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Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Dual Boot Windows 7 and XP system won't boot-up

Okay so I'm writing this down to help those with similar problems and also to serve as a guide for me in the future in case I forgot what I did. I have a dual boot XP and Windows 7 System on the same hard disk but on different partitions. It was working well for several months until I suddenly got a BSOD and when Windows 7 attempted a startup recovery, I got a black screen and I can't even see the boot manager.

I tried repairing it via the Windows 7 install disk but I still get the black screen after BIOS startup so I tried repairing the other partition with XP although I rarely use the latter. I loaded up my Windows XP install disk and chose repair (not through the recovery console) and THANK GOD! I was able to boot to XP. So now my only problem is getting the Windows 7 side to boot.

I installed easybcd (google it), deleted the boot entries and then manually added everything one and by one and Ta-da I finally got the boot manager and successfully loaded Windows 7.