Dual boot issue with XP

[Mopar guy]

Hello everyone, I hope this is the right forum! I have a problem I hope someone can help me with. I have (had) a three OS multi boot setup going that was working fine until I had to reinstall my main one & now I can't see the others. Here's the details - I've had XP Pro as my main OS & I have separate partitions for WIN 7 & Vista home prem. My XP has been acting up so I decided to reinstall it. I found out after the fact I should of backed up my boot file & a hal.dll file I think. Either way, it won't recognize the other OS's. After tons of "googling" & reading on here, I did manage to modify my boot.ini file to show the other systems but when I try to boot into one of them, I get a "missing sys32\hal.dll" error. My Win 7 partition does have the hal file in the system 32 file, so I'm lost as to why I get this message. I really don't care about the Vista as I was just experimenting with it so it could be wiped out but the Win 7 OS I was using everyday. Any ideas on how to get Win 7 to boot without reinstalling it? Oh, I was using Vista boot pro but after I reinstalled it in XP, it won't do anything. It does show all 3 partitions & the OS's but shows no problems when I run the diagnostics. Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!

[IcemanND]

With previous versions of windows you had to install the newest last to have the multi-os boot options work right. You should be able to do a repair install of Windows 7, or it will likely just do a repair of the startup sequence to fix the problem

[Mopar guy]

That's what I had done so it worked fine but repairing the startup is what I'm having problems with. I assume there's more than just changing the boot ini file? When I did & tried to boot WIN7, is when I got the missing hal.dll file errror. Unless I didn't change the boot file properly. Here's what I changed it too:

[boot loader]

timeout=30

default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS

[operating systems]

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows 7" /fastdetect

[IcemanND]

do a repair install of windows 7

[spacesurfer]

That's what I had done so it worked fine but repairing the startup is what I'm having problems with. I assume there's more than just changing the boot ini file? When I did & tried to boot WIN7, is when I got the missing hal.dll file errror. Unless I didn't change the boot file properly. Here's what I changed it too:

[boot loader]

timeout=30

default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS

[operating systems]

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows 7" /fastdetect

Umm, no! You can't boot Windows 7 using ntdlr/boot.ini.

Windows XP uses ntldr and boot.ini and was release prior to Windows 7 and Vista, which use bootmgr and winload.exe.

Thus, your option is to repair the bootsector using the recovery option on Windows 7. Just pop it in, do startup recovery and let it do it's thing. It will restore it.

[Mopar guy]

OK, that did it. I did try that before but I think I had changed the boot file first. When I changed it back to it's original configuration, I tried the repair in Win 7, everything works fine again. Thanks for the help. I didn't realize that there was a pecking order to this stuff! LOL

[pjadec]

Why you don't you use EasyBCD 1.7.2 and fix boot? I have xp and win7 installed in system. when i install xp again i use EasyBCD fix to win7 working.

Sorry my english is not so good.