Roffen

I installed XP first, then Win7 and got the standard MS dual boot, with Win7 as the default boot option. Since the Win7 is there only for sentimental reason - i don't use it, just let it rest there just in case I for any reason (can't imagine what that would be) might need it. I made an attempt to fix it but gave up before messing it all up. How should it be done - I assume it is doable? my boot.ini: ; ;Warning: Boot.ini is used on Windows XP and earlier operating systems. ;Warning: Use BCDEDIT.exe to modify Windows Vista boot options. ; [boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN /FASTDETECT

From having double boot XP/7 on my machines I now have only XP and that looks like heaven to me. I really can't see what I'd use 7 or higher for.

I can't even remember a time when I did not have a XP, and before that a 2k machine running around the clock. No problems so far. But I like to archive things that might come in handy someday. Use PM if you don't want to publish the link.

I wonder, during later years before MS orphaned XP, many updates were offered. Do I have to worry about there being updates that I ought to have but won't get when I reinststall from my Sp3 CD?

Still comfortable with XP Sp3, yet I opted for the MS offer to a free 'upgrade' of my Windows 7 Home Premium to a 10. I am not certain, but I seem to remember some words about the update being good for one year but at 85, that doesn't bother me much. But as I don't see any reason for using 10, I am uncertain whether I should install double boot XP/10. Anyhow, the reason I am here now is: Can I use a SSD drive with two partitions, install Win XP on the first, then Win 10 on the 2nd partition, and the double boot will be taken care of just as it used to with XP / Win 7? I am sort of hoping I'll be done reinstalling OS'es again. I may be a gullible fellow, but not wrt MS operating systems. I took a peek at Linux Mint but was not convinved that it would become a solution for me to be comfortable with.

I ran into a peculiar problem when I installed a Gigabyte motherboard with AMD APU (cpu) and dual boot. I wasn't able to get the integrated NIC to work under XP but no problems under WIn 7. Gigabyte confirmed that the Richland version of APU's didn't work under XPSP3 (Well everything else seemed to work ok) but I presume Trinity would be ok. Since XP-46 wasn't mentioned I thought that might be a solution although I never had any luck installing XP 64 - I always get a blue screen warning and have no clue what I could to to overcome that. Sata drivers missing? But I found a workaround: Use the onboard NIC for Win 7 and a PCI bus board for XP. Luckily I had a spare RJ45 socket already on the wall. With an SSD drive, booting is fast enough and the computer is virtually noiseless. Don't know much about the future; would like to take a peek at XP's SP4

Hope I am not disturbing this thread, but since the subject is Gigabyte motherboards: I recdently got a kit consisting of a GA-F2A98XM-HD3 motherboard, AMD CPU and 8GB RAM. I thought it would be a good candidate for my preferred setup: Dual boot with Win XP and Win 7. What a disappointment. I have struggled and struggled, but it was, and probably is, a permanent problem. It just isn't possible to get the NIC to accept both systems. I am not even quite certain if it ever worked with XP, but Win 7 was ok! So after several long days of work I decided to surrender and install a NIC on the PCI Express bus. I already had twin Internet sockets on the wall so it wasn't all that much of a problem, except the solution violates my sense of how things should be. I returned the kit (assembled) and it is in the mail now, the distributor says they found a fault and the board has been replaced. I am not holding my breath, I will be quite surprised if it any different from what it was. If it is, there's another board here to be replaced! I have complained to Gigabyte, it was quite a job to enter all the details they requested before the complaint could be sent. I don't know if I'll get a reply. I just regret I didn't go for ASUS again, they've never given me any problems

i replaced my old mobo with a Gigabyte GA-F2A88XM-HDS an all went well until I installed my trusty old XP. I selected both the English and Norwegian keyboard layouts, but the language selector is missing from the taskbar. And the keyboard I got is definitely not Norwegian, with among other things [ \ ] instead of Æ Ø Å. Looks more like an English kb. I will install W7 Home Pro on the 2nd partition as soon as I can, will be back here later. And before that, I may try installing XP again. The XP is a version I have been using a lot and I've never had problems like that before.

Win7 might be allright if it had the look and feel of XP.

Guys, sincerely, are there any good reasons why I should use Win7 Ultimate instead of XP? I have experienced some troubles with XP/SP3, like slow booting, and system slowing down for unknown reasons after being in use for a while. I just downloaded a 64 bits version so I am already gearing up for giving it another chance. Life would be so much easier if XP would satisfy all my desires;) and I could forget all about the neo-modern styled mistresses.

Haha, I am in the habit of saving everything, often ending up with several backup copies of the same old ..... that may live forever somewhere in my all to large storage space. So yes, you are right and I am going to remove that line presto. Aside from that, everything looks hunkydory here right now and I am optimistic it will stay that way at least for the near future. Consider yourself off the hook for the summertime, enjoy the weather where you are. Here, we've had rains and storms continuously for the past several months. Day temp up to 15 these days. It is getting late, should have moved to Spain years ago. Roffen

The BIOS boot order is 1st disk (XP), then 2nd disk (Win7) Both have only one partition. (3rd is a 2TB drive with several partitions, and XP on the 1st partition. Tha'ts the one I booted and was then able to fix the problem.) I haven't tried the C:\Windows7.bin="Windows 7 disk" because the C:\grldr="grub4dos" works for me. I never know when I may irun into problems so when I've found something that works I ignore other options. But if you think it is safe to try, I will. How does the line C:\Windows7.bin="Windows 7 disk" work?

This morning I feel much better. Found another XP parition on the machine, booted, removed the Archive attributes and added the SHR attributes. The files probably had been left without attributes after installation. So now everything is back to where it should be. But here are are the files I have: BOOT.INI: [boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" C:\grldr="grub4dos" C:\Windows7.bin="Windows 7 disk" MENU.LST: color blue/green yellow/red white/magenta white/magenta timeout 30 title Load Windows 7 from disk 1 part 0 root (hd1,0) chainloader /BOOTMGR title commandline commandline title reboot reboot title halt halt

All root files in drive 0 have the Archive attribute, and the boot ini cannot be typed, edited, or have it's attribute changed. It seems 'someone' has been creating a mess here Maybe the problem is that I am working from Win7 and have no rights on the drive? Maybe I'll try and see if I can obtain ownership, I can't see how else I can fix it. Or I surrender and install XP from scratch again. I can handle my main 'business' from Win7 for the time being and work on the XP problem when I have time to spare. Seems Win 7 is a strict mistress, there doesn't ssem to be anything I can do to get access. What I will do is to take a XP disk from my old machine and put it in here, boot up and probably get access to the other XP disk and remove the A-ttribute. Maybe removing the Attribute is enough, but I think I will add the SHR attributes. But that's for tomorrow, now it's off to bed.

I got a special problem today. The XP disk(0) has been ok for a long time, but I had to reinstall my Win7 Home Premium on disk(1). Afterwards It all semed to work as before and I was in the proces of reinstalling my usual applications. I had restarted the system several times and it worked like a charm, but suddenly, after installing ZoneAlarm on the Win7 disk and rebooting, I got this ugly message from disk(0): Loading new partition. Bootsector from C. H. Hochstätter. And that was that, the system was like dead, nothing more happened. The setup I've been using had boot XP as the default option, with grub4dos as the next alternative. Disk(0) has boot.ini grldr IO.sys menu.lst MSDOS.SYS NTDETECT.COM pagefiel.sys Windows7.bin ymjsetup.exe Disk(1) (Win7) C:\ has autoexec.bat bootmgr config.sys hiberfil.sys pagefile sys Is there a simple fix for my problem? I'd hate to have to reinstall XP, it has been in use for some time so there is much that will need to be installed anew. I could do without WIn7 except there are features of my bank access that will not work under XP.

That's very nice of you but I think you already have done much more than anyone could expect on any forum. I am very grateful for that. I now I have a functioning system that I don't want to mess up for anything in the world. Besides, it is about time I get all all of this settled for good, I want to spent the rest of my spare time using a computer and forget all about what's inside. I am now trying to streamline the process by removing things from the boot.ini and menu.lst files. With only two options in boot.ini, would it be possible to have grub4dos automatically select and execute the only option besides XP that I need in my menu.lst - booting of the Win7 disk? I might decide to use WIin 7 as my main OS and just keep XP as a standby in case of compatibility problems. That would be the v6 of Outlook Express, and MusicMatch. I have not looked into whether Win7 Ultimate might have a solution for that. I wouldn't mind getting rid of XP altogether! But for the time being, what I care most about is whether I now can use disk management to designate all my drives and volumes to use the same drive letters regardless for which system is booted except for the two system drives that of course always would be C or D. That would make mapping of everything else look identical regardless of system in use.

"Well, you cannot use NTLDR to boot Windows 7, which is what you are attempting to do with this line: Quote multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows Ultimate" OMG, now I see! I take it that means a dual boot with both system drives as C: is impossible without grub4dos or something like that? Was a revelation to me.

After installing grub4dos I can boot Win 7 without any problems. I don't understand why it doesn't work from the 'normal' entry. Must run, will check your post later. I have a wife that needs some attention, it is stressing.

ETA:: I didn't see your msg before I wrote this: I have been working hard to try and manage as much as possible on my own, and I am almost tere, but a strange problem has snuck in: As said, I have two similar system disks, one for XP and the other for Win7. When set as first boot drive in BIOS, both of them work 100% fine, with drive letter C and everything else looking just fine. But with XP as first drive and selecting the Win 7 entry in the boot.ini file, I get an error message like this: Windows Root > \system32\ntoskrnl.exe is missing or corrupt. The file is there, ntoskrnl.exe 54341KB, 21.11.2010 I know ntoskrnl problems are not uncommon but it beats me why the multiboot path to booting should cause a problem. My two setups: Disk 0 Win XP root files: boot.ini: [boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows Ultimate" C:\Windows7.bin="Windows 7 disk" … IO.SYS MSDOS.SYS NTDETECT.SYS ntldr pagefile.sys Disk 1 Win7 root files: AUPOX bootmgr hiberfile.sys pagefile.sys swapfile.sys .... It would be nice to have grub4dos too, but I don't know if I can fix that all by myself. What has made everything so difficult for me is that my old machine didn't just break down; I was having all kinds of problems that I tried to fix. Reinstalling OS's, utilities, only to run into more problems, CD/DVD disks getting corrupted and finally, out of the blue i got a message about data written to an address that should not be written to, and after that my SSD drive with the XP and Win7 partitions was dead and beyond resurrection. So much of what I thought I had saved from my installation got lost during my struggle to repair the system.

My old computer broke down, got me a 'new' one and will have Win XP and Win 7 on each their own hard disk. Keeping both drives connected, am I right in assuming that I then can install XP first, then Win7, and the multiboot I want will have been taken care of with nothing left for me to bother with? Will either system drive appear as a C: volume when booted?

I recently bought a used ASUS M4A79T Deluxe, ATX form factor motherbord and it has many both USB2 and USB3 ports. From the specs it appears it is made with high grade compnonents. It is made for AM3 CPU's but I don't see that as a drawaback. It is (or was, last time I checked) available at Amazon, refurbished IIRC. Drive CD is available, I downloaded both XP and WIN7 drivers from ASUS. I even tried WIN 8.1 but I found that user interface is not made for people like me.

Just a single partition on each drive, so a zero it is... So we are there now! Get a file system msg during Win 7 boot. Irrelevant. Relieved, need a rest now.

The txt file(s) are my way of saving things so I can bactrack my steps if I 'mess things up'. I just finished putting your suggestions in place and will now promptly reset. Holding my breath... ETA: XP = OK W7 No good cmd: root (hd0,1) generates error 22, no such (path?) cmd map --hook generates error 61, refuse to hook (int?)13 because of empty drive map table My jotted notes, they look rather messy, I should have been a doctor... Maybe we are not far from from the ultimate solution? Although I'd like it better if booting of Win7 would be transparent and look as clean as that of XP.

I am afraid I have messed it all up. I removed the menu.lst and this now is the root of XP disk: A C:\asusdisp.log A C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT A SH C:\boot.ini A C:\bootini.txt A C:\CONFIG.SYS A C:\grldr A SHR C:\IO.SYS A SHR C:\MSDOS.SYS A SHR C:\NTDETECT.COM A SHR C:\ntldr A SH C:\pagefile.sys Win7 disk: A E:\autoexec.bat A SHR E:\bootmgr A SHR E:\BOOTSECT.BAK A E:\config.sys A SH E:\hiberfil.sys A SHR E:\IO.SYS A SHR E:\MSDOS.SYS A SHR E:\NTDETECT.COM A SHR E:\ntldr First boot shows not boot.ini but shows two identical lines, "Windows default" and they will boot XP. Is there a way that I can clean up whatever mess I've made on the XP disk?

I am beaten. Wouldn't the sensible thing be to scratch both drives, then with both drives connected all the time install XP and Win7, in that order on the respective drive? Wouldn't that result in a situation where there's very little that needs to be done to get what I want?