I have windows seven installed and used partition wizard to create partition. I then installed xp thinking or maybe hoping in the back of my mind it would be in the dual boot mode but that didn't happen. oops, only way i know to learn is try and this one didn't work out just right................

Can someone help me to get the dual boot screen up?

Thanks in advance

GaryYou are always supposed to install the oldest OS first and the newest last. Since you haven't done that, download and run VistaBootPro and I believe it will fix your boot loader.I read that after the fact and i did see the program you mentioned. Okay, thanks, I'll give that one a spin and thanks again. This question has been asked so many times it makes us wonder why people never do any preparation or RESEARCH before they try something.
Can it be done? Yes, it can be. You can do what Allan  suggested and that should resolve the problem for you. But there is no shortcut for doing a dual boot system when you start out the wrong way. Microsoft has determined that the evolution  of Windows should be upward, not downward. Otherwise, they would have released THE ULTIMATE Windows many years ago and gradually worked us down to Windows VERSION  zero. That's a strange software limitation.  Unix-type  boot loaders work with either automatic or manually ENTERING the value. I can have a release candidate for today and a 2.2 kernel CLIENT as the main and be able to boot. That seems to be a major lack in backwards COMPATIBILITY and an unstable base structure.It's a lack of forwards compatibility- not backwards compatibility. Each version of Windows can detect when installations of previous versions are installed and set up a dual boot appropriately- and if it doesn't recognize the OS it adds an entry for it anyway.

The main problem here is  that with Vista they revised the boot loader; so now XP and earlier use a completely different boot loader- so Vista/7's boot loader copies the "old" boot sector to a file, and installs it's own, then when you select to run a previous version of windows it runs the old boot sector.

of course the problem is that installing windows XP or earlier after installing a NT6 OS confuses XP as far as detecting installed Operating Systems are concerned, and it simply overwrites the boot sector with it's own. of course now the NT6 OS won't work because it can no longer be booted. (if you were enterprising you could probably copy the NT6 boot sector to a file and boot Vista/7 from the XP boot menu in the same way that XP boots older OS versions; but it only does this automatically when it knows what the OS is.


Quote from: Geek-9pm on April 22, 2010, 02:50:59 PM

But there is no shortcut for doing a dual boot system when you start out the wrong way.

Microsoft has determined that the evolution  of Windows should be upward, not downward. Otherwise, they would have released THE ULTIMATE Windows many years ago and gradually worked us down to Windows version  zero.

  It would make more sense that the bootloader is developed separately from the system than with it.

It seems that there is no option for chainloading a system.

It would be better to have a file that could only be accessed from the said machine

and used a text editor such as vi to enable changes.