Upgaded windows xp to windows 7 and can't boot into latter.

[gregaryb]

Bloody Micorosft!

I had XP installed on one hard disk and decided to upgrade to windows 7.

The installation process installed windows 7 on a secon hard disk but for some bizarre reason it has not rendered that disk bootable on its own.

I had to restore my xp installation because the hard disk went bad, but the backup I took was before I upgraded to Windows 7.

Now I can't boot into my new windows 7 installation.

I created a new windows 7 installation on a third hard disk and booted into it.

I tried to use bcdboot.exe to render the orginal windows 7 on the second hard drive bootable but in their 'wisdom' microsoft has not made the allowance to specify both a source installation and a destination installation with bcdboot.exe.

You can only specify the source installation, from where bcdboot.exe will obtain the nltdr etc.
bcdboot expects c:\ drive to be the destination installation - the same as the source installation in my case.

So next a tried to modify the boot.ini on my windows xp installation so that I can boot into my original windows 7 installation on the second hard disk that way and then use bcdboot.exe.

But that does not work either because I can't find how to set the multi, disk, rdisk and partition values for my my original windows 7 installation.

All my hard disks have one partition so it will be partition(1) and multi(0)

But I can't remember whether disk and rdisk should be the same value or not. And I can't figure out what value it should be.

I was using windows xp disk manager to work out what value disk and rdisk should be but it does not seem to be working.

Perhaps what windows xp disk manager is telling me that drive number each hard disk is (and that I was using as a value for disk and rdisk) is not the same as what the bios is telling windows at boot time.

Can any body help me out here?

Perhaps a utility like bcdboot that allows you to specify BOTH source and destination windows 7 installations

 

[gregaryb]

Bloody Micorosft!

I had XP installed on one hard disk and decided to upgrade to windows 7.

The installation process installed windows 7 on a secon hard disk but for some bizarre reason it has not rendered that disk bootable on its own.

I had to restore my xp installation because the hard disk went bad, but the backup I took was before I upgraded to Windows 7.

Now I can't boot into my new windows 7 installation.

I created a new windows 7 installation on a third hard disk and booted into it.

I tried to use bcdboot.exe to render the orginal windows 7 on the second hard drive bootable but in their 'wisdom' microsoft has not made the allowance to specify both a source installation and a destination installation with bcdboot.exe.

You can only specify the source installation, from where bcdboot.exe will obtain the nltdr etc.
bcdboot expects c:\ drive to be the destination installation - the same as the source installation in my case.

So next a tried to modify the boot.ini on my windows xp installation so that I can boot into my original windows 7 installation on the second hard disk that way and then use bcdboot.exe.

But that does not work either because I can't find how to set the multi, disk, rdisk and partition values for my my original windows 7 installation.

All my hard disks have one partition so it will be partition(1) and multi(0)

But I can't remember whether disk and rdisk should be the same value or not. And I can't figure out what value it should be.

I was using windows xp disk manager to work out what value disk and rdisk should be but it does not seem to be working.

Perhaps what windows xp disk manager is telling me that drive number each hard disk is (and that I was using as a value for disk and rdisk) is not the same as what the bios is telling windows at boot time.

Can any body help me out here?

Perhaps a utility like bcdboot that allows you to specify BOTH source and destination windows 7 installations

Oh and I have tried using the windows 7 installation cd repair option to render the disk drive containing my original windows 7 installation, bootable.

But that does absolutely nothing to fix the problem.

If I install another copy of windows 7 on the hard disk with the original windows 7 installation then it tells me it will rename the original 'windows' folder to 'windows.old'.

If you do this with windows xp, then I know from previous experience that you can just delete the new 'windows' folder, rename 'windows.old' to 'windows', and the orginal windows xp installation will boot happily.

Can you do that with windows7 or have microsoft messed up that little backdoor solution with windows vista -> windows 10

 

[gregaryb]

Oh and I have tried using the windows 7 installation cd repair option to render the disk drive containing my original windows 7 installation, bootable.

But that does absolutely nothing to fix the problem.

If I install another copy of windows 7 on the hard disk with the original windows 7 installation then it tells me it will rename the original 'windows' folder to 'windows.old'.

If you do this with windows xp, then I know from previous experience that you can just delete the new 'windows' folder, rename 'windows.old' to 'windows', and the orginal windows xp installation will boot happily.

Can you do that with windows7 or have microsoft messed up that little backdoor solution with windows vista -> windows 10

I don't know why microsoft bother puting recovery options in their install CDs - they NEVER work and not once in all the version of windows I have installed, and that have broken for what ever reason, have the recovery options EVER worked!

The only way to fix it is to wipe the fu@#ing disk and start all over again, unless you have a good backup of a properly working windows installation.