

 

The only problems I have had with partioning programs have arisen from allowing them to format a partition before installing an OS. All Hell broke loose when I created and formatted a partition for Win 7 RC using Acronis Disk Director. But by letting the installer format again before install all was fine.