How to Dual Boot Windows 7 & XP, when Win 7 installed first before XP ?

Hi! this is Sonicbom. I m just a student and doing specialization in Information technology. Now coming to point lets talk about Windows one of the heaviest brand name in IT field. Recently this giant company launched Windows 7 in the market . A mind blowing piece of work with enough eye candy to fall in love with it. But wait windows7 is still fresh as morning dew water. Many developers are yet make their development and API to perfectly suitable for windows 7 . And this makes Windows 7 still a thing You want but cant utilize it at fullest capacity . Thus here comes XP and Vista in scene.

Myself being curous like a cat wanted to use Windows7 as well but cant stay away from XP for few comptability issues ok here I stop my story and let me describe how I installed it.

How to Dual Boot Windows 7 & XP, when Win 7 installed first before XP ?

• I’ve just upgraded my pc’s harddisk. I’ve installed Win 7 first, and then installed Win XP. That left me with only being able to boot into XP. So I needed a way to re-activate booting into Win 7, and have the option to boot into XP also.
• I Googled around, but couldn’t find what I was looking for which should easy for me to understand. I found hints, but no direct, step-by-step, simple to follow instructions.  But hey I thank my friendly forum members of Prodigits.co.uk to give me hints regarding this.
• Turns out the solution is very simple with EasyBCD.

1. If you installed Win 7 first, then installed XP, then right now you can only boot into XP. So do the following from XP:
2. Download and install EasyBCD (link).
3. Inside EasyBCD
4. Click the ‘Add/Remove Entries’ Button (left side).
5. Under the ‘Add an Entry‘ section, select ‘Windows NT/2k/XP/2k3‘ from the ‘Type‘ drop-down list.
6. Optional, edit the ‘Name‘ field.
7. Click ‘Add Entry‘.
8. (Optional, under the ‘Manage Existing Entries‘ section, use the Up/Down Arrow buttons to change which OS is first in your list, then click ‘Save‘.)
9. (Optional, Click the ‘Change Settings‘ button (left side). Then under the ‘Global Settings‘ section, use the ‘Default OS‘ drop-down to adjust which OS you want to automatically boot to by default. You may also adjust the ‘Bootloader Timeout‘ to adjust how long the boot menu will display before loading the default OS. Then Click the ‘Save Settings‘ button.)
10. Click the ‘Manage Bootloader‘ button (left side).
11. Under the ‘Bootloader Install Options‘ section, make sure the option for ‘Reinstall the Vista Bootloader‘ is selected. (For our purposes, Win7 Bootloader and Vista Bootloader are the same.)
12. Click the ‘Write MBR‘ button
13. That’s pretty much it. EasyBCD will write the required changes, and tell you that you need to reboot. Just reboot, and voila, you can now Dual-Boot between Win 7 and XP.

• The above points assumes that Win 7 was installed first and was fully functional prior to installing XP. It also assumes that all the files required for booting are located on your Win 7 partition.

XP requires the following files for booting:

• NTDETECT.COM
• ntldr
• boot.ini

The XP installer should have automatically put these files on your Win 7 partition.

This is as new to me as it is to you. But I’ve used the above steps, and it allowed me to Dual Boot Win 7 and XP on my PC.

Good Luck!

The above instructions work for me with EasyBCD v1.7.3. If you are using a different version, you may need to click around until you find similar options.