I recently added a second hard drive to my machine with the intention of dual booting the beta of Windows 7 as I had read some good things about it and the beta was free. I also wanted to install my games on the 7 drive and experiment because as you know XP will only see three gb of ram at any one time and my machine has a total of five.
I connected the second drive, started up with the 7 dvd and it asked which drive I wanted to install on and all went according to plan. That is, until I restarted my computer. Instead of being asked during boot up to choose from 7 or XP I was asked to boot Windows 7 or "an older version of Windows". I tried the older version option, got an XP screen, then the screen goes black and it does not boot up. I tried disconnecting the 7 drive and rebooting. Same thing, black screen after an XP loading screen (the black one that says "Windows XP" and has the blue scrolling meter at the bottom).
I have gone into BIOS with both drives connected and with only the XP drive connected and BIOS sees both drives, the size and free space.
I have tried booting from the XP disc with no luck. I also tried booting with a Ubuntu Linux disc to rescue my data with no success.
I feel like it's a boot problem but I don't knpow what to do next. Reinstall XP? A repair install? Try a boot disc, such as The Ultimate Boot Disc?
Even if you can't boot xp all the data is safe and recoverable.
But you should be able to fix xp to boot up again. You can try the fixmbr/fixboot command, this will either fix the problem, if it doesn't it won't make it worst. You can check the boot.ini file in xp and make sure that it's setup so that it is pointing to the correct boot partition.
The ultimate bootdisk probably won't fix it, a more valuable tool would be a "boot corrector" it's what I use. It can only be found in the "paragon partition manager 9.0 boot disk" it's a very good utility that has got my computers to bootup in some worst case scenario problems.
The link shows a problem similar to yours but with Vista and xp dual boot. see solution 2.
One way to look at it is your windows xp partition is fine, the bootloader section which is located on the MBR and in some files in the partition folder/registry might have been changed. Those can be fixed everytime. I have never encountered a non-booting windows xp, that I wasn't able to fix.
My recommendation is to get the free "virtualbox" and see if you can install windows 7 in the virtualbox.
That's how I test new operating systems without risking my main computer. The new operating system in the virtualbox will act like a normal computer, you can even install software etc on the virtual OS.
the other option is to make sure you have a good image backup of your xp partition (I use the free macrium reflect). This way if anything goes wrong, you can just restore windows xp (which can be done in minutes/hours) instead of doing a complete windows reinstallation which can take hours/days).
Does the software running in the virtual machine suffer any degradation in performance from a standard install, such as a slower framerate or longer load times?
everything runs slower in the virtual mode,but it gives you a basic idea of what the OS will look like if installed in the real hard drive. I mainly use the virtual mode to test programs on a different OS.
