boot issues (I hope ;_;)

[rice]

ok so for the first time in like never, i reformatted my old laptop hard drive. Then, i installed XP on it, but for some reason, now it only boots to XP. I have tried to boot from the win7 drive only, but it just skips to the xp drive. i've checked out all the files on both drives, and there are xp files on xpdrive, and win7 files on the win7drive, so I'm POSITIVE I didn't overwrite win7 with xp. Help me please, i'm a Driverless PC and i'm using a mac! :*:

 

[Blackbox]

Reset your MBR...

Easy way;

- Set your Win7 drive first in the array of drives and XP after it. (or just change the boot device order in the BiOS)

- Boot into the windows 7 drive and enter the recovery menu. (can't remember the function key to press to get there off the top of my head since I don't use windows much at all anymore, but I think it's F9)

- Select command prompt

- Type out;

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /rebuild bcd


Can also be done through the windows vista/7 install discs.

The only bad thing about installing windows XP on top of others is that it doesn't detect other OS's, it just completely wipes and rewrites the MBR to it's needs.

 

[rice]

oh emm geee that sounds like it could work!
just one question: what's MBR?

Also i try to boot win7 drive and it says BOOTMGR missing
looking for my disk atm

also here are some ss' of the drives and content and such

 

[Blackbox]

MBR = Master Boot Record

You can also try a program called EasyBCD, haven't used it since it's early stages but it use to be a good one, not sure anymore.

 

[rice]

Damn, i ended up beingn forced to back up my files through network, and using an ol bootleg of win7 :| thanks for the help though blackbox, much appreciated