Dual boot Win 8.1 & XP

[Karol]

I had Win XP, then installed Win 7 and, to my surprise and content, it made dual boot and kept Win XP also. good.

Later i installed Win 8.1 anew, and it installed instaed of Win 7.

Now i want to move the partition where XP is (it's on an other HD and i want to disable it)

How do i keep the dual boot, where is the file so i can change the path and how.

By the way, do you know a program to create and resize partitions?

Thanks

[jaclaz]

The Disk Manager in Windows 7 (and later) is quite good, and - even if a tad bit complex to use - Diskpart (also built-in) can do even more things, there is no need for a third party partition manager normally.

About the dual boot, basically:
1) the boot related files for XP and earlier are NTLDR and BOOT.INI
2) the boot related files for Vista and later are BOOTMGR and \boot\BCD

The normal booting sequence of XP is:
MBR->PBR of active partition->NTLDR->BOOT.INI (choices)->Windows XP

The normal booting sequence of Vista (and later) is:
MBR->PBR of active partition->BOOTMGR->\boot\BCD (choices)->Windows Vista+

The normal bootng sequence of a dual boot like yours is:
1) MBR->PBR of active partition->BOOTMGR->\boot\BCD (choices)->Windows Vista+
2) MBR->PBR of active partition->BOOTMGR->\boot\BCD (choices)->(NTLDR)->BOOT.INI-> XP

The NTLDR is between brackets because it depends on the specific item and on the Windows version if it is used or not.

Without knowing the specific, exact situation of your system (now and how it will be) it is not possible to provide you with exact advice on what to do.

Your best choice would be to use BootIce that can manage the PBR's, the NTLDR and BOOTMGR and the settings files BOOT.INI and \boot\BCD via a nice GUI:

http://reboot.pro/topic/21956-bootice-v1332/

you want the 1.332 version, but you will need to learn a bit about the principles and the usage of the tool.

Depending on the exact setup, you may also want to introduce a separate boot manager (grub4dos) as primary boot manager, that would allow to have the two systems (XP and 7 or 8.1) completely independent.

jaclaz

 

Edited May 28, 2020 by jaclaz

[Dibya]

use https://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/ to add back boot loader. its a yearly ritual for me . 

[jaclaz]

1 hour ago, Dibya said:

use https://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/ to add back boot loader. its a yearly ritual for me . 

A (oldish, circa 2012) link casually dropped out of my bag o' links:

http://reboot.pro/topic/17655-boot-into-3rd-party-efi-application-via-bcd/

anyone wanting to read it may learn something.

jaclaz