I have installed windows 7 on a clean hard drive. I also have XP on another drive and want to boot both. When windows 7 lists the operating systems and I select XP I get the message windows fails to start and am asked to repair computer with original disk. This did nothing. I then got bias set up so it booted to the hard drive with XP on and installed Easy BCDin XP to try and set up boot properly. I followed instructions fro the net. Now whether I set the Bios to selecs Windows 7 or XP to boot from Windows 7 always starts and I can no longer access XP. Help please!!!

Did you have both drives in when you loaded the XP? Is this an odd setup like a sata adapter pci card? Might have to do a repair on the xp first. Playing to the angels Les Paul (1915-2009)

Thank you for your reply. I had both drives installed and individually Windows 7 and XP both work well. How can I repair XP if I can't get access to it? P.S. I need everything in simple terms please as I am not well versed in computers like some.I gather booting can be a field to keep clear of and shouldn't be ventured into unless one knows what they are doing. That's why I should have left it to someone who knows and not have been so stupid. Should I view windows 7 boot.ini file to see what's going on?

Not sure I can answer your question. I can maybe give you some tips. What I might do is boot to the xp cd and use the repair. See MS site for how to's. There are two ways an XP cd can repair a system. One way is using command line sort of tools to fix mbr and some other features like fixboot. The second way is to boot into a repair gui that basically restores some files to the way they were in the original install. That tends to make you reload applications. All the data would be there but since the registry is replaced the programs won't work. I would be inclined to try the command line repairs first. If you can then boot to xp then you can fix the W7. The bios boot order has a bit to do with the way the system works. It played part in how your install and boot loader works. W7 changed the way it boots a bit. That is why you see the choice would be my guess and it let's you boot to W7. W7 uses bcdedit. My guess is you had some files on the W7 disk that were needed for xp. When you installed W7 two or three hidden files were overwritten and the bulk of your xp is fine. Playing to the angels Les Paul (1915-2009)

Thank you for your help. With a little help from various quarters I have now reached a barrier I can not pass. A history and current state is listed below: History of my problem and how the computer is today: Original Set-Up One hard drive with two partitions, one for XP the other for Data. Always reliable. No problems New Set-Up New hard drive added split into two partitions one for Windows 7 the other for Data. Windows 7 installed. Clicking Control Panel /System/ Advanced Settings. When clicking Default operating system Windows7 and XP appear in the drop down menu. On restart Windows 7 menu appeared. Win 7 or XP. Clicking XP caused error message: Restart computer. Re-staring causes the same message In BIOS Win7 disk is called disk 0 and XP disk 1. Selecting BIOS boot order as disk 1 XP loaded. Setting boot order as 0 only windows 7 can be loaded despite the XP option on the start-up menu. Easy BCD 1.72 was the loaded onto Win 7 and new operating system Microsoft Windows XP added. On booting Windows 7 new menu showed Win7 and Microsoft Windows XP. Selecting Microsoft Windows XP produced same error message as before i.e. restart computer. How do I boot XP from Windows 7 menu instead of having to do it through the BIOS? Any help would be appreciated. Thank you

Hi. After changing Windows 7 boot loader with Easy BCD 1.72 you should place boot.ini, ntldr, NTDETECT.COM into boot disk(partition) with Windows 7 and change hard drive number in file boot.ini. In my case I have changed rdisk(0) into rdisk(1) I took those files from my Windows XP installed on other hard drive.

I have been away and just read your reply. It seems a very good idea. I will try it out. Thank you