How to Recover/Restore Windows 7 Bootloader after Installing Windows XP

Posted: June 27, 2012 in PC tips, Tips and Tricks
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There may be times when you have installed Windows 7 and then you felt the need of Windows XP also. So finally you decide to dual boot windows 7 with windows xp. If you install windows xp, then there won’t be any option to boot into windows 7. So now you’ll need to restore the bootloader of Windows.

Follow these steps (with acute care):

  1. Install Windows XP in a different partition (other than Windows 7)
  2. After installing, bootloader will be gone. Don’t worry, that’s bound to happen. Because Windows XP writes its bootloader over Windows 7.
  3. Insert Windows 7 DVD and boot from it and click on “Repair my computer”.
  4. In the next step, click on “Command Prompt”
  5. Type these commands:

bootrec /fixmbr (press enter)
Bootrec /fixboot (press enter)

So that’s done. Restart the Computer and you will see that the Windows 7 bootloader will be restored. If not, then install EasyBCD.

  1. Install EasyBCD and start this utility
  2. Click on Add New Entry
  3. Now simply select the type and change the name as per your wish and click on Add Entry and then click on Save


EasyBCD

This is an amazing utility, which can help you very much in this. Through this, you can even change the timeout to show operating systems, select the default OS, move up and down entries and much more. What’s more, this is just 1.3 MB in size. Go ahead and use this nifty utility. After doing this, just restart the PC and you will be able to see two options, XP and 7 🙂

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