Dual booting XP and 7 beta, cannot boot into 7

[skitzo_zac]

Right I have XP (Pro, 32 bit, SP3) installed on my C: partition and I installed the 7 beta (the public beta, build 7000, 64 bit) onto my F: partition. The install process went fine no issues. But when the install completed it just boots straight into XP with no option to boot into 7.

Edit: I dunno if its important or any issue but XP and 7 are both on the same physical hard drive, just different partitions. I have another hard drive, its only an old 8GB IDE drive I found lying around (planning to install Ubuntu onto it using WUBI for a play around later, but thats not for discussion right now). End O' edit!

Basically what I need to know is what to add to the boot.ini to enable dual booting to boot into 7. I have done some googleing, but I cannot find an example of the boot.ini for dual booting XP and 7.

I am aware that vista onwards do not use the boot.ini anymore and now use BCDEDIT, the problem here is that I cannot get into 7 to use this and edit it.

Currently I my boot.ini contains the following:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

I just added:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows 7 Beta"

to the bottom of it to see if it would be that easy and work. It didn't it threw up an error when I selected the 7 option to boot to it.
Windows could not start because the following file is missing or currupt:
<Windows root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe.
Please re-install a copy of the above file.

So yeah basically I just need to know what to put into the boot.ini to have two working options to boot into XP or 7.

I can provide more information if it is required, any help will be greatly appreciated.

 

[alexschmutz]

same problem and i have fix

to begin running in 7 again, it is quite stupid in my view:
1.insert 7 disc
2.pick install language
3.bottom left of window, click repair
4.dvd will search for 7 installation
5.it will automatically fix itself by reinitializing the bcd, or whatever function
6. Xp will be once again in the older installs list and 7 will once again be able to be booted.


-you can not boot with the xp loader(boot.ini)

-i made the account for this site just because i had the same frustrating problem as you

 

[skitzo_zac]

Cheers for the reply alexschumtz, but In the end (before you replied btw) I just formatted and got rid of both XP and 7. I am now currently running just 7. When I look back now I think that your solution would of probably worked just fine, I don't know why I didn't think of using the repair function on the Windows installation disk myself.